With my very own eyes

Rating: Null/10 (20 January 2003)

`This grand epic  this is the first film of the modern age that dares to dream a DeMille dream a D.W. Griffith dream a Kurosawa dream.' Harry Knowles  Ain't It Cool News
Certain films are born from a special source, from the deepest imagination, from dreams and visions. More than stories, they are icons of life itself and the experience of what it is to be human in our world. It is King Kong standing on the top of the Empire State Building, it's Errol Flynn coming down from a tree in the Adventures of Robin Hood, it's Gary Cooper in the middle of an empty city in High Noon. We can't explain it, but we recognize it in Gene Kelly singing in the rain, in Hitchcock's birds and Splielberg's flying bycicles. And we recognize it because they're the expression of what is of more intimate in human emotion, of joy and fear, of sorrow, of redemption...
It is a dream I had, when I was young, that I would see Middle Earth with my very own eyes, someday. But for many long years, The Lord Of The Rings remained with a red stamp on the cover: `Impossible'. How could cinema breed life to the landscapes of Tolkien, larger than the horizon, or to it's talking trees, or to the largest and fearsome battles ever imagined by an author. And while we waited, hidden as the One Ring lost for centuries, the myth took shape. In the New York subway walls someone wrote `Frodo Lives'. And the dream grew in silent whispers, in the paintings of John Howe and Alan Lee, in unknown fan clubs and the dedicated imagination of millions of readers. Peter Jackson embraced this myth and attempted to translate the iconography of Middle Earth into the big screen. The final result is overwhelming, the product of impressive dedication and effort, incomprehensible to those who do not share the love for fantasy. But there it is, from the projector light, that all the beauty and grandeur of this ancient world comes to life. Here are Tolkien's themes, the corruption of absolute power, the value of friendship, the inevitability of growth, the strength of hope. Here we are, launched in the eloquence of a long journey of discovery through the deepest of ourselves, recognized in Gandalf's immortal words, that even the smallest person may change the course of the future, and have a part to play in the destiny of all.
This is the Middle Earth, a place that lives in that world of dreams created from the same fabric of The Wizard Of Oz and Peter Pan. It is the hobbit Frodo in the world of darkness facing an eye of fire, it is Gandalf surrounded in light leading an army charging thousands of Uruk-Hai. It is a landscape that breeds, timeless, that makes us dream. Because we have all been there, in our childhood, when we were afraid of the dark or believed we could fly. Cinema, the great cinema, is not the rollercoaster we embark on with a bucket of popcorn. The greatness of cinema lies in Gollum's conflict, in our ability to believe that this being massacred by the greatest of torments can still find peace, even though we know the inevitable. And how it is great, how magical, that this ingenuity remains and is alive today in the movie theater.
It is a dream I had, that I would see Middle Earth with my very own eyes, someday. Lucky for me, that in the movies, sometimes dreams come true.