The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring

recommended

Walking the line between grand and grandiose, Fellowship makes you feel every second of its 2-hour, 58-minute running time — not that that’s necessarily a drawback. Directed by Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners), the first installment in what will effectively be a 9-hour movie released in three parts suffers a bit from having to carry the weight of enough exposition to shore up the entire trilogy: A 10-minute narrated prologue — which, among other things, has to sum up The Hobbit, only begins the process of introducing the characters and history that will sustain all three films. But fear not: By the third hour, things get really good. Removing some of the airy-fairiness from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books (so long, Tom Bombadil), Jackson and co-screenwriters Frances Walsh and Philippa Boyens bring the characters — hero Frodo (Elijah Wood), wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), mysterious Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and, of course, many others — ever-so-slightly down to earth, muting Tolkein’s faux archaism without losing the otherworldly feel of his fully imagined Middle-earth. To an extent, Fellowship promises more for the trilogy as a whole than it delivers all on its own. But considering the mammoth size of Jackson’s planned canvas and the (heavily digital) world he so evocatively creates, it’s hard not to start counting the days until Christmas 2002.