"The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring"

"The Fellowship of the Ring" is soaked around the edges with a melancholy darkness, which is part of what gives it such resonance and depth. (At this point I need to make a special plea to all those cranky souls who have no patience for ren-faire and sword-and-sorcery bullcrap: My brothers and sisters, I feel your pain, but "The Fellowship of the Ring" is too big and too masterly to be scrunched into those puny categories.)

Jackson unfurls the action so that it drifts into graceful peaks and valleys; the picture is a marvel of pacing, built on the premise that the proper flow of tension and suspense is the most powerful special effect of all, not to mention the cheapest. "The Fellowship of the Ring" looks lavish but never wasteful, miraculous given the way everything in Hollywood these days costs big money, and yet nothing looks like it. (Compared with "Fellowship," the gaudy and lifeless "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" looks like a play mounted at a school for rich kids, where no expense was spared in the attempt to cover up clumsy amateurishness.)

Jackson doesn't scrimp on staging, and the images and scenery have a grand, burnished richness. His battle sequences are magnificently plotted, and shot so that every angle of the action is clear. (They're thrilling, but they also invoke the peril of warfare. There's always the sense that people -- in other words, characters you've come to care about -- could die.)

He shows us immense landscapes of snow or forest or rolling greenery that make us feel incredibly small and inescapably human. And his special effects are so seamless, so organic to the scenes in which they appear, that you often spot them, dreamlike, first out of the corner of your eye. (I gasped in disbelief as I watched a tidal wave, conjured by an Elf princess, swiftly but subtly transform into a herd of galloping horses, their heads and manes defined by dancing crystals of water.)

This is moviemaking on a grand scale, which is not to say that it's merely a big, impressive movie. (Any old goat can make one of those.) The crucial distinction is that Jackson's sense of scale is impeccable. The vistas are huge and wondrous, the special effects sparkling: But Jackson also trains the eye on details that, more than anything else, define the movie's rich, dreamy look.

The cloaks worn by Frodo and his gang are clasped with delicate green enamel pins in the shape of an art nouveau leaf. As readers of the Tolkien books know, the clasps will ultimately have a special role. Even so, considering that most of us understand the visual shorthand of movie props and costumes, there's no reason they'd have to be so exquisitely made. As it is, with their tendrils and fragile veins, they look like family heirlooms, and they're valuable grace notes to the look of the movie. Unlike the painstakingly re-created carpets and china patterns of James Cameron's "Titanic," obsessive details that just get swallowed up in the blur of the movie's hubris anyway, these cloak pins are a bit of visual music to go along with the story.

They also help establish its gorgeous pre-Raphaelite look. Rivendell is filled with architectural details (trellises, gazebos) that echo the graceful swoops and swirls of nature -- if Alphonse Mucha were a production designer, he'd be proud to put his name on it. (As it is, production designer Grant Major is the one who deserves the credit.) Cate Blanchett plays Galadriel, a bewitching but foreboding Elf queen, and the movie makes perfect use of the actress's floating carriage and luminescent porcelain skin: Her Galadriel is an enchantress who's floated out of an Edward Burne-Jones painting.

Next page: Opening the camera to the wondrous faces of his performers