purity of emotion

Rating: 10/10 (17 December 2003)

How do you condense the ultimate crusade against evil into a ten hour film? How do you capture the depth of the written word with lighting and CGI? How do you encompass the power in Lord of the Rings in a swordstroke or an embrace? The brilliance of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" is its ability to perfectly capture a single emotion, be it love, camaraderie, betrayal, or despair, and embrace it through visual effect. Every scene in this movie contains within it one idea, masterfully expressed by Tolkien, and uniquely captured by Jackson; every camera angle, every dash of makeup, every facial gesture and reaction in each scene attempts to recreate the "single effect" Tolkien intended. And every attempt is successful. Consider the precipice on the thousand steps where Frodo is deceived, misguided into mistrust. Consider the tavern scene near the end of the movie: no words are spoken, yet none are needed; this is the power of the movie. Before leaving my seat at the movie theater, I was overcome with a sense of indescribable emotion and infinite depth. After much time and consideration, I realized that I had been struck repeatedly by scenes of true emotive power, unclouded by excess and uninhibited by thought.