Quite Simply: One of the Best Films Ever

Rating: 10/10 (19 January 2002)

A few thousand reviews in a month or so bespeaks of many things. I find it hard to add what has already been said. But I will try to capsulize my take on LORD OF THE RINGS:
1. Superlatives are insufficient to describe the utter awe that this movie has elicited - in me - and in the world.
2. You'll never be able to please everyone. Mr. Jackson has virtually achieved that. I haven't seen such a splendiferous response to a movie in a long time - not even from 'Titanic' or 'Harry Potter'.
3. The movie's opening comes at the most propitious time in history. We need fantasy right now, Harry Potter and other vehicles are providing that...but it is hard to compare them to the sheer virtuosity of this movie's execution.
4. 3 hours has always been a horror story to Hollywood's mass market audiences. But to anyone who has attended a screening of a really long movie like Bertolucci's '1900' 5 hrs+ or 'The Sorrow and The Pity' (almost 5 hours - depending on the version), 3 hours is NOTHING. Movies SEEM to be getting longer these days. But the audiences are not complaining as much as they once did. This is a good thing.
Frankly, at the end of the movie...I just wanted to go ON AND ON.
5. Every actor, every scene, every effect is believable. Despite the more than generous mix of sets, real outdoor scenes, created outdoor scenes and mixtures of these, one's beliefs are never jarred from the Tolkein-Jackson fantasy world.
6. The Howard Shore music (which suggests some measure of doom by adapting the most famous motto in history - second only to Beethoven's Fate Motto from his Symphony #5 in Cminor - the DIES IRAE (Day of Wrath) theme from 'Office of the Dead' from the extensive catalog of Gregorian chants) - uses music and sound and not just Super-compressed FOLEY sounds (which are OVERUSED these days to a fault instead of music in order to shock audiences into an artificial level of frenzy)...to evoke true suspense and excitement.

7. Elijah Wood - proves that no other actor could have portrayed Frodo (even if the 'book Frodo' was much older). His performance is astonishing in the breadth he exudes with the economy he expends. His eyes are among the most expressive I've seen in a long time.
Elijah has always taken the more interesting and unflashy parts during his surprising career. But in each role I have seen, he has brought deep human emotion and a strength found ever so rarely in the more flashy actors. This is not to deride as Speilberg's choice of Haley Joel Osment as Frodo. Quite simply, Haley would have been just too young and though his talents seem limitless to us now, Elijah just IS FRODO.
Thanks to all involved in the making of this masterpiece. The world cannot wait for the next two!