The Lord of the Rings: FoTR Review at WoTC

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(Originally posted by Sorcerer)

An excellent (and long!) review of the excellent The Lord of the Rings: FoTR movie has been posted at WoTC. In addition to the critical evaluation of the movie, it also tells us about the history of trying to get the LotR on tape by other movie makers. (And how they failed miserably...)

It was posted in three parts, one every week, so I waited until all of them were up before posting it here. If you're a true fan you'll want to read all three parts yourself, but if you're just looking for a short take on what the whole review is about, read the conclusion here:

This is not Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. This is Peter Jackson's LotR: a deeply moving film about the pain and suffering quite ordinary people are willing to undergo for the sake of their friends, family, homes, and even people they'll never meet -- a lesson that's all too timely. But Tolkien's LotR is still there, on your bookshelf, as vivid and enthralling as ever. A film, even a great film, cannot supplant a great book, and LotR is a great book in the eyes of millions. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, The Maltese Falcon, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet, and more have been made into great films (some of them more than once), yet the original books have lost none of their impact for being supplemented by a new version in another medium. Instead, Peter Jackson's film is likely to send millions back to their bookshelf, to reread the story for themselves and plunge ahead into the second and third volume (unlike the original readers in 1954-1956, we don't have to wait a year or more to find out how the story comes out!).

Millions more will be encountering Tolkien for the first time through Jackson's movie, and many of them have been deeply impressed. It's a fair guess that a goodly number of them will go to their libraries and bookstores to see for themselves what the original that could inspire such a movie is like. Even Bakshi's movie, which was terrible, and the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, which was not much better, created a whole new generation of Tolkien fans, many of whom grew up to be avid readers of fantasy fiction, active gamers of D&D and other fantasy roleplaying games, and authors. I would not be surprised to see another vast swelling of our numbers in a decade or two to come.

- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3