Saturday morning of the 22nd my friends and I went to see the most anticipated fantasy movie of the year, second to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. We went to an 11:30 showing on a rainy day during Winter Break, so at 11:00 we were all alone in the theatre. Eventually maybe 30 people saw that showing, but as were leaving I saw a long line starting to form for the next showing.

With all the hype sorrounding this movie, especially in the gamer crowd, it was going to be impossible for The Fellowship of the Ring to meet at least my expectations. It's a good movie, I'll say that for it. Not a movie I'd see again though. Gorgeous landscapes and seamless CGI, which is a problem in that it's so good that you don't notice the special effects. Now, every action movie wants better and better special effects. But the other side of the coin is that once the effects are so good that people don't notice it, they then focus on the story and other traditional movie elements.

Frankly, I thought the Lord of the Rings Trilogy was way too long and with whole books devoted to Sam and Frodo, it was plodding and tearfully boring. This first movie captures the essence of the first book. I read LofT 15 years ago so I'm not extremely exact on the details, but I didn't notice anything missing. Sure, people told me this and that scenes are missing and characters were changed and so forth, but I didn't notice it and because of that it didn't detract from the movie.

At three hours running time it just seemed to go on forever. There was just too much to the book to cover in one movie. Ok, the problem is that it's not designed to be standalone. You can't just watch or read the first part and get a complete story -- the crime of any badly plotted trilogy. To be fair, I'll make the assumption that Tolkein was not writing a trilogy, just an amazingly long book. But making a movie in the same way, such that it definitely leaves a lot of plots hanging, is unforgiveable in my opinion.

Basically, I'd say don't watch the movie, at least not until you can see all three movies together or in a short span of time. Get the DVD set when it comes out and watch them over three nights. Which brings me to another point: shooting two or three movies at once and then releasing them over a period of years. Makes lots of economic sense. You save on sets and paying the crew and you can't release two or three movies at the same time because that will glut the market.

But I don't like it. If you only have one movie, you're going to make it into a complete story. If you know there will be a sequel beforehand, or if heavens forbid you're actually shooting the sequel at the same time, the temptation is way too great to leave the story unfinished or to leave in a hook into the next movie. All that does is leave a bad taste in your mouth after the movie. Maybe people don't mind, but I do. Look at Back to the Future and Dungeons and Dragons and The Empire Strikes Back. Yeah, there are movies that end up with this sort of "they have other things to do", but it can be done well and it can be done with the idea of leading into a sequel. You can't really do both. For that reason I hope Fellowship and Matrix 2 fail miserably. Nothing personal against the movies, just against the marketing forces.

Ok, so that's my little diatribe. The Fellowship of the Ring is an impressive achievement and possibly the best fantasy movie to date. No, scratch that. It's an impressive achievement. Faithful to the book, whether or not you think that's a good idea. Good, though not great acting since it is an action movie, not a drama. Good action, interspred with way too long talk scenes. Like the book, the movie presents a world and a great task and it's not really trying to do anything other than set up the next two movies.

Everybody else liked it, I have no idea why. And if this had been a science fiction movie I wouldn't have minded. But this is a genre that I'm not particularly enamored with so it is something I noticed. Apparently women like it, gamers like it, young people like it. It should do well and if you want to not look like one of those backwards troglodytes that didn't watch the biggest movie of the year then you have to watch it too.