91% rotten tomatoes, 9/10 on IMDb, 92 on Metacritic, people love the first Lord of the Rings movie. Its quotable lines, still fairly decent CGI, and breathtaking landscapes all come together to form a beloved movie. But when we strip the story of its visual prowess, while it’s left with still a great story overall, it struggles in many areas that could easily be overlooked in the film adaptation.
Written by J.R.R. Tolkien and published in 1954, the first novel alone has sold over 140 million copies across its various different versions released, with the film versions coming out in the mid-2000s. The story follows the character Frodo Baggins as he tries to take an evil ring to the one place it can be destroyed. With the help of the wizard Gandalf and close friend Sam, along with 6 other companions, he will journey across the entire continent of Middle Earth to destroy this ring before it can corrupt Frodo and fall into the enemy's hands.
I started my lord of the rings trip by watching both the original film adaptations and their extended versions, and I’m unsure if that had any sort of effect on my opinion, but I definitely felt that the books did an excellent job as fleshing out the world of Middle Earth in great detail. The world was intriguing and the entire concept of each group of people, while slightly tiresome today, feels somewhat more original than other areas such as Dungeons and Dragons. One of this book’s biggest strengths though is how well it can flesh out its world and characters, but unfortunately one could say they do it a bit too well. J.R.R. Tolkien clearly wanted to develop every single character and flesh out every locale he could, but that, unfortunately, led to the book being egregiously long. Now that may not be a huge surprise for a fantasy book, but when reading, I found myself constantly wanting to skip entire sets of pages that felt like they had no point being in the book. It can quickly become distracting when the beginning of the adventure literally takes over a decade to get started after the objective has been introduced.
While the book does an amazing job with its characters and overall plot, Tolkien clearly struggled to contain everything he wanted to into a reasonable length, which was a huge detriment to at least my enjoyment. Great book for those that have the time and patience, but if you wanted something slightly shorter, I’m sorry to say I would not recommend this book to you.
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