The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (Extended Edition)
(Peter Jackson, 2001)
It’s a truly beautiful moment when you finish watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy on Blu-Ray and realize that you’ve spent the last 9 hours witnessing a trilogy that is on par with cinematic perfection. But it’s even more beautiful when you finally get your hands on the BluRay trilogy of the Extended Editions and realize that a masterpiece is even better when every scene filmed for the trilogy is included.
There are many ways to describe the brilliance that is The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I believe that the best is to call it a labour of love. Why? Because I firmly believe that the reason the films are so perfect is partially because of the impeccable cast, locations, and all other production aspects which went above and beyond in quality, but also because Peter Jackson chose to turn The Lord of the Rings into a film series for all the right reasons. This wasn’t a studio assignment by New Line, it was a chosen project by a man who was a) a fantastic director of his own right, and who b) loved The Lord of the Rings as novels and wanted to help Tolkein’s legacy display it via a different medium. It should be noted that I’m going to pretend with a lot of others that the Bakshi animated “adaptions” never happened (my High school english teacher who was a massive Tolkein fan once referred to them as “semi-pornography” to show his level of disgust at them.)
The fact that The Lord of the Rings is such a revered masterpiece is evidence of how important is is to have the right people working on a movie. And while the film itself may be shockingly long (3 hours 48 minutes to be exact), Jackson doesn’t waste time with pointless filler like many other films of gargantuan length find themselves doing, instead spreading out the content of Fellowship evenly across the film, thereby giving it a progression that is so shockingly natural that it’s almost uncanny. Likewise, the decision to utilize the landscapes of Jackson’s native homeland of New Zealand for the lands of Middle Earth results in the cinematic Middle Earth being painted as a mountainous, vast, and somewhat very idyllic place (excluding Mordor and Moria, of course), while still seeming so uncompromisingly real to the viewer’s eye. It’s a difficult thing for fantasy films in particular to pull off perfectly without appearing exaggerated or camp, but Fellowship manages to because as a film, it’s not overtly glitzy or laced with sub-par acting.
The Extended Editions are not an easy pill to swallow, though. Besides the length of the opus, I find that the Extended Editions are remarkable and extremely important possessions for the fully-fledged fans such as myself, or even the more than casual Lord of the Rings fans. For those who aren’t, it has a tendency to come off as just a long film made longer by nearly an hour of additional footage per film (over an hour for Return of the King, but we’ll get there eventually). You can say what you want about The Lord of the Rings in comparison to other epic fantasy series, but as a film, the extended edition of The Fellowship Of The Ring is just an absolute masterpiece.
