Review:Fellowship of the Ring

One of the best perks about my job is the excuse to skip out and catch the first showing of Lord of the Rings at the local theater. I did just that, and if you hit the magic link below you can read my comments on the film. I'm going to keep it short, and spoiler free. In a word? Wow.

Everyone has expectations about this movie. I imagine most of you have read the books. You all have ideas about what a Balrog looks like. What Gandalf is like. And yes, hell, even what the ring should look like. And you simply can't expect a movie to meet everyones ideas... but this thing came just as close as I could have hoped.

In short, there aren't many great movies that come out any more... but this is one of them. Everyone seems nearly perfectly cast. The special effects are nothing short of brilliant. The sets from the Shire on out look so wonderful and believable that you just wanna move in... until the Ring Wraiths show up and make everything all miserable.

Elijah Woods pulls off Frodo quite well. Yeah maybe he fell down one to many times, but the angst is believable. And Gandalf? His desire for the ring is intense and his actions are truly heroic.

I can't imagine a film adaptation of perhaps the best book ever written being done better. The first 45 minutes are a bit slow going, but once the Fellowship starts coming together I just didn't want to blink.

I could find things to nitpick about: some scenes the audio mix wasn't quite right, but that could partially have been the mediocre sound system in the theater: dialog was a bit muffled under the music. Some of the effects were noticably CG, but those were rare. Quite frankly nobody has done CG monsters as convincingly in a film to date. There was a handful of shots that looked faked, and all the rest seemed as perfect as could be.

God damn. The hype is warranted. The wait was worth it. But 12 months for the next one? At least I have my copy of FFX to keep me occupied during maybe 40 hours of the next 8,760 or so I have to wait. But who's counting?

Comments

Re:My Review

[Chundra]

They eat seven or eight times a day, like to take naps, have never been far from home and have eyes that grow wide at the sounds of the night. They are like children grown up or grown old, and when they rise to an occasion, it takes true heroism, for they are timid by nature and would rather avoid a fight.

Good god! I never thought of it before, but you have just described the vast majority of the IT department where I work. No wonder geeks love Tolkien so much.

Re:My FOTR Review

[Hard_Code]

Ok, there really needs to be a peer to Godwin's Law which replaces "mentioning Nazism" with "prefacing the comment with a recantation of a lusty love affair the author had in their youth". Preferably this would be built right into the net, so such posts are automatically purged, and a squad of roughnecks with bats immediately dispatched to the author's place of posting. How about "Pygmalion's Law"...

Another Generation of lusers

[The Ape With No Name]

My only bitch is that I will have another bunch of dweeb kids who want to have their username/password to be:


SunOS 5.8

login: gandalf
password: 6O11uM


Please, God. Spare me.

Wait a minute...

[nytes]

I wanna hear more about Denise.