Yesterday evening, Katherine and I watched The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). I had never seen any of the Lord of the Rings movies (or read the books on which they are based). The reason we watched it is that we're watching the Academy Award-winning movies in chronological order, beginning with Midnight Cowboy in 1969. The third movie in the set won the Academy Award in 2003. (Jim Slagle told me that the award was really for all three movies.) Yes, we could have watched just the third movie, but I thought it would be best to watch all three, in the proper order; so I bought all three of them on DVD. It actually took three sittings to get through the first one, since it's so long (almost three hours).
Katherine told me not to be mean in my review, and she must be obeyed. How's this: This movie will appeal to people who like movies such as this one. It did nothing for me. I don't understand the compulsion to come up with all new place names and personal names. Frodo? Bilbo? Strider? Orcs? Please. Most of the dialogue was meaningless to me, even though I was wide awake while watching and had subtitles on the screen. About the only thing I found interesting was the scenery. Apparently, the movie was filmed in New Zealand, which is breathtakingly beautiful. We're going to take a break before watching the second movie in the series. We're in the middle of season four of 24.
Here is the trailer.
