Finally…

I got to see The Fellowship of the Ring (NOT “The Lord of the Rings” as most people call it — it’s only the first of three movies) on Saturday. It was good. I don’t mean that as a slam, though. I grew up on Tolkien and his various knockoffs. Junior high and most of high school was consumed by SF and F reading and the playing of D&D. Tolkien’s world is the world I grew up in. I have no idea how many times I’ve re-read that trilogy. Fifteen? Twenty? At least twenty.

The movie was good, though. There were a few bits of FX cheesiness but even more FX spectacle (esp. the Balrog). The casting was generally excellent (Ian McKellen, Hugo Weaving, and the guy who played Boromir whose name escapes me at the moment). The changes to the storyline were inoffensive to me (esp. the dropping of Tom Bombadil, a section of Fellowship that I usually skip anyway, hey dill a dillo!). Though I didn’t expect it, I liked the dirty, grungy violence of it all. In many ways the movie was much more realistic than how the books unfolded in my imagination. Not at all surprising if you know how my brain works.

The thing that bothered me about the movie is that my friend Daniel wasn’t watching it with me. Daniel was my best friend growing up, from junior high through college, though we had grown apart after that. We grew up together in Tolkien’s world. Playing D&D gave Daniel a chance to be the hero he didn’t think he was in real-life, which always made me a little sad. He never realized how much people thought of him. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years when he died at the age of 29 of a heart attack in 1998. I still dream about him nearly every night, and losing him still feels like a big sucking chest wound.

The whole three hours or so of the movie, I couldn’t quit wishing that he were watching it with me and wondering what he would have thought about it.