A new cine-myth is born - The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Reviews

Humans cooperate with elves, dwarves, wizards, hobbits and other mythical creatures, to destroy a magical ring being sought after by an ancient evil, in this grandiose screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. Elijah Wood is the young hobbit who inherits the ring from an uncle (Ian Holm) who does not fully understand its power. Ian McKellen is the neighborhood wizard who explains it to Wood, launching him on a quest to return the ring to the dark netherworld where it emanated -- the only place where it can be destroyed. Eight companions -- THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING of the film's title -- accompany the hobbit boy on his quest. Eight of them take care of the logistics, which range from intoning magical incantations and reading mystical signs, to fighting off armies of supernatural -- and, superhuman -- creatures. The boy's role is simply to be pure of heart and pass the spiritual tests that he faces as the forces of darkness conspire to entrap the troupe and prevent them from carrying out their mission. LORD OF THE RINGS is a modern tapestry of centuries of Central European myth, folklore, and faerie tales. It harkens back to the lore of Germany's "Black Forest" and the minstrels of the Middle Ages. But, in the thick weave of ancient, mythical symbols of purity, fidelity, and good against evil, is embroidered a moral lesson for our age about resisting the lure of becoming a collaborator with wickedness for the sake of personal advantage or even mere convenience. There is also a sense that the visible world is only a veneer to conceal -- and, at times, to reveal -- an unseen reality that swims deep beneath reality's surface. This, in fact, is part of the story: when the hobbit puts on the ring, he can see, through a sort of mystical x-ray vision, the spiritual world, including the evil spirit hunting after him. The multi-dimensional concept is buttressed and echoed by layers of meaning that remind us that each character personified on the screen is also a metaphor, whose meaning may be developed, like a Polaroid image, from our own interpretation (sometimes, also, at a covert, sub-surface level of our understanding). This occult quality of the story has put off religious fundamentalists, who distrust the unseen workings of a tale based on magic, demons, and wizards. But, confronted head on, the allegory turns out to be a positive, life-affirming saga of friendship, loyalty, and selflessness in the face of a reality greater than one's own existence. There is much to digest, but LORD OF THE RINGS feeds it to us piecemeal, over a three hour course that ranges from thoughtful to suspenseful, building up in action and adventure in the last hour, when the nine companions launch, Holy Grail-like, into the mythical forests, dodging their pursuers while they school themselves in mysticism. The troupe includes the human descendant of a king who unleashed the curse of the ring when he captured the article from the evil Lord, but declined to destroy it. Now, the descendant (Viggo Mortensen) must wonder whether history will repeat itself and he, too, will choke when his moment of truth comes. The end of the first part of the RINGS trilogy (the other two movies are in the can, already) ends abruptly -- but, satisfyingly, because the key questions, about the moral fiber of the movie's characters, have been answered, though mechanical questions about the storyline require us to seek the sequel(s). (Carlos Colorado)