A jaded 11-year-old watches New Zealand’s defining film for the first time.

Several sessions into a Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring screening that would take many more to complete, my son started putting on an accent. In an actually pretty good approximation of Pippin’s Scottish brogue, he started asking me, “What’s for breakfast?” He’d follow that with a higher-pitched, and still pretty good: “But what about second breakfast?”

This usually happened around lunchtime. My son is nearly 12 and he should be making his own morning meals by now. When I refuse to feed him and point him in the direction of the pantry, he responds with a hunger-strike, and by late morning can be found comatose on the couch, complaining of fatigue, pretending to be Pippin. The only way to resuscitate him is with a large plate of carbs.

He was hungry, for sure. But his accent indicated something else, a sign that he might finally have started to enjoy the movie. For weeks, he’d refused to watch The Lord of the Rings with me, ignoring my requests in favour of lengthy sessions of his favourite video game, the colourful car racer Forza Horizon 5, with his friends.

His reluctance confused me. My son has already passed through many phases typical of boyhood: Lego, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and, lately, jaded eye rolls at his dad’s jokes. Lord of the Rings seems like an obvious follow-up, but first I had to convince him. The promise of hobbits, orcs, goblins and cave trolls did nothing to entice him. He’s like his dad: robots are his thing.

Finally, I convinced him to sit through the first hour. He soon had questions. Just seconds into the film, before we meet any hobbits, before Gandalf waves his magic staff, before there’s time for any second breakfasts, my son turned his head and asked: “How come there’s only one ring but it’s called Lord of the Rings?”

As an admitted fan of the film whose day job involves the process of putting words together in a grammatically correct way, I should have been able to answer that question. I couldn’t. Instead, I passed him a bowl of popcorn and told him to concentrate. I didn’t hear a peep out of him until an hour later when we had to turn it off.

I asked him what he thought of what he’d seen so far. He replied: “It’s fine, whatever, Dad.”

That first hour is The Lord of the Rings’ most boring hour. Hobbits dancing around the shire underneath the glow of fireworks did nothing to persuade my son that this movie, one that Aotearoa has based its identity on for the better part of 20 years, was any good.

I asked him if he wanted to continue. “Sure,” he replied. But it wasn’t the same kind of “sure” he delivers enthusiastically about video games, or ice cream. It was half-hearted, insincere, the kind of “sure” he gives his dad these days to shut him up.

After much pleading, and many plate loads of pasta, he sat through the much-better second hour. With more battle scenes, it seemed to connect, especially when the cave troll showed up. I asked him if he was enjoying our bitsy watch of Lord of the Rings. “Yeeeeah,” he responded warily, wondering if I was writing his comments down again (I was). “It’s pretty good. It’s cool that it’s a New Zealand film.”

It took us several more sessions to finish Jackson’s tome. As the closing credits rolled, I asked my son if he was keen to watch The Two Towers next. Without missing a beat, he rolled his eyes and replied: “We haven’t even finished the first one, Dad. There’s 28 minutes of credits to go.”

We’re talking about elves, dwarves, cave trolls and sneaky little hobbitses for an entire week. Read the rest of our dedicated Lord of the Rings 20th anniversary coverage here.

The Lord of the Rings’ finest moment is an action sequence involving a dying Frodo and some magical movie-making.

We’re talking about elves, dwarves, cave trolls and sneaky little hobbitses for an entire week. Read the rest of our dedicated Lord of the Rings 20th anniversary coverage here.

Frodo Baggins shivers and gasps on the ground, his stab wounds being tended to by his sidekick and possible love interest Samwise Gamgee. Aragorn, Merry and Pippin worry at each other in inconsistent accents. Aragorn takes out his knife to cut a herb, and then a long curved blade is put against his throat.

A silky alto chuckles. “What’s this? A ranger, caught off his guard?”

The Fellowship of the Ring has a lot of memorable moments. Gandalf refusing to let a Balrog pass, Galadriel anti-yassifying herself after seeing the ring, the whole Boromir pin-cushion scene, Legolas awakening the sexualities of people across the gender spectrum (that one’s less a moment, more a state of being).

But one moment that doesn’t get its due is “Flight to the Ford”, an action sequence involving Arwen, a character not so much beefed up by Peter Jackson’s adaptation as she is ‘roided up, rushing Frodo to Rivendell after he has been stabbed by a Ringwraith/Nazgul.

I have watched this scene, no joke, hundreds of times. It is chapter 17 on the DVD menu (23 on the extended edition) and on pretty much every Air New Zealand flight that has screens. It appears in my YouTube recommendations far too often, and if I leave the app to play by itself, it will show up sooner rather than later. I am a connoisseur, and this scene is my Michelin-starred restaurant.

Flight to the Ford is the first time The Lord of the Rings really, truly lifts off after having circled the runway for close to an hour. The camera swings wide, Howard Shore’s fantastic score justifies the size of his orchestra, and the SFX finally get a spotlight after that ridiculous, bonkers prologue. Flight to the Ford is Peter Jackson nudging us and going, “Don’t worry. I know this is an epic.”

It also really shouldn’t work.

Let’s strip it down: Flight to the Ford is functionally a car chase, just with horses. What is a horse if not a regal, smelly, spiteful car? Just like any action scene from The Fast & the Furious franchise, it involves our heroes being chased on vehicles – albeit breathing, hoofed ones – from one point to another, with the threat of death being a stumble or a wrong turn away. It’s very, very high stakes.

It also fails at pretty much everything a good car chase should be. There’s no sense of geography, pr speed, or a clear narrative journey beyond “they get chased and end up somewhere at some stage”. I’m going to ask you to watch the scene for me now if you’ve got five minutes spare, and don’t have every frame of it burned on the back of your eyelids like I do. It’s the video above. I’ll wait for you, don’t worry.

Done? Great. Isn’t it awesome? Now, ask yourself a few questions.

Why do they go from the dead of night to high noon, and how far into their journey do we start the chase? Furthermore, where the hell do the Ringwraiths/Nazguls come from and where the hell are they placed at any point in time? 

How fast are these horses going, considering that the average speed of a thoroughbred horse in the real world is 43kph? Can you tell how far any of the characters (or horses) have moved from the preceding shot?

And do you really care because if it feels this fantastic to watch, why would any of the above matter a single bit?

Like eating meat and smoking cigarettes, Flight to the Ford is most enjoyable if you don’t ask any questions. Let it take you on a ride from that haunting shot of the white horse starting up a canter in the forest, right through to Liv Tyler absolutely nailing (with some post-production audio assistance) the line reading of “If you want him, come and claim him!”. Also water horses drowning evil horses.

There’s the fact that too that if you zoom out just a little, Flight to the Ford just works from a screenwriting point of view. It sets up the elves as a different and (supposedly) superior race to the hobbits – they can stand up to the Ringwraiths, and have both magic and access to hair straighteners. And then the audience sees all of that subverted over the next eight hours. The elves might save a hobbit one time, but the hobbits are the ones who have the determination to actually save the world.

Beyond that, it’s a savvy way for Peter Jackson to remind us that this isn’t going to be a page-by-page, word-by-word adaptation of Tolkien’s 1,000-page series. The moment that a woman who looked suspiciously like Steven Tyler rode out of the light, speaking Elvish in a gorgeous alto, any Lord of the Rings diehard knew Jackson was doing his own thing. While I can’t speak for the consistency of quality of that “thing” for the other 1027 minutes of his two trilogies, these five minutes are pretty much perfect.

We’re talking about elves, dwarves, cave trolls and sneaky little hobbitses for an entire week. Read the rest of our dedicated Lord of the Rings 20th anniversary coverage here.