The Fellowship of the Ring. February 27, 2023

 

I have written many times, that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy is my favorite story ever written. When I heard it was finally going to be a movie, after decades of being deemed unfilmable, I was ecstatic. The instant I got my driver's license back my senior year in high school, I started going to movies practically every weekend, mainly to see the trailers. And because I am going through another marathon this week, I will give a short review of each movie. 

The Fellowship of the Ring was the most appropriate named of all of them, because it centers on the nine heroes. Every time, I watch the opening narration, I get the same chills I get in the theater. When the hobbits see Aragorn, for the first time in the Prancing Pony, I get excited like I am reunited with an old friend. The battles are amazing, especially the saga's most iconic scene where Gandalf fights the balrog. The scenes that were added were necessary, helping make the villains that seldom appeared in the books more threatening. A lot of people took issue with increasing Arwen's role, but it did not bother me. My only problem with that is more of a personal preference and that is Liv Tyler should have been billed after Viggo Mortenson and Sean Astin. I know it sounds minor, but as a writer, I feel it should always go protagonists first, and Arwen was not a protagonist, so Tyler's name should have come after a featuring, a with, or an and. I also would have preferred if Frodo took more initiative in the action scenes, like he did in the books, but I can see that they needed to show the effect the Ring had on him. While the Fellowship of the Ring is the only one chosen by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the National Film Registry, I think they all should. Even so, I still loved that movie, as much as I love the other two in the trilogy, being based on the story that inspired my life's work.