The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

"Nobody tosses a dwarf!"

This is only my second viewing of this or, indeed, any of this magnificent trilogy. And, yes, with an appropriate nod to YouTube's How It should Have Ended (watch it for LOTR), it's magnificent. The three sodding hours actually passed very pleasantly.

The Lord of the Rings is an odd book, or trilogy, however you’re counting. I’m glad I read it at twelve, appendixes and all; I enjoyed it very much, but I fear the charms of its 1,200 plus pages would have likely eluded me if I’d been any older. Written by an Old English academic- I once cited an academic work of his while writing an essay on Beowulf- and intended to create the Germanic and Finnish myths he so loves, it isn’t a style of writing we’re used to in modern times. These days we have a literary genre called “fantasy”; that wasn’t so clearly the case at the time, and indeed The Hobbit was written for children. One odd thing about Lord of the Rings is the huge change from children’s pride in the shire to epic narrative for the rest of the novel but it is, of course, a work of genius.

So how does Peter Jackson film such a book? Well, brilliantly. His native New Zealand is a magnificent setting, and his cast is superb- Ian McKellen May stand out, but Christopher Lee is utter perfection as Saruman. Yet just as important is the magnificent direction and the scene that, for me, stands out is Christopher Lee’s performance in the scene where we discover that Saruman has betrayed Gandalf- the scene is a perfect synthesis of actor and camera as the extraordinary subtleties of Lee’s performance are echoes perfectly by the movements of the camera.

Wisely, Jackson does a faithful adaptation without cutting corners and, indeed, takes things from the appendixes to flesh out the narrative- particularly in an expanded role for Saruman which helps with the plot at this early stage but also, with Sauron himself being just an eye, giving a face to what the Fellowship is fighting. Seeing the Shire on screen makes is stand out from the high fantasy surrounding it: it’s odd to see a British work of high fantasy that features American crops such as tobacco and potatoes- or perhaps the “weed” is something else? It would make a lot of sense.

There’s one thing I don’t get, though. What’s so special about Sean Bean’s “One does not just walk into Mordor?” It’s a fairly nondescript line so why all them memes?