'Fellowship of the Ring' at 20: The film that revitalised and ruined Hollywood

Gandalf takes on Balrog in Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.

When I first saw The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring with my dad at a Johannesburg multiplex one afternoon in that idle dead zone between Christmas and New Year, not everyone in the audience was left as rapt as they might now claim to have been. 

“That’s it?” asked a bewildered punter in front of us, to nobody and everybody in general, as the credits rolled to the droning vocal windchimes of Enya.