The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Review

The opener does the job nobody thanks it for: it teaches you a world. Jackson front-loads Hobbiton with round doors, scaled props and forced-perspective trickery so the Shire feels inhabited rather than sketched, which is precisely why its loss registers later. Moria is the finest sustained sequence in the trilogy, a descent that keeps changing register from awe to dread to grief, with the Balrog held offscreen long enough to be a sound design problem before it is ever a creature.

Ian McKellen plays Gandalf as a tired professional rather than a wizard, and that exhaustion sells the stakes better than any exposition could. Andrew Lesnie's New Zealand vistas have been imitated so widely that it is easy to forget how radical the aerial passes felt. The dialogue leans hardest on Tolkien's cadences and occasionally stiffens, and Aragorn's reluctance is asserted more than dramatized. Boromir's death is the proof of concept: a character introduced as an obstacle earns a moving exit inside three hours. The most disciplined chapter of the three.