It is a pattern in my life that I rarely catch the popular movies when everyone, justifying the adjective, has viewed them. I finally got around"The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Rings", mainly because Nikhil would like company in watching the second part when it gets here and so I'd need a crash course in what many people have warned me was too abstruse to follow otherwise, especially as I hadn't read the books. Nikhil usually doesn't watch too many English flicks, but when I learnt that he actually bought the voluminous tomes and read them, I was suitably impressed. The movie had some excellent aspects which I won't go into. It actually didn't seem all that abstruse, there was a basic story thread that I could follow. Perhaps reading the book would've have enriched the experience, but the lack of it most definitely didn't leave me clueless. I may not remember the names though I can go by the faces. I may, however, be nasty and wonder if there wasn't excessive violence! Lots of head-chopping and arm-lopping. But they did have very little gore, which would've reduced the impact.