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Between Harry Potter and The Fellowship of the Ring, the busy moviegoer might overlook news of another imaginative production on the horizon. This one's quite unlikely to stir up any controversy: Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie is coming to a theatre near you in 2002. (I spotted this news blurb at CanadianChristianity.com.)

But first things first. The Fellowship of the Ring opens in theatres everywhere on Wednesday, December 19, bringing J.R.R. Tolkien's work to the big screen whether the Tolkien family likes it or not. Buzz is building after last week's screenings, and fans are gaining confidence that director Peter Jackson might have made the first decent Middle-earth movie.

David Ansen (Newsweek) believes the movie is "too violent for little ones," but he raves about it anyway: "Jackson's fierce, headlong movie takes high-flying risks: it wears its earnestness, and its heart, on its muddy, blood-streaked sleeve. It transcends cheap thrills; we root for the survival of our heroes with a depth of feeling that may come as a surprise. It leaves you with your wits intact, hungry for more." Ansen also becomes the first to see the film as timely. "[Frodo] must form a coalition among the races of Middle-earth … to battle the armies of the Dark Lord. Is there an echo here of our current world?" (It has been a recurring phenomenon since the successful series was first published that each generation interprets it as relevant for a different reason—The Lord of the Rings has been called a parable of the wages of addiction, racism, industrialism, and more.)

Tolkien's fans should count it the most encouraging sign of all to hear that Ansen left the theatre "thinking a trip to the bookstore to pick up The Two Towers might be in order."

Variety predicts the movie will "please the book's legions of fans with its imaginatively scrupulous rendering of the tome's characters and worlds on the screen, as well as the uninitiated with its uninterrupted flow of incident and spectacle. Jackson must have convinced someone that he would do it right, a view thoroughly borne out by what's up on the screen." There are compliments for everyone involved, and high praise for Howard Shore, whose musical score is "constantly supportive, creative and complementary to the action. As such, it represents an object lesson that handily points up how unnecessarily intrusive and insufferably distracting John Williams' work is in Harry Potter."

The Hollywood Reporter says the film "rarely takes a wrong turn." In a tempered review, the writer concludes that the film is "so well-made and well-cast that one can have no reservations about the rest of Jackson's monumental creation."

In the first official review offered in the religious media, Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) writes, "The intensity of the battle scenes and the depiction of evil is so vivid that the PG-13 rating seems inadequate. This is no children's fantasy." But he assures grownups that this is an exemplary fantasy. "It is the visual artistry which takes the focus rather than any individual performance," he writes. "Tolkien's book is rich with descriptive details and Jackson has helped to give each unique part of this world its individuality. Credit Tolkien for originality but give Jackson and his team their due for realizing Tolkien's vision and putting it up on the screen." From the film's compelling story, he draws this observation: "We can't always choose the events of our lives … all we can do is choose how we will act when those events occur."

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December (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45