movie magic

Rating: 10/10 (18 November 2002)

Since I'm not normally a fantasy or sci-fi fan and I did think Godfather was a great movie, I can say with some certain objectivity, that I thought that Lord of the Rings was a vastly entertaining movie. For those who compare it to Harry Potter...Stop! These two movies do not belong in the same category. Harry Potter's audience is children, LOTR was obviously made for adults. Watching the extended version, I'm more than curious as to how the movie was rated a PG-13. It was violent--limbs were constantly being truncated and at least twice, Orcs were beheaded. I was inspired to read the first installment after the movie and considering books are rarely outmatched by their adaptive screenplays, I will be watching both of the next two films before I read the other two books. There's no point in setting myself up for disappointment. The Fellowship of the Ring is a great book though and I was awed by Tolkien's creation of a new language, Elvish. Amazing! In fact, this entire new world he imagined is incredible. But if you're not willing to suspend what we know as reality for a few hours, don't watch LOTR.

I was taken back by the passion in a majority of these commentaries. Either, it was effusive superlatives in rating it as the best movie ever, or it was the most boring of movies. I don't give much credence to the overly negative reviews. The movie was surprisingly faithful to the original story whenever possible and the attention to detail, as chronicled in the making of the movie, was awesome. This movie is a testament to what truly is movie magic and to not appreciate the work in such a respect would be unjust.