The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

The lack of new theatrical product has forced the theaters that have re-opened during the covid-19 pandemic to be creative about what they're putting on their screens. Several theaters around Arkansas are presently showing Peter Jackson's 2001 film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Here's some of what I wrote about the film when it opened back on December 21, 2001:

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the latest unavoidable cultural wonderment ....

And it is a glorious movie. Not that it is without flaws, but The Fellowship of the Ring is, by turns, enchanting and exciting, simultaneously a beautiful opium dream and a rip-snorting adventure tale. It admits light and warms the heart yet at the same time recognizes that violent death is hard and the bad guys can and do win their fair share of battles.

Even those with little patience for elves and amulets and all the twee widgy particulars of J.R.R. Tolkien's recombinant mythology might find themselves thoroughly caught up in the story of brave little Frodo Baggins and his band of brothers. It should be noted that although Fellowship is long -- just two minutes short of three hours -- it is rarely boring.

There are scenes that seem not to advance the story or disclose character, yet we might be inclined to wait and see the rest of the series before deciding on their relevance. Perhaps it should also go without saying that this is not an actors' film; it's a costume action movie with stylized dialogue (presumably) lifted from the book.

Most of the performances are enjoyable -- especially Viggo Mortensen as a glowering knight errant -- but acting seems beside the point. There's lots of running and jumping and turning around to gape in terror at the next ever more horrible monster dispatched by the Dark Lord. Elijah Wood seems wondrously cast as Frodo, the hobbit charged with disposing of the nearly indestructible, morally corrosive ring at the heart of the story, and Ian McKellen twinkles as the scene-thieving wizard Gandalf. Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler have roles that amount to little more than expanded cameos; we imagine they'll show up in later installments.

While it's possible to draw parallels between this film and the Star Wars movies, it's really like nothing else we've seen lately. Extraordinary care is taken to establish the verisimilitude of middle-earth, the digital effects are seamless, and we caught only one postmodern reference to contemporary pop. Jackson, reportedly a longtime Tolkien fan, plays the material very straight -- and the end result vibrates with a certain Merchant-Ivory quality. There's a weird dignity to the film that may cause critics -- who normally wouldn't be able to resist dismissing material like this as pretentious kid stuff -- to accord it a measure of respect. It would be easy to make fun of this effort, but it probably wouldn't be fair.

This critic is not a Tolkien expert and is therefore in no position to discuss irrelevant issues such as the "faithfulness" of Jackson's vision. While one suspects the real story here has more to do with the marketing of cultural phenomena than the quality of filmmaking, this is a very well-made film indeed.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Original grade: A-

Revised grade: 90

Cast: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Ian Holm, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Bean, John Rhys-Davies, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Christopher Lee, Liv Tyler, Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving

Director: Peter Jackson

Rated: PG-13, for violence

Running time: 2 hours, 58 minutes

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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero
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