FINALLY A MOVIE MADE THESE DAYS THAT ISN'T CRAP!

Rating: 10/10 (3 January 2002)

To be honest, I'd probably be more moved by Fellowship of the Ring as a kid but then again, at that age I'd probably see movies in a different way. Now forget the knowledge of the books. I know virtually nothing of the Lord of the Rings books, besides from what my roommate has told me. Look at Fellowship of the Rings as a movie experience. It's got a tremendous epic scale going for it, with a sense of direction and vision that is rarely seen in any director these days. The acting I would say represents a lot of love, because all these actors (Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Christoper Lee, Sean Astan, Viggo Mortensen, etc.) spend such a long period of time filming, that they virtually became the characters they played. I wasn't seeing acting. I was seeing these characters become alive and real. This movie also takes lots of chances and has what Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone doesn't have, which is SURPRISES. Not that HP is a bad film, but FOTR makes it look like the Neverending Story III. There's just a lot of crap made these days in the film industry, that when you see FOTR, you get p****d that you had to wait this long for a true magical piece of work. This is what true filmmaking is about, not filmmaking done purely by contracts or formulas, but by great stories and tremendous respect for detail.