Review of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) by Colton T — 11 Dec 2015

I love fantasy and science fiction, but even moreso when a film does the original source material justice, while standing on its own merits as a cinematic production.

Peter Jackson's epic trilogy is one such trilogy I feel are films you have to see, regardless if you're into fantasy or science fiction or not.

The first part of the trilogy remains a cinematic triumph in my eyes, full of amazing special effects, expert cinematography, pacing, and excellent acting.

While people before attempted to translate Tolkien's groundbreaking epic to film, few have done it with elegance, class, action, and imagination of Peter Jackson's take on the series.

While the film is incredibly faithful, it isn't a perfect transliteration. And mostly I'm fine with that, as the first film is as faithful as you can hope to get, and the way the film brings Tolkien's vision to the screen could have been narmy, but luckily it provided us with a faithful and imaginative take on the work.

My overall favorite scene in the film is Aragorn's fight with Lurtz, which never happened in the original novel, and I'm saddened by that, as it contains some of the best choreography and has an epic feel to it that I feel it should have been in the original novel.

It's little diversions like this that make the film faithful but incredibly imaginative.

Overall, this film gets a 9/10 on my scale. While it's an achievement of cinematography, acting, and production, it isn't perfect due to entirely reasonable diversions due to the praticality of producing a film with such a large budget.