The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the release, we revisit Peter Jackson’s culture-defining adaptation of Tolkien’s masterpiece. The future of civilization rests in the fate of the One Ring, which has been lost for centuries. Powerful forces are unrelenting in their search for it. But fate has placed it in the hands of a young Hobbit named Frodo Baggins, who inherits the Ring and steps into legend. A daunting task lies ahead for Frodo when he becomes the Ring-bearer - to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom where it was forged.

Review from Empire

The Council of Elrond, the famous scene in which denizens of Middle-earth sit down to debate what to do with the One Ring, took JRR Tolkien 15,000 words to describe. Yet that extended back-and-forth is a mere spat compared to the real debate: which is the greatest of Peter Jackson’s Rings films? The Two Towers has the adrenalised grandeur of Helm’s Deep, while The Return Of The King has the best bit in cinema history to feature a flaming man jumping off a cliff.

For my mithril, though, there’s no beating Fellowship. As Jackson and his crew of renegades filmed in New Zealand, far from Hollywood’s all-piercing Eye, nobody really took them seriously. It was, in Boromir-speak, a folly. You’d have more chance of strolling through Barad-dûr without a Morgul blade piercing your gut than you would turning Tolkien’s antiquated prose, awash with phrases like “the hosts of Gil-galad and Elendil were mustered in Arnor”, into must-see cinema. Yet that scepticism was fuel for the production: you can feel the urgency, Jackson’s gonna-prove-them-wrong zeal, in every single shot.

Take the opening expository scenes in Hobbiton, as Gandalf converses first with Bilbo, then with Frodo. On paper: essential but dry reams of information to set up everything ahead and establish the stakes. On screen: utterly thrilling stuff, veering between moments of genuinely scary horror (a Black Rider fake-out as Gandalf lunges out of the shadows) and genuinely funny comedy (“I ain’t been dropping no eaves”). The camera moves and angles are often distinctly un-blockbuster-like, the Peter Jackson of Braindead still there, swooping at his actors’ faces, getting in close, conjuring up menace and mystery. Before you’ve even left Bag End, you’re fully in the hands of a master.

Read the rest of the review from Nick De Semlyen here...