The Fellowship of the Ring Is So Impressive My Jaw Dropped

The dirty little secret of reviewing is the dirty little secret of every profession: once you know how something is made, it becomes increasingly hard to sit back and experience that something the way everyone else experiences it. Over a period of years, you absorb a certain amount of knowledge about the process of filmmaking, and you find yourself sitting in the dark admiring the craft while remaining immune to what the starry-eyed among us call the Magic of Movies. Magic isn't a bad comparison, actually. If you know all the magician's tricks, their very existence (or illusion of existence) can't impress you; all you can do is admire the skill with which the tricks are executed. "Nice twist on the rabbit-up-the-sleeve bit." "I've seen lots of ladies sawed in half, and yours isn't half-bad."

But when a magician truly believes in his craft, and pulls off a series of exceptionally difficult tricks with offhand flair, resistance has a way of breaking down. The magic show in question is The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installation in a live-action Lord of the Rings trilogy; the man in the top hat and tails is New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson. Throughout much of its nearly three-hour running time, I forgot I was watching a movie?which, when you think about it, is just about the highest compliment a reviewer can pay a fantasy filmmaker. It's the latest good movie in a winter season that has delivered one unexpectedly interesting movie after another, from Baran and Kandahar and No Man's Land to The Royal Tenenbaums and the forthcoming Gosford Park and Ali; in some ways, it's more impressive, because its pop culture cachet requires it to be more than an art house curiosity and more than a crowd pleaser. It needed to be great, and it is. For long sections of the film, I didn't take any notes; it's hard to scribble when your jaw is on the floor.

As everyone knows by now, Fellowship tells the tale of Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), a furry-footed hobbit who leaves his hobbit village and goes on an epic journey with a band of heroes to dispose of an evil ring that has the power to extinguish good and allow evil to rule Middle Earth. He got the ring from his friend and relation, Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm), who came into its possession years ago and held on to it during a long period in which much of the land believed the ring had been lost or destroyed. Frodo, who is small and helpless even by hobbit standards, must steel himself for the long journey to Mt. Doom, the place where the ring was forged. With encouragement from Gandalf (Ian McKellen), a legendary old wizard and longtime compatriot of the hobbits, Frodo fights his own natural fear and resists (often unsuccessfully) the temptation to get out of tight spots by donning the ring and turning invisible. (This comes in handy during the first part of the film, when Frodo and company are stalked cross-country by dark horsemen that look like the Grim Reaper's brothers.)

As is the case with any sort of powerful temptation, when you give in once, it becomes easier to give in again. The ring is seductive and obeys only its master, Evil. Evil is represented by the dreaded Sauron, a gigantic armored knight with demon horns who rules the combined forces of darkness and is massing them for an attack on the forces of good, with help from his protege, Saruman (horror film legend Christopher Lee, whose presence in this sort of film confers legitimacy on the whole movie, rather like casting Sam Elliott in a western). Saruman is crossbreeding goblins and men to create a new breed of superevil footsoldiers.

I might as well stop describing the plot here, because if you're familiar with Tolkien's material, you know this stuff already, and if you don't care, reading it can make your eyes glaze over. Believe me, I understand; Dune, The Foundation Trilogy and other supposedly indispensable fantasy and sci-fi works always bored me a bit, because while their ideas were interesting, the execution struck me as unnecessarily dry, thick, academic. If you don't like sword-and-sorcery movies simply because they're sword-and-sorcery movies?especially the type that goes all the way, complete with plummy, pseudo-Olde English dialogue and mystical creatures?Fellowship won't win you over. (A friend of mine conceded it was well-made, but said it didn't move him because he didn't care for hobbits.) And I suspect that if you're a J.R.R. Tolkien obsessive?the kind of person who knows the names of every minor character, plus their lineage?you'll doubtless find a million things wrong with it. I went in having read The Hobbit and the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring back in high school?even then, I was growing bored with fantasy?so I knew a bit more about Tolkein's world than most people, but not as much as some. I had no trouble following the complicated history, geography and genealogy of Middle Earth (much of which is helped along with split-second flashbacks and illustrative images that interrupt the exposition). The supporting characters include Liv Tyler as the elfin warrior Arwen, Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchett as elfin royals Elrond and Galadriel, Orlando Bloom as the expert elfin archer Legolas, Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean as the conflicted human warriors Aragorn and Borimir, and sweet-faced Sean Astin as Frodo's intensely loyal hobbit pal, Samwise. I liked the characters immediately, mainly because they didn't seem calculated to make me like them; under Jackson's direction, the ensemble attains the kind of taken-for-granted toughness one associates with John Ford pictures, as if they'd be doing and saying the same stuff even if nobody was watching.

Best of all, Jackson doesn't oversell the movie's relentlessly fantastic elements. Visually, the film is astonishing?and nearly unique?because it deploys so much cutting-edge special effects technology with so little fuss. It's arguably the first film with hundreds of spectacularly busy, yet curiously matter-of-fact, digital effects shots that somehow don't take you out of the movie. In an intensely violent setpiece midway through the movie, high-angled shots reveal an army of goblins stalking the heroes through a deserted underground dwarf city. The goblins swarm after the heroes in the thousands, and from a great distance, the images suggest an army of flesh-eating ants tracking a handful of lost and wounded mice; but even when the goblins scamper up and down pillars in defiance of gravity, you're not thinking, "How'd they do that?" You're thinking, "Oh, man?I guess the good guys are done for." A horrifying attack by a giant, flame-skinned demon known as the Balrog is a riot of intricately choreographed, chain-reaction action, but it unfolds so briskly and precisely that you get caught up in the moment, like a kid listening to an adult read a story at bedtime and hoping against hope that everything will turn out all right.

The seductive power of the omnipotent, malevolent ring the characters fight over?one ring to rule all others, the legend says?is the Force represented by an object one can hold in one's hand (or wear on one's finger). It's a simplistic, even silly reduction of eternal human conflicts and temptations?some 50 years ago, when Tolkien inaugurated his series, it already seemed very old-hat?but it works. It works because despite the hobbits, dwarfs, elves, wizards, dragons, demons and spells on display, the story Fellowship tells is a story that matters?a story we can all interpret on our own personal terms. When Bilbo or Frodo give in to the lure of the ring, their faces darken, the world turns gray and fluttery and they glimpse a fiery gateway that suggests the demonic slit iris of a watchful devil in another dimension; when the human warrior Boromir leans on Frodo to give him the ring, he suggests a reformed heroin addict impulsively begging to restart his habit; the previous holder of the ring became a Gollum, a goblin-like creature who can do nothing but pine over his precious, precious possession. It's overwrought and easy to read, yet powerful, because the chords it strikes are real.

Jackson's specialty is rethinking and even reinventing genre movies without disrespecting the emotions at their core. His early films included Meet the Feebles, an intense, violent, scabrously funny NC-17 Muppet movie that played like The Muppet Show directed by Alex Cox, and Dead/Alive, a zombie comedy in which the meek, mommy-dominated hero watched his entire family succumb to zombism, yet insisted that everyone under his roof continue to behave as normally as possible. Heavenly Creatures, Jackson's take on a real-life, scandalous murder plot involving two teenaged lesbians, highlighted the fact that, to its two heroines, there was no border between fantasy and reality; what they imagined together was as real as the world they were forced to live in every day.

Jackson's sense of fantastic realism also serves the quieter scenes. He cast adult actors as hobbits and dwarfs (including the wide-bodied John Rhys-Davies, who played Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies, as a dwarf) and integrated them into the same frame with actors playing human-scaled elves, wizards and humans; they move around each other casually, sometimes with a handheld camera following them; somehow, Jackson's seamless combination of old-school, in-camera effects (forced perspective sets and props) and new-school tools (digital compositing) rarely call attention to themselves. The goal isn't spectacle that invites admiration, but spectacle that invites viewer involvement?two very different things. You're too interested in the relationship between Frodo and Gandalf?and, earlier in the film, Bilbo and Gandalf, who've known each other forever?to worry about how Jackson choreographed and composited the performers. Throughout the film, the conversations between fantastic creatures of different shapes and sizes aren't about showing off effects; they're about characters talking to each other, clarifying their ambitions, their fears, their moral values while they interact as naturalistically as possible.

The characterizations mirror Jackson's philosophy of how to make good fantasy; their world is amazing, yet it's the only world they know, so they take it mostly for granted. They're properly impressed, sometimes emotionally devastated, when something truly momentous happens, but otherwise, the magic and dread of Middle Earth is presented as the normal state of things. Unlike Chris Columbus' film of Harry Potter, which worked overtime with low angles and tinkly John Williams music to emphasize how incredibly magical everything was, Fellowship photographs its fictional world as if it's real.

Many people say the Harry Potter movie represents the first installment in a new generation's Star Wars, but box-office take aside, I suspect that's way off-base. With its brisk pace, elegant photography, diamond-hard fantasy characterizations and general aura of lived-in density, Jackson's film exposes Harry Potter as a competent but uninspiring piece of franchise-building. Fellowship is the new Star Wars because it reverses the equation, reminding us that Star Wars was, in many ways, a flattened-out sci-fi variation on Lord of the Rings. In all the ways that count, it's a richer, deeper movie than Star Wars (which cribbed from Tolkien) and its countless imitators; it's richer and deeper because it treats good and evil not as storytelling conceits we've all collectively agreed to believe in for entertainment's sake, but as analogs for our own real-life struggle to be good in a world that constantly tempts us with evils both small and large.