Jeremy’s Tophunder №13: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

7 min readApr 3, 2020

Two days in a row, we cover a movie that clocks in close to or over three hours long, and yet, doesn’t seem to drag or get boring at any point.

I’ve probably seen Fellowship 20+ times in my life, but even when I went back over it a few nights ago, I looked at the navigation bar when the group finally escapes the mines of Moria, and I thought to myself “Damn, there’s only an hour left in the movie? There’s still so much stuff left to happen!”

Let’s get a few things out of the way about how I view the series as a whole before we break down Fellowship on its own. I have Fellowship ranked highest for a few reasons:

The supporting characters in Fellowship are more interesting to me than the supporting characters in the next two movies. I like Gandalf the Grey better than Gandalf the White — I like whimsical, sometimes goofy Gandalf a lot more than I like stiff, serious Gandalf. Also, characters like Boromir and Galadriel add a lot to the story.
I like it a lot more when the Fellowship is all together, instead of dealing with several disparate storylines. The scenes in the series that drag the most are those with Frodo and Sam with Gollum leading the way. Don’t get me wrong — Gollum is a fascinating character, and played incredibly by motion-capture genius Andy Serkis, but those scenes can be downright boring at times.
This is just my potentially way-off-base recollection, but for some reason I associate Fellowship most with the aesthetic of the series that I really like — the big sweeping long shots where the characters are barely visible and you get a sense of the scale of the landscape. Sure, I know that type of shot exists in all three movies, but for some reason, when I think about it, I think about Fellowship first. Two Towers and Return of the King, to me (and again, this is an unscientific snap judgment) venture more into the action/adventure genre and become slightly less visually interesting.
Fellowship introduces the world. I’m a sucker for introductions. When it’s a bad-ass character, I eat it up. When the most important character in the movie is actually the universe (like here), I might eat that up even more. The opening ten minutes that introduce Middle Earth and the story of the one ring, with Cate Blanchette’s narration is a perfect way to start the series.
I love music, and Fellowship has the best music in the series. There’s a piece of music from the mines of Moria that is not only my favorite piece of music in the series, and is not only one of my favorite pieces of music from any movie, ever, but in fact is just one of my favorite pieces of music ever recorded. It’s called The Bridge of Khazad Dum, and I can’t talk about the movie without bringing it up.
Like I talked about with The Empire Strikes Back, for whatever reason, I just really like movies in the beginning or middle of a series where the bad guys win. It just makes for a very interesting ending, followed by a more satisfying resolution when the story finally comes full circle. Fellowship nails this. Boromir and Gandalf fall, and then the group fractures after Merry and Pippin get captured in an effort distract the enemy, allowing Frodo and Sam to escape and continue the journey on their own. The remaining three members of the Fellowship then take off to rescue Merry and Pippin, and, as Aragorn says, “hunt some orc.”

All of this is not to say that I think The Two Towers and Return of the King are trash — far from it, they both also make the Tophunder. But Fellowship is the highest of the three.

And frankly, the story of how these movies got made might be even more interesting than the movies themselves. The fact that Peter Jackson was trusted to film 11 hours worth of epic fantasy movies with a combined budget of almost $300 million, based on his career up until that point is kind of amazing. Nothing about his resume suggested that he was the right choice to handle a production of this size. He had one Academy Award nomination (for the screenplay of 1994’s Heavenly Creatures), and his biggest box office success was a horror movie in 1996 (The Frighteners) that grossed $29 million. It’s kind of mind-blowing that New Line Cinema agreed to letting him direct three movies, all to be produced concurrently, with a production staff the size of a small city.

But they did. And it worked. Almost by accident.

How much would you like the series if Gandalf was played by Sean Connery, Aragorn was played by Nic Cage, and Galadriel was played by Lucy Lawless? Because all three of those actors were offered those three roles, but turned them down for various reasons. (Just as an aside, Nic Cage turned something down? Holy shit.) Like, I’m not a huge fan of Viggo Mortenson — I think he’s fine, but nothing special — but sweet mother of god, can you imagine this series with Nic Cage as one of the two or three central characters? I’m legitimately shocked just thinking about it. Connery was offered an absolutely absurd deal to play Gandalf — he would have made $30 million up front, as well as 15 percent of the worldwide box office receipts. By the end of the series, that would have netted him $450 million. Connery turned it down because he “didn’t understand the script.” It really seems like they dodged a bullet with some of these casting choices.

My favorite casting tid-bit? The filmmakers offered the role of Arwen to Liv Tyler, and New Line Cinema apparently “leaped at the opportunity of having one Hollywood star in the film.” Remember when Liv Tyler was a Hollywood star? That made me laugh.

Some of the visual effects seem old-fashioned in 2020, but for the most part, they did a great job. A lot of the stuff in the series that seems like “special effects” (i.e. Digital) is actually a practical effect, done with miniatures. That, more than anything, enhances the realism of the world. We’ll talk more and more about this as we get to the other films in the series (as a lot of the prominent action scenes utilize miniatures also), but the models used in Fellowship to create places like Rivendell and Lothlorien are incredible, and hearing the model-makers talk about the Argonath (the two huge rock sculptures that flank the river towards the end of the movie) is absolutely fascinating. The model-makers actually reverse-engineered how they assumed the people of Middle Earth would have built them, and then constructed their models to make them look that way. That’s the level of detail they went to on a model that appears on the screen for about 45 seconds of a three-hour movie. It’s next-level thinking that is, quite literally, unbelievable to me. That section starts around the 10:30 mark of the video linked above. I highly recommend checking that out.

The film also produced tens of thousands of pieces of armor, swords, and bows and arrows, as well as thousands of orc body suits and heads. They took every effort to have things appear on screen as they actually are, rather than digitally enhancing things after the fact. They intentionally took the hard way, and it paid off for them.

The biggest artistic licence that the filmmakers took in the series was re-arranging parts of the story in order to create a tighter narrative structure. In the books, J.R.R. Tolkien did not write an ending that would make sense for the movies. He wrote it as a single story, and his publisher split it into the three volumes. The book version of Fellowship of the Ring simply ends with Frodo and Sam leaving the group, unbeknownst to the rest of them. The battle between the orcs and the Fellowship in which Boromir dies and Merry and Pippin are captured doesn’t actually take place until the first chapter of Two Towers. The choice on the part of the filmmakers to condense that action into the end of the first movie makes the story flow a lot better, and provides a natural climax at the end of the movie.

It’s rare that I have a movie that I enjoy as much as this one, and yet don’t really have a favorite scene. If I had to pick, it might be the encounter between the Nazgul and the hobbits at Weathertop (a nice bonus here is that scene runs right into Arwen’s ride to Rivendell). I could also go with the Council of Elrond (linked in two parts there). Really, though, it’s not a single scene that stands out for me, at least with Fellowship. It doesn’t have a huge action set piece that stands out (like the Battle of Helms Deep in Two Towers or the Siege of Minas Tirith in Return of the King). It’s mostly a movie that moves forward with consistently strong pacing. Nothing really drags, and even if you think some parts do (like the stopover in Lothlorien), they’re always followed by high-energy scenes. It’s a three-hour movie that doesn’t feel like a three-hour movie. That’s not easy to do. I love all of the Lord of the Rings movies, but Fellowship of the Ring is by far my favorite, and it’s №13 on my list.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13

31. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

34. Catch Me If You Can

45. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back