Not a movie - an event!

Rating: Null/10 (23 January 2002)

As a huge fan of Peter Jackson´s first three movies "Bad Taste", "Meet the Feebles" and "Braindead/Dead Alive" I was more than sceptical when I went to the cinema to see this pretty hyped film! And indeed, the first 30 minutes where pure camp, so it seemed that Jackson would be after John Woo the next former cult director who sold his soul to the commerce of Hollywood. But fortunately, the film became better with every minute then, and finally we had a really breathtaking and spectacular masterpiece on the screen! The most important thing about LOTR is the fact, that it´s no soulless material battle like "Armageddon" or "Pearl Harbour". Although the CGI-effects were really excellent, the set decoration is bombastic and every cent is visible, Peter Jackson´s film is a movie that lives from his sympathetic actors! Especially I liked the performances of Elijah Wood, Sean Bean, Billy Boyd, John Rhys-Davis, the famous Shakespeare-actor Ian McKellen (is he already knighted to call himself "Sir"?!?) and horror-legend Christopher Lee (another one to be knighted!). The director could call himself now the David Lean of fantasy movies and if not, he created at last a film that you really can call big cinema! George Lucas should see this gem to realize how bad "The Phantom Menace" actually was, because Peter Jackson´s film will set new standards for the future of film-making, "Episode 1" however was nothing else but a 120-minutes Playstation video-game! I only find it pretty exaggerated that so many users voted this film for being number one here on IMDb - just before masterpieces like "A Clockwork Orange", "Apocalypse Now" or "Casablanca"..! Nevertheless the greatest movie of the season, if you only gonna see one film this year it should be LOTR!!
By the way, did anybody realize the goof where a car is driving over a hill far behind..?!?