The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The first film of a trilogy. There is a ring. It was made long ago, was separated from its maker, and now sits in a hobbit's pocket in the Shire. Frodo inherits it. Gandalf works out what it is and says the only remedy is to carry it back to where it was made and destroy it. They set off. Four hobbits first, then a ranger at Bree, then a company of nine formed at Rivendell. From there the film is a journey. The mountain pass, the abandoned dwarf city under Moria, Lothlórien and the river. What the narrative is interested in is not magic but endurance: the ring corrodes whoever carries it, and every character in the film reaches for it once, some pulling back and some unable to. Boromir's line is the clearest case of this and the best written part of the film. All three films were made together in a single shoot. It ran close to fifteen months in New Zealand and nobody had taken a risk on that scale before. The smallness of the hobbits was mostly done by measurement rather than computer: sets built at two sizes, forced perspective, and two separate camera rigs within the same scene. The part of Aragorn changed after shooting began. The first actor left within days and Viggo Mortensen flew to New Zealand at short notice, taking the role with no preparation. The music is by Howard Shore, with a separate theme built for each people; that structure carries across all three films. Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Bean, Sean Astin and Christopher Lee are in the cast. Peter Jackson directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants long, wide, hand-built fantasy cinema. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a conclusion; the film does not end, it stops.