Spring [1] and I were invited to the opening of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [2] (and this has the highest rating of a film I've ever seen over at the IMDB [3]) at a relatively obscure theater just past noon on opening day by a friend of Spring's, Russ.
The movie is incredible. The special effects were incredible and the computer generated effects were not at all annoying (except for the few shots of Gollum). They did an incredible job of resizing the actors (John Rhys-Davies [4] is not a small man yet plays Gimli the Dwarf). The landscapes were more impressive and beautiful than those in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace [5] (the landscapes where one of three things that kept me watching that movie—the other two being Natalie Portman [6] and the third being the fight sequence between Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon and Darth Maul). It was a beautiful movie.
I could however, do without the introduction at the beginning of the movie since the material there is covered several times through the rest of the film, but that's me. Otherwise, I have no complaints about the film other than I have to wait another year for the next installment. [7]
[2] http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120737
[4] http://us.imdb.com/Name?Rhys-Davies,+John
[5] http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120915