Wow, this is a seriously loaded question! I think I’ve mentioned on this blog before that being a filmmaker is one of the only three things I ever really wanted to do in my life. I bring it up now just to explain how passionately invested I get in movies.
Because of that, it would be incredibly difficult for me to remove certain movies from my memory. For instance, as much as I would relish the opportunity to see the original Star Wars again for the first time, it had such a profound impact upon my life that it’s fair to say I would be a radically different person today if I had never seen it.
I have to admit I’m a big fan of those videos where people watch a movie or listen to an iconic song for the first time and film their reaction to it. In fact, I think I remember commenting one time on a video like that: “I would love to be able to hear ‘One’ by Metallica again for the first time, just to experience all of those sensations again.”
So, if I had to choose one movie—one that I truly loved, one where I want to re-experience the sensation, the feelings, and the emotions of seeing it for the very first time, and yet one that wouldn’t necessarily alter me as a person—I would probably have to choose The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
I know I’ve discussed this movie a few times in other posts. But I don’t know how else to articulate the feelings I got watching it for the first time other than to say: Not since the original Star Wars had I truly watched a movie and felt like I was looking into another world.
Setting the Bar
I was never a big Tolkien fan, even though he left an indelible mark upon the science fiction and fantasy genres. Hell, I’ve never even read The Hobbit, let alone The Lord of the Rings. But even as a hardcore nerd like myself, I knew that J.R.R. Tolkien’s impact on the fantasy genre and world literature in general was undeniable. I remember first hearing that Peter Jackson was going to make a Lord of the Rings trilogy: three parts of the book, three separate movies. Live action. I remember hearing that he wasn’t going to use little people to play the hobbits and dwarfs; he was going to do it all through trick photography.
And I still remember the first time I saw the trailer for The Fellowship of the Ring. There’s that one scene where the nine members of the Fellowship walk from the left-hand side of the screen to the right through the mountains, and you see them all one by one. This was the audience’s first look at the main characters. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This looked about as authentic as any movie set in a fictional world could be.
Holy shit, this guy is setting the bar, I remember thinking to myself.
As someone who always wanted to make movies, the technical execution blew my mind. The armor looked heavy and authentic. The sets felt completely “lived-in.” I later learned that Jackson and his crew actually prepared the Shire location in New Zealand a full year before principal photography even began, just to give the relocated landscaping time to settle naturally. They wanted it to look like people had genuinely lived there for hundreds of years. Sure, there was CGI and green-screen, but the reliance on practical effects where possible gave it a tangible weight.
“No! It Cannot End This Way!”
And then I finally saw the movie. I will never forgive myself for not seeing it in a theater and instead waiting until it was released on DVD in 2002 to watch it at home. My wife and I watched it together in our living room. She was just as hooked on the film as I was, though she didn’t quite make the heavy Star Wars comparisons that were running through my head.
I knew the movie was three hours long. I knew that it was only the first part of a trilogy, and I knew that we weren’t going to get a definitive ending. But still, after three hours, seeing Frodo and Sam make their way alone toward Mordor with the rest of the fellowship broken behind them, I remember screaming at my TV, “No! It cannot end this way!”
Because of the theatrical release schedule, The Two Towers was actually getting ready to drop in theaters just a few months after we got our hands on that first DVD. But even that remaining wait felt interminably long.
Devouring Middle-earth
Short of actually reading the novels themselves, I remember devouring everything Middle-earth-related that I could. I wanted to learn more about how the movies were made. I wanted to learn about what ended up on the cutting room floor from the novel. I even read and watched biographies on J.R.R. Tolkien.
I read about how Tolkien served in World War I. Seeing the destruction of nature at the hands of industrialization, and the technological breakthroughs that rewrote the rules of modern warfare, served as major influences on his writing. He was also a linguist who developed the Elvish language. And since he had built this language, he decided to take some of the things he experienced in the war and write The Lord of the Rings.
The point being that there are some heavy-handed messages in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I don’t think any of this was stuff that I heard for the first time and randomly altered my thinking, but if anything, The Lord of the Rings solidified a lot of my already firmly entrenched worldviews.
But I would love to have that feeling again. That feeling of watching Sam and Frodo staring off toward Mordor and Mount Doom. That feeling of dread after three hours, knowing that I had been completely engulfed in the world of Middle-earth, and now had to leave it again.
Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Whether I’m closing in on 1,000 consecutive days of blogging or reflecting on the decade of work that brought me here, the mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.
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The article “The Sensation of Being Completely Engulfed” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob
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