<em>The Atlantic </em>Daily: This Is Heat Season, Not Summer

This week’s winner is Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (streaming on HBO Max and available to rent elsewhere), which beat out Ocean’s Eleven, The Fast and the Furious, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the franchise category.

I grouped these movies together as a reminder that these titles have been lingering in the cultural ether for two decades; The Fast and the Furious produced nine sequels, Ocean’s Eleven was given sequels and eventually rebooted with an all-female cast, and the worlds of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are still being mined for new material. One might not remember that Jackson’s film was a risky proposition at the time—despite the enduring fame of J. R. R. Tolkien’s book series, a three-part adaptation of Lord of the Rings was perceived as a financial folly by every major studio, before eventually finding support at the upstart company New Line Cinema.

I still think Fellowship of the Ring is the best of Jackson’s trilogy, and so much of its success rides on its incredible opening act. The film begins with an epic prologue that briskly lays out the complex history of Tolkien’s legendarium, and then switches to the pastoral beauty of Hobbiton, using its New Zealand setting to convey an innocent haven in need of protection. Jackson’s greatest challenge was to get audiences unfamiliar with the books up to speed on their massive lore, and then root them in the more personal stakes of Frodo Baggins (played by Elijah Wood).

I love the scale of Fellowship of the Ring—its battle scenes are perfectly staged, its swooping shots of Middle-earth’s rugged mountains and deep caves are awe-inspiring even on a small screen. But the film’s charming practicality attests to Jackson’s history as a purveyor of cheaper genre movies such as Dead Alive and The Frighteners. Fellowship of the Ring has a heavier reliance on makeup and smaller stunt work than the later, more CGI-laden Lord of the Rings sequels. Here, the director can convey so much fear and wonder with just a shot of black-robed men galloping down a country road. This film launched a multibillion-dollar franchise, and encouraged studios to take bigger risks on more niche properties (including comic books), but some of its best tricks are its simplest ones.