Any film -- indeed any work -- that attempts the comprehension

Rating: 10/10 (9 January 2005)

of the irregular solid geometry of vast legend, myth, and 'truth'.... of heroism and evil incarnate.... of fragility and emerging strength of character.... of challenge and peril of men and beasts that can exist only in the private mind of a private man who delved in ancient runes and forgotten ways of perceiving the world.... this kind of movie is going to have angles, spicules that bother some.
It is especially so in this truly unique work, this depthless fantasy that J. R. R. Tolkien created, since the passions of Tolkien acolytes equal that of, say, 1930's readers of "Gone With the Wind", who had such firm and vivid images of the characters, that David O. Selznick's principal nightmare was to put forth the 'perfect' Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara.
'Rings' director Peter Jackson's nightmare was the nightmare itself -- how re-create this horrible and parlous world without cartooning it.... how to make real the mélange of characters -- men, elves, trolls, wizards, dwarfs, orgres, orcs, and this new creature born in his own mind and toyed with in an original small work, "The Hobbit". And then to credibly set this most gentle and pastoral creature -- so diminutive as to be called "as children" by other characters -- how to impel this hobbit out of his charming 'Shire' to become the principal weapon against An Evil so Powerful and so aggressively menacing as to make a combination Hitler-Stalin-Saddam appear as a back-alley thug.
Somehow, Jackson has enfolded the 2,000 pages that gestated in Tolkien's mind, and in three films has pulled us into a world so complex, so startling, so awesome and wondrous, that the viewer need only suspend the tiniest disbelief to be swept into a place where fear and danger and unknown terrors are all round us -- a profound and howling darkness, dimly lit by only by the small flickering hope and determination of a band of two men, an elf, a dwarf, a second-level wizard. . . .and four tiny hobbits.
And this small band, frail enough, is soon shattered by assailants into three smaller parts. Lonelier, even more frail.
A numbingly horrific place and time, yet through which Jackson weaves enough of his own sense of warmth and humor and 'nice surprises' to keep this dark world from turning to an impenetrable black.
Jackson took a cast of lesser-known actors and character players and a vast production crew into the forests and valleys of his native New Zealand -- after three years of exhaustive preparation. And in a little more than a year, shot the three extra-ordinary films he gave us each year beginning in 2001.
His achievement is so powerful as to be difficult to grasp -- the mélange of disparate scenes, the complex special effects, the creation of living beasts and creatures unknown and unseen, the worlds that exist only in the most vivid of dreams and nightmares.
There are details that will bother some  an affect here, an accent there, creating a love interest not in Tolkien's original (which I think works very well)  but they are trivial as compared to this very special monument to the creation of a medieval language specialist and carried with great love and respect to the movie theater by this only child from New Zealand, who became excited by an 8-millimeter camera given him as a boy.
The many, many splendid actors commit to their characters, believe them, and hence, so do we. What must be the most complex set of production and post-production crews have stitched countless bits and pieces into a moving 'Bayeux Tapestry' of this strange and wondrous tale.
Most admirable is that unlike the other epic trilogies  "Star Wars" and "Raiders"  there is no diminishment in sequence, no uneven steps from one to the next. These three films are uniform and move one to the other with ease and increasing power to the Feast of a Final Resolution.
"The Lord of the Rings" trilogy deserves the highest respect, the highest valuation, for the awe and enjoyment it brings now, and will bring for centuries as long as homo sapiens watches film.
These are truly Kings in the Realm of Great Filmography.