Lord of The Rings: Fellowship of the Ring is the best fucking movie of the year.

Granted, I have not yet seen A Beautiful Mind, The Royal Tenenbaums, or No Man's Land, but unless one of those three movies can somehow guarantee me a lapdance from Angelina Jolie, the coveted Best Fucking Movie of the Year title will stay firmly in the hands of a humble hobbit.

Let it be known that I am certainly not biased in my opinion. I am, indeed, a dork of various qualities (tabletop RPG, computer literacy that goes back to DOS, a propensity to collect the works of "classic" authors -- Douglas Adams, Edgar Allen Poe, et al -- in quasi-leatherbound editions), but I have never been a dork of the fantasy variety. To be perfectly honest, I pretty much loathe the fantasy genre for its unoriginality and bland, juvenile escapism. I tried no less than three times to read The Hobbit and never got past page 50 on any of those three tries.

All the same, Lord of The Rings is the best fucking movie of the year.

The story is comfortably familiar to anyone who's ever played a game of Dungeons & Dragons (what with the Tolkien trilogy being the basis for D&D): young Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) and a group of the Usual Suspects of Fantasy (an elven archer, a blowhard dwarven warrior, a mysterious and scruffy ranger, an arrogant human fighter) are on a quest of the gravest importance. Seems there's this ring made thousands upon thousands of years ago, a ring with the power to unmake the world and cover it in darkness. It is a powerful ring, so intoxicating with its potential that almost any who encounter it may be corrupted by visions of ultimate power. Furthering the problem, the dark lord (one of the more impressive cgi creations I've ever seen) that originally created the ring is alive once again, and you'd better bet he wants his ring back. Should he get the ring, it'll be the end of the world, the moon will be as blood, the seas will boil and rise, cats and dogs will live together, yadda yadda yadda.

The only choice is to unmake the ring by casting it into the fiery pit from which it was forged. A mean feat, considering almost all who come in contact with the ring become corrupted by its power, and since said fiery pit rests squarely in the territory of the resurrected dark lord. One can readily see how such a task would take three books to document.

By Fate's fickle hand, the ring falls into the ownership of Frodo, and with the careful guidance of Gandalf (Ian McKellen, with the right mix of wisdom, authority, and plain likeability), the quintessential Wise Old Wizard, Frodo and his merry fellowship trek their way through caves, dungeons, mines, forests, and mountain tops, while alternately fighting and running from orcs, gigantic demons, tentacled monstrosities, and nine truly impressive, truly freaky shades called Ringwraiths.

Give it up to Peter Jackson, the director of this and the two Lord of The Rings movies to follow. His sense of visual flair was most apparent in his previous film The Frighteners, which while storywise a mediocre film, was a stunning and innovative visual feast. Now with the help of some seriously pumped-up cgi and a fanboy's devotion and love of the story, he delivers us a movie that has not only a fantastic look, but an honest-to-god beating heart. Lord of The Rings is at turns breathtaking, humorous, sad, frightening, and most of all wondrous. This movie will be Jackson's career maker, and rightfully so.

The danger with a movie like Lord of The Rings is that when such a story is handled in anything less than perfect form, it will step over the thin line from wondrous brilliance into eye-rolling idiocy. It takes heart to make a movie like this and do it right, and that is appropriate; the story is itself is about heart.

What Jackson and company bring to us is a movie that, for all its virtuoso technical wizardry, is still about values that modern Hollywood pictures have either forgotten how to tell, or have just plain forgotten. This is a movie about duty, about the bonds of friendship, about purity, and about humility. The story possesses an infectious innocent quality that speaks directly to our soul: Anyone, even the humblest hobbit, can change the fate of the world.