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overthinking entertainment

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

Young hobbit Frodo Baggins, after inheriting a mysterious ring from his uncle Bilbo, must leave his home in order to keep it from falling into the hands of its evil creator. Along the way, a fellowship is formed to protect the ringbearer and make sure that the ring arrives at its final destination: Mt. Doom, the only place where it can be destroyed.
Probably yet another FF post that got disappeared with the original poster. Just an absolutely huge film, for its impact on movies (especially in the 21st century) and on the fantasy genre and fandom in general. Of course, there had been plenty of fantasy movies before--this isn't even the first major adaptation of this book; that would be Ralph Bakshi's animated version (really the first 1 1/2 books) from 1978--and the original trilogy (and The Hobbit, of course) practically invented the high fantasy genre--but it reached heights that I don't think that a lot of people were expecting. I did a rewatch because I didn't remember the first movie that well (this was when I was starting to drink pretty heavily and I smuggled half a bottle of wine into the theater), and I was surprised at how sweet and fun much of it was, even with the orcs and Ringwraiths and Saruman and You-Know-Who giving the flaming stinkeye to all of Middle-Earth. Balancing out the sweetness, of course, are the early and frequent reminders of the corrupting influence of the Ring, and how quickly and dreadfully the Fellowship falls apart.

Some of the effects seem a bit iffy now, but the heart of it is still the performances by the cast. Ian McKellen is key, of course; he twinkles and thunders as needed, and his Gandalf helps sell how scary (and how tempting, which makes it scarier) the Ring is to the major players. Even though Sean Bean doesn't get a ton of time, I think that he has more of an impact here than in the entire first season of Game of Thrones. But the real star is Elijah Wood, who is the most impressive special effect in the trilogy; his eyes are unsettlingly empathetic--when he's happy he beams, when he's worried you feel that worry, and when he gets stabbed by a Ringwraith you're ready to stand in their way just so he can get across the river to Rivendell.
posted by Halloween Jack on Dec 07, 2025 at 1:06 PM

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I remember watching it and just being amazed at how true it was to the books. Sure, they amped up things in a place or two, but the world and the characters felt so real and beautiful. It was a movie that I never expected to get done right.
posted by tavella at 3:17 PM

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I remember watching it for what must have been the third or fourth time on DVD when I realized that the music entirely drops out during the fight with the cave troll! All you hear for several minutes is the sound of the fight itself: swords clanging, the cave troll itself, etc. And only when the troll is finally defeated does the music swell back in. Great choice by the production team. I don't think there's another scene like it in the rest of the trilogy.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:35 PM

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Yeah, we went through the whole damn thing a few weeks back - all three Hobbits, all three Lords, all extended editions. It... It took a while.

But it is still fantastic - honestly I think the effects work in LotR holds up better than the Hobbit, because so much more of it is still physical in 2001. I mean, the mega battles still have some janky gravity and impacts, but it's there and past so fast you don't have time to grumble about it.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure I went on an IT department work trip to see this back in the day, and man, it blew me away. I never read the books as a teen, so it was and still continues to be fun spotting where pop culture D&D artifacts came from.
posted by Kyol at 6:49 PM

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I assume we've all seen this news

I do think the effects hold up better than the Hobbit - about the only ones that annoy me are the Legolas stunts which suffer from Spiderman on rubber bands issues.

I've watched the movies and read the books so much that I kinda get them blended. (Each once a year). I like some of the story changes like making Aragon a reluctant hero. Giving Arwen more things to do. Actually having Eowyn and Theodred talk to each other was much better than the realistic game of telephone in the book.

I think the whole Gondor leadership got done dirty. (Faramir getting the worst of it, natch)

I'm solid on the stump of skipping Tom was 100% the right thing to do, but I kinda wanted to see the scouring of the shire in full (but RotK had way too many endings already)
posted by drewbage1847 at 8:48 PM

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All three of the LOTR films came out in December. I remember seeing them with mom in the theater while visiting her for the holidays. It's a fond memory. They still hold up so well and I'm looking forward to watching them with my kids (but the rule is set: you must read all the books before watching any of the movies!). I marvel at how singular an occurrence it was that this trilogy was greenlit, and this excellent cast assembled. Peter Jackson's subsequent work has disappointed (especially the Hobbitses, which I hated), so it must have been quite an alignment of the stars that made these as good as they were. Of the three, Fellowship is my clear favorite. It's the one that most conveys Tolkien's love of nature and peace, and give us a glimpse into Middle Earth that is not all orcs and war and big stupid CGI battles.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:04 PM

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I remember watching it and just being amazed at how true it was to the books.

I felt the opposite. The film overemphasized the stories of the humans compared to the hobbits, due to the difficulty of visualizing Frodo's internal journey.
posted by fairmettle at 10:03 PM

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amazed at how true it was to the books

ring a WRONG dillo
posted by fleacircus at 10:32 PM

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amazed at how true it was to the books

Really? I guess your version didn't have Tom Bombadil.

We rewatched the films recently as well and one of the interesting things I noticed between Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit was effects but also how different they are shot. Lord of the Rings feels real, it is a lived in world. The Hobbit feels shallow, like a cut scene from a unengaging video game (there's an extended discussion of haptic perception vs optic perception here).
posted by Ashwagandha at 5:51 AM

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My family as well saw these in the theatres as holiday outings. I remember the line about not being quick to deal out death in judgement standing out to me, as we saw it as the US was first going into Afghanistan, freshly post-9/11.
posted by transient at 6:20 AM

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Take whatever I say with a grain of salt because I've never read the books.....

This movie was amazing. The visuals, the pacing, the music. Even though I know it compresses literal years of book time, this sequence where Gandalf leaves the Ring with Frodo that quickly cuts to Gollum being tortured and the ringwraiths being sent followed by Gandalf arriving at Minas Tirith and uncovering the truth about the Ring is such a pitch-perfect example of show-not-tell storytelling. I love it so much.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:01 AM

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I remember being so leery of these movies, because I have loved the books so deeply since childhood... but for the most part, I love them. I dislike a few things -- there are some jokes that don't land well for me, because they don't fit, and later in the trilogy, Gollum becomes more silly and less an unsettling blend of pathetic and terrifying. But the casting is amazing, and the films capture the... grandeur, I guess, of the books so well for me.
posted by maryellenreads at 8:31 AM

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Sticking to just Fellowship here, but I was in the fortunate time and place to have a Tolkien super fan in our English department and the semester leading into the release of the film, I got to have weeks upon weeks of studying Tolkien, from his early stuff through LoTR and so on. One of my distinctly fond memories has to do with a group of us, including the professor, standing around a desktop computer and watching the first trailer load and play. We all left quite giddy and we concluded the course by going as a group opening night to see the film.

I grew up a Star Wars, but was too young to see all but Jedi when they premiered in the theaters, but I had to believe as I left Fellowship that it was with that same feeling that everyone had left Star Wars. Jackson and his team, and it was very much a team collaboration from Weta to Howard Shore, had crafted a nearly perfect film. No, we didn't have Tom Bombadil, nor did the Extended Cut, but there was so much detail at times it was just joyous to watch. Everyone was perfectly cast, including New Zealand, and the film found the right level of fast and slow tempo as it maneuvered its way, like a journey, through the story. I have been waiting in great anticipation of sitting down and watching this with my kid someday in the future (he's still a bit young).

There are very few films I have seen in the past 24 years that have pulled such a joy of a time in going to the film, and that's excluding its sequels. But that's another fanfare post or two.
posted by Atreides at 8:36 AM

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Could have done without the "dwarf tossing" gag, though.
posted by SPrintF at 8:47 AM

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when I realized that the music entirely drops out during the fight with the cave troll

Just like the chase scene in Bullit.
posted by whuppy at 8:54 AM

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These are great movies, all of them. It's been a while since I've watched them, but I'm hoping to introduce my kids to them over this holiday break. I suspect my 10-year-old will be bored and my 5-year-old will ask non-stop questions that would be answered if he'd simply be quiet and watch, as was the case with Star Wars.

Maybe I'll call up selenized for a marathon viewing of all three extended editions like we once did...probably 20 years ago now (damn, we're old).
posted by asnider at 9:20 AM

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My wife and I both being huge nerds is certainly one foundation of our relationship. It's something a like to think about sometimes, that before we knew each other, we both attended the all day events the proceeded the release of the Return of the King, where you watched the extended versions of Fellowship and Two Towers, followed by a midnight showing of Return of the King. She was in Europe and I was in Canada, so things were not perfectly synchronized, but with high probability we were both seated in movie theatres in different parts of the world watching the Lord of the Rings moves at the same time.
posted by Alex404 at 11:26 AM

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I don't know how noticeable it is in Fellowship vs. the later movies, but my running gag with my partner is to comment on the greasiness of Aragorn's hair and the greenness (like he's growing moss in it!!!) of Theoden's beard. And someone's wig is just so obviously a wig - can't even remember now who, maybe Gandalf? Like, you can see the weave.

It's worse if you catch them on TV because of the difference in the lighting - what is that problem called, anyway, where things that are so Dark and therefore Serious in the theater are like a community theater production in full daylight when shown on TV? It's so so bad.

Anyway I grind on these things out of love for the story obviously. I prefer the books but the movies gave us some really great moments. AND MY AXE

I do think the movies did some violence to the themes and rich love of story in the books. I don't trust Peter Jackson not to get a little gross with it - the birth scene of the Uruk-Hai is a good example of this, and actually I've always hated Galadriel's pointy nails (seriously). And I really didn't like what they did with the Ithilien portion of Frodo and Sam's journey - Faramir was pretty out of character the whole time. But whatever.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 4:30 AM

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I protested against turning these books into films on principle: movie adaptations become the default version and tend to rewrite your own imagination when given the cultural space to do so. But looking back I'm less precious about Tolkein's "masterpiece." It's a less stunning work to me now than when I was 14 or 24.

Still, I think it's ridiculous to try and adapt long novels into films. Even 4-hour extended cut films. There's just too much source material that has to be trimmed away. (Except in the case of The Hobbit, where they made up a bunch of new stuff to extend one small book into a trilogy.) Not sure TV adaptations are necessarily better, though, depending on how much time/budget they have. The Expanse did a pretty great job up until the last rushed season. The Magicians did a fine job by mostly ditching its source material entirely after season 1.
posted by rikschell at 5:37 AM

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Lawn Beaver: "It's worse if you catch them on TV because of the difference in the lighting - what is that problem called, anyway, where things that are so Dark and therefore Serious in the theater are like a community theater production in full daylight when shown on TV? It's so so bad."

A film will never look as good on television because it was made, well, traditionally, made for the movie theater and to be projected on a giant screen. When you watch it streaming or on cable, or whichever, you are getting a picture that has taken the original film's data and compressed it to make it easier and cheaper to to distribute. When at home, you either have to have a special service to download gigabytes of data to run off local memory or you need to have a physical disc (and even then, not all physical disc transfers are equal when it comes to compression and so on, and we're talking at minimum blu-ray, if not 4K). Throw in having a sufficiently high resolution television and so on....the sum of it, there's a reason the film that knocked your socks off in the theater falls short when you're on your couch.
posted by Atreides at 7:09 AM

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More serious comment:

Bombadil is actually my least favorite part of the whole meandering beginning of the book which feels like Tolkien trying on many different little storyteller hats. I like some of it a lot, but it's absolutely a good move to cut a lot out. None of it has anything to do with the main story. If the movie has too many endings, the book has too many beginnings.

A pet peeve I have of the movies is the merger of Merry and Pippin. It's not obvious but in the books, by my reading!!, Merry is a confident snerky little guy who should probably wear glasses and Pippin is just a pure young idiot; and I think there is an interesting little lesson how Merry is apprenticed to the passionate Rohirrim, whereas Pippin is seconded to seriousface Gondor. That is kinda backwards from the personalities, but see it's about them growing up (literally, with ent juice) and being tempered etc, but maybe I'm the only person who cares about this. Put glasses on Merry that's all I want.

Peeve #2: I think Bean was bad casting as Boromir. IMO Boromir's fall should feel like a betrayal of who he should be, and he should broadcast nobility and strength, but no one is surprised at treachery and weakness from Sean Bean.

I do like turning the dial up on Arwen a lot. I like most of the other choices!
posted by fleacircus at 10:12 AM

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I don't know how noticeable it is in Fellowship vs. the later movies, but my running gag with my partner is to comment on the greasiness of Aragorn's hair

Disagree, Peter and Fran were cooking with scruffy Aragorn. I have never recovered from my feeling of horror and confusion when we got squeaky clean, glossy-tressed King Elessar at the end of the third movie.

I think all three movies hold up pretty well, but the Fellowship was always my favorite and I still think it's the best. High fantasy as a mass market thing in the US was so dead in 2001. As a middle schooler who loved Xena and fantasy novels, the whole thing was kind of embarrassing. I saw the first movie with my older brother, who was more of a Fast and Furious kind of guy, and knew they'd really hit on something when he came out of the 3 hour movie wanting more. It had so much work to do (establishing the world and characters) and yet none of it felt like work on screen. (Well, except maybe some of the Rivendell exposition about Aragorn's Destiny in the extended version.)
posted by grandiloquiet at 12:38 PM

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But Sean Bean wasn't 'the guy who dies in the first act' until after FOTR. In part -because- of FOTR (and then more things and more things). It was not yet a cliche when this movie was made.
posted by janell at 2:09 PM

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I didn't say, or mean, "the guy who dies in the first act". I meant the Sean Bean of like Ronin and Goldeneye. The man looks shifty.
posted by fleacircus at 3:46 PM

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Summer reading was The Hobbit, of which we had a copy, and LOTR if we could get them all, or at least 1 and 2, from the library to take on vacation. I'd try to read other things while my older sister started reading Fellowship, but she read slower than I so I'd usually wind up starting to read 2/Towers even though it was much slower going.
In other words, steeped in the books. I don't mind the deletion of Tom Bombadil, I agree it feels very much a sort of wandering diversion, and ultimately it serves little purpose.
Watching this in the theater when it came out, I was holding my breathe during the opening scenes, after the narrative introduction-- would it look all right, or even okay? And it did, it looked like The Shire, and it had a lightness and playfulness to it. Of course as it goes along it becomes its own version, but mostly it's one of the best visual adaptations of a book, true to the spirit mostly, true to the overall story, rich enough in detail without feeling stodgy.
posted by winesong at 4:05 PM

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And I really didn't like what they did with the Ithilien portion of Frodo and Sam's journey - Faramir was pretty out of character the whole time. But whatever.

Yeah, all of that was pretty shocking in the theatrical releases and only a little better in the extended DVD version of The Two Towers. In the book, the dialog between Frodo & Faramir shows, among other things, just how much Frodo has evolved since leaving the Shire. Like a lot. Listening in, Sam, still a somewhat simple hobbit, isn't even entirely able comprehend their conversation.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:08 PM

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Regarding Cave Trolls, that scene was shown at Cannes as a sneak preview to show how the film was coming along. I'm guessing Howard Shore hadn't done any music at such an early stage, and they just kept it that way because that worked.
posted by WhackyparseThis at 2:05 AM

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