The epic of our time...

Rating: Null/10 (18 December 2003)

Once every so often in the long history of film, a movie will be made that breaks all boundaries of excellence. In no small way, it captures the eyes, hearts, and imaginations of millions of people around the world, and becomes one of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of it's time.
Such movies can never be replicated. There is no way you could remake 'Gone With the Wind' and hope to measure it with it's predecessor. There is no way you can retell the first, great 'Star Wars' trilogy and hope to capture the same magic and amazement created all those years ago. (Despite George Lucas's constant efforts to try and make them better... *coughs*)
And in the end, there is certainly no way that anyone, in any period of time henceforth, could take J.R.R. Tolkein's classic 'Lord of the Rings' novels and create movies that would dare to rival Peter Jackson's complete cinematic masterpiece.
This, my friends, IS the great cinematic masterpiece of our time. There is no replicating. There is no retelling. To call the film perfect is by no means true, but you would definitely have to *reach* perfection if you even dared to capture the brilliance that Jackson has created in his epic trilogy.
The landscapes and sets are, to put it shortly, absolutely breath-taking... especially when added to the emotionally stirring score by Howard Shore. The cast is superlative, with each actor completely embodying the characters so perfectly, you'd swear they were born to play them.
'The Fellowship of the Ring', when all is said and done, is arguably the greatest telling of a classic story in movie history. It stirs, it inspires, it saddens, and it overjoys. But most of all, it lingers with you... far longer than you believed it capable of doing.
And that, in the end, is what makes it the epic it aspires to be.
A masterpiece of its time.