The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: A Near-Perfect Classic That Sold Frodo Short

Some films are “good,” some are “classics” — and for me The Lord of the Rings trilogy sits a shelf above both: a classic among classics. If I had to put numbers on it, all three films land within touching distance of a perfect score. I don’t say that lightly, because a near-perfect score carries an obligation: it means that if a rerelease opened tomorrow, I would buy a ticket and sit through nearly twelve hours of it all over again, gladly. This trilogy clears that bar.

Middle-earth has weight on the big screen. That is not something “great effects” can explain away — you simply believe the Shire exists, that Rohan and Gondor exist, that dust rises from the ground those armies march across. More than two decades on, fantasy epics have come and gone, and the one that still makes me want to walk back into a cinema is this one.

But “near-perfect” implies something missing, and my one regret has a name: Frodo.

It isn’t really the performance — it’s what the films chose to do with the character. For most of the trilogy, Frodo is melancholy: crushed by the Ring, dragged forward by fate, his eyes a little emptier with every hour. All of that is right; the Ring should be heavy. But where is his courage? This is someone who volunteers to carry doom on a chain around his neck, and keeps walking while knowing he probably will not make it home. That kind of bravery deserves to be seen, not merely implied by the fact that he never quits. Nearly all of the visible courage in these films goes to Sam — and Sam earns every frame of it — but the hero’s own share gets buried under all that sorrow. Courage was never the absence of fear; it is being terrified and walking anyway. Frodo does exactly that for three films, and the films rarely let us feel it.

Still, if any movie ever earned the phrase “flaws and all,” it is this one. Everything else is simply superb — so superb that every time I try to hold this one complaint against it, I find myself wanting to watch the whole thing again.