The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
2001-2003, directed by Peter Jackson, starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Andy Serkis, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, John Rhys-Davis, Liv Tyler, Cate Blanchett, Sean Bean, Christopher Lee

Anyone who tried to put the seriously complex world of Middle Earth onto the big screen was always taking a huge risk – witness the dire unfinished cartoon version of 1978. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a seminal classic, creating a world in such detail that everyone pictures it in their own mind, and will therefore easily baulk at being asked to accept a different version portrayed in front of them. Suffice to say, Peter Jackson’s telling of the story was Middle Earth exactly as I had always imagined it.

For starters the technical expertise was beyond compare. From the massed battles of Helm’s Deep and the Pelennor Fields, to the sheer genius that was Gollum, and equally Treebeard (he’ll never create a believable walking tree, I thought beforehand…) the scale of the achievement was massive – watching it in the cinema I imagined a similar reaction to those 1930s audiences seeing a Cecil B DeMille for the first time. I also found myself thinking that George Lucas really should have asked Peter Jackson to do Star Wars 1-3 for him.

This is particularly true when one considers that the most impressive special effects mean nothing at all if the telling of the actual story doesn’t come up to the same level – but in Lord of The Rings it did. Jackson and his cast, mixing familiar names with a host of relative unknowns, successfully translated each character from the page, portraying the human (or inhuman, in the case of such as Gollum) side of each. One could feel for these creatures, whether heroes or villians.

There are flaws – little surprise in such a massive undertaking. I particularly still cringe at the drawn-out tear-jerking goodbye sequence at the end of Return of the King, even though I know it’s necessary to tie up the various loose ends of the saga. But such irritations are minor and do not detract from what is no less than motion picture history, and fully deserving of all the praise it has since gained.