Astonishing and beautiful, frightening and distant

Rating: 9/10 (5 January 2002)

So what is there to say other than that this is perhaps the most awaited film of all time?
Most of you have read the books, been lost in the wonderful tales of Middle-earth, only to come back to our world to realize that maybe the difference between our worlds isn't that big.
Finally, 50 years after the books were written, we get to see a seriously taken adaption into the world of films. First of all, I was very delighted when I first heard that Peter Jackson would make the films. I'm sure, if some great hollywood director would've made them, the films would become a disaster. But what am I saying then, that the film is good? Well, yes, it is!
First we get to know the world of Middle-earth through a really nice prologue, where all you need to know is explained. Then we get thrown into the beautiful landscapes of Shire, where we meet the hobbits and good old Gandalf, to discover that the actors chosen for the roles are perfect. And as more of the characters come into play, we see that almost all actors and actresses are great.
The film has an overall dreamish feeling, and I really like that. When you read the books, you feel a lot more related to the hobbits than the rest of the different races of people. The elves are (inhumanly) beautiful and have a lot of power and grace, the humans are very noble and proud, and so on. So, in the film, we get to see everything through the eyes of the hobbits. Those are things that lay beyond their ways of living, and therefor hard to understand. This saves the film a lot. I'm sure I'd get frustrated if all those beyond-our-imagination things had just been thown at my face without a single explanation of what it really is. So by making those sequences feel a bit distant and hard to grip, you get saved from the frustrations as well as long and hard to remember explanations.
Another great thing about the film, and one of the reasons why I'm so happy that Peter Jackson made it, is that the darker sequences are sometimes really frightening and have a bit of a psychological horror-film feeling to them. This proves that Jackson has a great sense of how you make things frightening, as this isn't easy at all. For example, I wasn't really frightened when I watched "Scream". Large knives and scary masks simply doesn't frighten me anymore, after having seen lots of hollywood "scary movies". Though, when I watch David Lynch's "Lost Highway", I get really frightened, and this type of psychological horror is also used in "The Fellowship of the Ring", though in a lighter scale.
But, as in all other films, there are some problems. First of all, I'm sure I'd be a lot more happy if I hadn't read the books before I saw the film. Yes, it's a great adaption of the book, but some things just kept annoying me. Some of the characters (read: Merry and Pippin, among others) were very poorly introduced. And some of the changes in the adaption made me a little dissapointed. But, then again, if it had been completely truthful to the book, it had been a very long and boring film.
It's hard for me to give this film a fair rating before having seen the two to come. But it is one of the better films I've seen, and I know that, when all three films are out, they will have a special place in my movie collection. Applause and a huge thanks to Peter Jackson for making this film not just another hollywood mastodont, but a great film with its own life and feeling.
8 out of 10