The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Reviews
It's full of scenic splendors with a fine sense of scale, but its narrative thrust seems relatively pro forma, and I was bored by the battle scenes.
Time Out
Top CriticIn unveiling the Holy Grail for action-fantasy aficionados, director and co-writer Peter Jackson has begun a series to rival Star Wars in the pantheon.
Tolkien completists won't find any of this overkill, but for those uninitiates among us, less is more is still a dictum worth heeding.
The production design is a marvel, and the special effects are dazzling.
The real deal, a movie epic that pops your eyes out, piles on thrills and fun, and yet stays intimately attuned to character.
| Original Score: 5/5
McKellen plays Gandalf and, truth be told, his performance is worth more to the success of the film than all the effects, visual and aural, combined.
Maybe by his second year in Hogwarts, Harry Potter will learn the trick to making a movie this good but don't bet on it. It's one of the best films of the year.
You can get gloriously lost in this.
| Original Score: 5/5
I left exhausted, happy, intoxicated.
An excellent film and a ripping yarn of a movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
If we're not careful, Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings could give hype a good name.
Spectacular scenery, stupefying effects and epic scope ... a dream come true.
| Original Score: 5/5
As an allegory of war and world dominance, Ring is weighty stuff, and Jackson gives it appropriate resonance.
Here, at long last, is an epic adventure that's worthy of its source.
Watching it, one can't help but get the impression that everyone involved was steeped in Tolkien's work, loved the book, treasured it and took care not to break a cherished thing in it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
In the end, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring succeeds as the event blockbuster that it was so clearly designed to be.
Certainly the most rousing and ambitious adventure film of many years and bodes well for the future of the Tolkien fan.
With this production, Jackson has used The Lord of the Rings to re-invent fantasy for the cinema in the same way that the novel provided the blueprint for the written word.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
An audience looking for a Star Wars-like fix, albeit with wands and rings instead of light sabres, is sure to offer a healthy return.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Fellowship is exciting for two hours. How many other movies can you say that about?
A well-crafted and sometimes stirring adventure.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Not since the original Star Wars trilogy has film dipped into myth and emerged with the kind of weight and heft seen in Peter Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Storytelling in the grandest Homeric tradition.
Jackson gets more feeling into Fellowship than he did with his previous films.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
An utterly beguiling feast for eyes, pulses and minds.
| Original Score: 4/4
Made with intelligence, imagination, passion and skill, propulsively paced and shot through with an aged-in-oak sense of wonder.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Jackson's film feels like an honest attempt to use the power of cinema to engage the imagination and senses in deep-ranging and seriously engaged myth.
Jackson ... handles the proceedings with both a flair for operatic grandeur and a respect for intimacy.
Not since Gone With The Wind more than 60 years ago has a movie held up as well to the original book.
An extraordinary work, grandly conceived, brilliantly executed and wildly entertaining.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Whatever it is that makes great movies stand apart from great theater or great literature, this film has it.
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| Original Score: A
Jackson's adaptation is certainly successful on its own terms.
It would be an insult to say the picture merely lives up to its hype; it crashes the meaning of hype, exposing it as the graven image it is.
Thrilling -- a great picture, a triumphant picture, a joyfully conceived work of cinema.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
There is little doubt that those who grab the Rings at the start will anxiously await Frodo's trip into ever more perilous territory a year hence.
So well-made and well-cast that one can have no reservations about the rest of Jackson's monumental creation.
It has real passion, real emotion, real terror, and a tactile sense of evil.
