Hype!!!

Rating: 4/10 (10 February 2002)

A great film makes you wonder, at the end, where all the time went. Sadly, "The Fellowship of the Ring" is not a great film. In this regard, it is barely a good film. I was not engrossed in the story, and I left feeling like I knew nothing more about Middle Earth than I did before it started. I sat through it simply waiting for it to END. (With a nearly-three-hour running time, the film feels interminable.) The mythology did not come alive for me, someone who hasn't read a word of Tolkien, and that should have been the film's goal. The production is huge, the special effects are flashy, and the same could be said of a dud like "Pearl Harbor." Tolkien fans may be going wild, but I was simply bored.