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Pre-screenings of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring continue to ramp up the excitement about the epic's big December 19th opening day. But this week, Peter Jackson's ambitious $250 million dollar project gained its first official complaints.

Film Critic's Christopher Null is the only naysayer thus far, but what a lot of nays! "The obvious digital backdrops that start to wear you down … the fights are not particularly well-choreographed, either. You don't get a good sense of scale of the big battles, and the in-close fighting is edited too frantically to follow well." He boldly claims that "most moviegoers will find it overly long and just too exhausting."

So far, though, Null is a minority of one. Just listen to the other mainstream reviews:

"The Fellowship … is thrilling," exclaims Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, "a great picture, a triumphant picture, a joyfully conceived work of cinema that would appear to embrace Tolkien's classic with love and delight, and rewards both adepts and novices … Every detail … engrossed me. I may have never turned a page of Tolkien, but I know enchantment when I see it."

The highest praise yet comes from ScreenDaily's Emanuel Levy: "Jackson's Ring cycle generates the kind of epic cinema excitement encountered in the films of Abel Gance (Napoleon), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai, Ran), David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia), Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey), and arguably last seen on the American screen in Coppola's Apocalypse Now. It certainly far surpasses the standards of popular epics like Braveheart or Gladiator, the Oscar-winners of 1995 and 2000, respectively." It contains "a moral and emotional significance" and is "bound to assume a place of honor in film history." Even though it's a fantasy, it "remains grounded in reality, dealing with relevant human themes of loyalty, friendship, sacrifice, and responsibility."

"Fellowship … is an unqualified triumph, its status as the best Western fantasy film ever made all but indisputable," says Nev Pierce at BBC Films. "I have no doubt the series will get better now that the groundwork is laid."

At MSNBC, Todd McCarthy raves that the film "is an epic by any standard and looks to please the book's legions of fans, as well as the uninitiated. Jackson must have convinced someone that he would do it right, a view thoroughly borne out by what's up on the screen. [He] keeps a firm hand on the work's central themes of good versus evil, rising to the occasion and group loyalty in the face of adversity, and always keeps things moving without getting bogged down in frills or effects for effects' sake."

"At last, smart movie making, with a real sense of creativity, style, wit, and texture. You can't ask for anything more," says Roger Friedman (Fox News). And he's not the only one who sees visions of little golden statues. "Are there Oscars waiting for Fellowship? Certainly for special effects, costuming, makeup, and other technical categories." But he adds, "What Lord of the Rings really revels in, though, are the characters and their relationships."

Calgary Sun 's Kevin Williamson simply declares, "Lord of the Rings, folks, rules. And while perhaps Harry Potter's spell will grow stronger as later episodes of the planned marathon of Potter flicks unfold, for now anyway, Lord of the Rings stands the taller of the two—a mythic, sprawling fable with a palpable sense of doom … It begins to fully dawn how much George Lucas, um, borrowed from J.R.R."

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December (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45