The Lord Of The Rings And The Hobbit: Ranked From Worst To Best
2. The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring
With six movies, each a box office success, its hard to consider that when The Fellowship Of The Ring was first released a Middle-Earth blockbuster was something of a gamble. Fantasy, particularly high-fantasy, had only ever been done with mixed results in mainstream cinema, and, with Tolkien only familiar in geek ciricles, a film from a New Zealand gore-purveyor didn't immediately strike as having potential for being a massive phenomenon. What made The Lord Of The Rings so immediately popular was how it threw caution to the wind and went all in. Telling the epic story in the three movies it needed, there was no trepidation in presenting this new world or attempts to pander to audiences fresh out of the much lighter Harry Potter And The Philiosiphers Stone. All of which keeps to film as fresh today as it was in 2001. The largest hurdle in this regard is the stark change in tone. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker goes from sun-gazing farmboy to hero of the Rebellion by way of saving a prisoner of war from torture, but it all feels like a consistent universe from the off. Here things are much more varied. Side-stepping from an epic prologue into rural Britain, the first movie takes its quaint middle-class hobbits out of their idyll and through the threat of death (and the loss of multiple friends) before sending them off into the wider world alone. However, thanks to Jackson's conviction in each stage, not once does it feel too much. This believable turn into the epic from the norm is something the majority of the trilogys imitators have tried to replicate, but none (not even The Hobbit) had the patience on show here, with the time given for the audience to feel as much a part of the Shire-folk as the Bagginses.
