A reunion with old friends

Rating: Null/10 (7 March 2002)

Spoilers. Short version: Awesome retelling of benchmark fantasy written by JRR Tolkien. Not deep, but it's not supposed to be. Not the best film ever, but awesome entertainment. ****/*****
First off, many people don't know that the(se) movie(s) are based on the three books of The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy. I left the theater surrounded by people complaining that they didn't get it, or that the ending was just a ploy reel us into the next two, or even that the ending was stupid, just stopping like it did and not knowing of the sequels. But, the movie ended just the way the book did. No ploy. And why wouldn't you want to see the next two? People also say the movie was way to long. I say, not long enough! Everyone is too tainted by the MTV split-second action flash bang crazy crap to have the attention to sit that long. Peter Jackson couldn't have done better with 3 hours than he did, with the books being so rich. Liberties were taken, and they have to be. What we watched was Jackson's interpretation of the books. He could not have matched our expectations, but he took a good shot at it. One very confusing thing in the movie was the two humans. They looked very much alike and i got them mixed up a few times.
I admired Jackson for using the B-movie technique of force-perspective to make the hobbits short. It is completely seemless. Gandalf is towering believably over Bilbo in their scenes in the Shire. Christopher Lee stars in the role he was born for in Saruman, and Ian McKellan plays Gandalf, the somewhat tempermental but caring wizard, just the way i wanted. Throughout the movie, we are treated to massively massive outdoor shot of Middle Earth, some of armies, some of orcs hoards, and some of snow covered peaks. These are not empty special effects shots. It's not like Godzilla (1998), where it seems they just wanted to see what they could do with Maya and a bagillion dollars. These huge scenic shots do help the story. Are we going to believe that the wars were as big as Tolkien said without seeing them? Probably not. Saruman's "Orc Factory" would have just looked like Frankenstein's lab if not for that one amazing sweeping shot that shows all of them. This movie took the scenic shots that D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" pioneered in 1915 and one-upped them. Yes, many movies use extreme long shots, but they never were as striking to me as they are here.
People who thought this film was boring probably recognize a fun movie if it slapped them in the face. This is a fun movie. If you went to see without any prior knowledge of the series, you were probably left stupified. The Avenger (1998) fell flat because it was based on an obscure british tv show from the 60's, oh, and it was bad. Get in the know, then watch it again. I left the theater with a smile from ear to ear, wishing that the next film would be out the next day. I almost went to see it again, but it was getting pretty late.