The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring 4K 2001 EXTENDED Ultra HD 2160p

The long-awaited first part of the epic saga-trilogy based on the most famous book after the Bible - "The Lord of the Rings" by JRR Tolkien. Set against a backdrop of untouched New Zealand landscapes with the latest technology and CGI, the film became a key cinematic event in late 2001.

The wizard Gandalf the Gray, who came to his old friend Bilbo's birthday party, witnesses a strange event - in the midst of the celebration, under the many glances of his friends and neighbors, Bilbo ... disappears into the air right in the middle of the crowd. Under the menacing gaze of Gandalf, he confesses that he did this trick with the help of the ring he found during his travels. The ring is unusual - there is no precious stone in it, and Gandalf realizes that this is the Ring of Omnipotence, lost a thousand years ago, forged by the Dark Lord in the fire of a volcano and giving the owner incredible strength and power.

The Lord himself understood this, recognizing the Ring the second Bilbo recklessly put it on his finger. Gandalf realizes that the Lord will try to get the Ring back at any cost in order to interrupt his disincarnation; Nine Nazgul horsemen are already riding on their black horses to the Hobbitania to kill anyone who tries to get in their way. Gandalf decides to hand the Ring over to Frodo, Bilbo's nephew, so that he secretly delivers it to Rivendell, where the Great Council of Elves, Men and Dwarves will be held, at which a decision on the fate of the Ring is to be made ...

The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring 4K Review
Scolding "The Lord of the Rings" is the same as complaining about the weather. It is raining anyway, and people will go for this work, just to keep up with all progressive humanity, which has already brought 600 million dollars to the box office of the film. And they will do the right thing - the children will definitely like them, and even somewhere it is pleasant to frown in annoyance at something that so delights everyone ...

Criticism, however, has one chance to get out with criticism, given by the fact that "The Fellowship of the Ring" is only the first episode of the epic. Let us frown as if positively, with the hope that everything will be fine with director Peter Jackson and the company.

So, the retelling of the plot of Tolkien's classics is done in detail and colorfully. Opportunities for this were not only financial (budget over 100 million), but ideological. "Lord of the Rings" in the original - popularization of the actual philosophical views of the late Englishman. His rather complicated philosophy was religious, but against the omnipotence of God - on the contrary, for God as the freedom to do something good, as a natural need. To popularize these views, he personified them with living beings, countries and eras. The further he philosophized, the more this personified world grew. In it, in addition to people, there were gnomes and elves, hobbits, magicians and orcs. They began to live in natural Middle-earth and unnatural, dark Mordor, in trees and castles, in graves and beer barrels. Some thirsted for power, others wanted to try it, others fled from it like fire. From this began a relationship with adventure, and since Tolkien had no limits of imagination, except for personal views, adventure with relationships made his world completely magical.

This is what the film was hooked on. The magic was embodied in tricks and computer graphics. This business is still troublesome, it took a lot of effort. Filming in New Zealand, for example, used 1,600 pairs of individually fitted legs and ears and 900 handcrafted armor sets. But a lot has turned out: ghosts in black cloaks on black horses and Saruman's tower, vile orcs and pastoral villages of hobbits. All these are accurate living illustrations of the classical ideas of the distant kingdoms-thirties states. Especially cool is the fact that hobbits are dwarfs by nature, somewhere up to the waist of people. How this was done is not clear, but the famous artist Ian Holm (Bilbo) is all the time up to the waist of the no less famous artist Ian McKellen (Gandalf), although in life they are on equal terms. Everything about water deserves a special mention. It can be seen that it lends itself perfectly to computer processing, but, one way or another, when, while fleeing from ghosts, an elven princess arranges a flood, the streams of water in the river take the form of a herd of galloping horses completely flawlessly. Both the opening scene of the war with Sauron and the scene of crossing the crumbling underground bridge are also fabulously organic, although they strongly resemble either Shrek or Return of the Mummy.

Finally, the performers were selected with great humor. Dracula with half a century of experience Christopher Lee as Saruman is a funny context. Strongly overweight Tatyana Larina Liv Tyler as an elven princess immediately causes laughter in the audience, but her beauty is not lost. Fatal beauties Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) and Sean Bean (Boromir) are also similar to the truth.

Unfortunately, disadvantages are always a consequence of advantages. Carried away by the embodiment of wonderful matters, director Peter Jackson underestimated the wonders of immaterial literature and, together with a play on words, threw out the whole of Tolkien's philosophy. There is nothing more complicated, no associations and second or third meanings, everything is visible, and this was enough for Jackson. He did not compensate for the absence of a play on words, although it seems that God himself ordered to compensate for images with humor. The less serious, the more there should be laughter, the same cinematic context as with Christopher Lee, albeit a deviation from the original. This is the transformation of the original into a movie that is no less years old than the Tolkien classics.

As a result of the adventures of the hobbit Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring to deliver and eliminate Sauron's ring in the bowels of Mount Doom, filmed without seriousness as much as without humor, they lost all the tension of a single plot, as if they became an end in themselves. This is just adventure after adventure, rather heterogeneous, carefully strung on three hours of timing, which in an hour starts to get boring. Trying to do the little things overshadows the purpose of what is happening, and the fairy tale, ceasing to be excitingly interesting, ceases to be a fairy tale. It turned out to be a large, expensive one, but nothing more than a list of illustrations. There is no beginning, middle or end in lists. The climax seems to be everywhere and nowhere. Honoring Tolkien's name without following his letter played a cruel joke with Jackson. The recent film adaptation of Ron Hubbard by John Travolta is considered the worst Hollywood fiction of all time, but to be honest, compared to The Lord of the Rings, this is Battleground Earth - just The Three Musketeers.

And when suddenly, out of boredom, you begin to gaze intently at the presented illustrations, you gradually discover that they are slipping a linden tree into you. Much more than miracles are long and tedious conversations with the clarification of "who is who." Some kind of radio play, only in suits. When a radio play is nevertheless diluted with fights, chases and miracles, they are not filmed very honestly either. In fights with battles, Andrew Lesney's camera is always very close to the fighters, and all the shots are very short, so instead of the effect of presence, a lack of overall impression is created. In short, a luxurious computer castle in the land of black mountains and burnt forests under a stormy sky - it seems to be separate, and the battle for the ring is separate and inarticulate. The soundtrack itself is not bad, but we know that music in movies is good when it is inaudible. And here not just everything is heard: here empty frames are openly filled with mighty orchestras or, for example, the mysterious descent of Gandalf into the book depository is accompanied by some kind of cheerful Charleston. Even "Gladiator" is very, very far away in directing.

And so on. It can be seen that the "main lead" is also, in general, undershot. The scary uruk-hais are not scary, they are not real. There are some stupid blotches on my forehead. And when a giant troll fights the Brotherhood in one of the underground caves, the technique did not work at all. It looks no more authentic than the monsters from some "Seventh Journey of Sinbad" half a century ago, where there was an ordinary puppet theater without any computer graphics. And one more thing: the painfully nasty protagonist of the hobbit Frodo. Twenty-year-old Elijah Wood looks more like a girl, cute, with a doll-like face, and you can't replace him in all three episodes.

However, much can be fixed in the sequels of the film adaptation. Add another 100 million to the technique and even change the composition of the whole.
If "The Fellowship of the Ring" is just the beginning, then the culmination may be ahead, it just needs to be unprecedentedly dense in everything: in direction, in effects, sound, editing. Is it just Jackson who can handle the unprecedentedness of anything other than budget development?

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Audio
English: Dolby Atmos
English: Dolby Digital 5.1

Subtitles
English SDH, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Korean, Mandarin (Simplified), Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Thai.