Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Hello everyone! This will be the first part of my 3 part review on the amazing Lord of the Rings series. I'm a big fan of the books, but never watched the movies seriously because of their drastic length. But over the course of three days, I watched the first two movies, and I got to say: they were great!

Well, I was lucky enough to be able to watch a Blu-ray version of this, and see it in its 1080p grandiosity, which brings me to my first point: cinematography. This movie's cinematography was excellent. The pans over mountains and woodlands were spectacular. Seeing every beautiful landscape and every imperfection in the characters' faces made this movie so many times better. Of course I already knew the story, and I have to say, this is probably one of, if not the best, book to movie adaptations every made. Obviously it did not follow the book even close to 100%, but overall it was still magnificent. The acting was also excellent. Almost all of the characters were cast very similarly to what I thought they would have looked like. I always thought Saruman would look like a more pointy nosed and evil version of Gandalf, and I was right. The only characters that came off strange to me were the hobbits, but I didn't know what to think when reading the book, and after a while, they came off very naturally. Aragorn was perfect, a long haired sword wielding adventurer with a bit of a strong but silent vibe. Gimli and Legolas were also great, but after watching Game of Thrones, Boromir seemed out of place. And for its time, Gollum was perfectly animated. The soundtrack was also outstanding. It brought emotion the movie, which many other soundtracks fail to do.

I give this movie a 9.5/10. It has become one of my favorite movies, but it has its faults. I highly recommend this movie to anyone, even those who have not read the books.