An Indepted Fanboy's Love Letter to The Lord of the Rings: A Critical Essay on the Film Trilogy, Part One

Rating: 10/10 (12 January 2008)

Where does one start when putting Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings  a movie which has, in less than a decade, become almost unanimously hailed the world over as one of the most ambitious projects and one of THE definitive achievements in the entire long history of motion pictures  under the spotlight? Just as one cannot do justice to J.R.R. Tolkien's staggering and immortal literary fantasy masterpiece in merely a few words, thus is also the case for Jackson's unprecendented film adaptation. Because, with this operatic, timeless story of good triumphing over evil  with themes of love, sacrifice, redemption, mythology and corruption of power thrown in for good measure  Tolkien and Jackson each pulled off an extremely rare achievement in their respective mediums: they "built a church." Furthermore Jackson single-handedly introduced virtually an entire generation  myself included  to the life's work of Professor Tolkien. It is not impossible to do the film justice, but extremely few have fully done that, so I'll do my best.
But before I attempt to navigate just how Jackson, who has referred to the making of The Lord of the Rings as "like laying down the train-tracks while the train was moving forward," was so successful, I want to get something less important out of the way, and forgive me while I reminisce briefly.
I was fortunate enough to first see The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen during its opening weekend in Australia when I was 13, the perfect age for it. While I still to this day consider seeing Star Wars on the big screen at the age of nine when it was re-released in 1997 to be my fondest movie-going memory, that film only gets it over Fellowship in a photo-finish, but since the two are apples and oranges in terms of genre I still thought Fellowship was completely unlike anything I'd seen before. Witnessing the Fellowship crossing the Bridge of Khazad-dum followed by the showdown between Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the Balrog was, and continues to be, the most awe-inspiring thing I'd seen sincewell, the Death Star blowing up (and all those scenes still make my eyes light up like a pinball machine). And as soon as the lights in the cinema went up after the credits began to roll, virtually every person in the audience rose to their feet and started clapping and cheering. In all my movie-going experiences, that's the only time I've been part of an audience that honoured a movie with a standing ovation at the end (perhaps with Star Wars in '97 and The Two Towers and The Return of the King most of the audience knew what they were in for). Furthermore, and no doubt by some total fluke, Fellowship was released at just the PERFECT time. Of course, we all know and wish we could forget what happened in September of 2001 and it was not the movie's huge worldwide box office taking but rather, the hugely positive and lasting impact it had, and continues to have, on so many people which proves that movies like Fellowship, when they're done right and released at the right time, give people hope and inspiration. When we get those feelings from a film, as we do with real-life experiences, the film becomes a miracle. Feelings of hope and inspiration elicited from a movie are feelings that no one, neither the director nor the attendant behind the cinema concession stand, can give you, and nobody and nothing can ever take it away.
Click on my my name for Parts Two and Three!