YMMV / The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Click here for tropes pertaining to the trilogy as a whole.

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Peter Jackson Film

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: "Second Breakfast" is a real thing in some European cultures, including England, which The Shire is based on. In real life, second breakfast is more of a mid-morning snack than a full meal (though given Hobbit culture, for them it probably is a full meal). "Elevenses" is real too, again more of a snack.
• Award Snub: The film lost Best Picture to A Beautiful Mind at the Academy Awards.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Figwit, an unnamed elf played by Bret McKenzie, is probably the epitome of this trope. One scene, no lines, and an entire Wiki article.
• First Installment Wins: Many fans see it as the best of the films, and most faithful to the source material, with fewer deviations and mostly justified omissions.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Bilbo telling Gandalf "I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread" takes on a whole new meaning if you think that making three long films out of The Hobbit was a bad idea.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • That infamous Nazgûl scream now sounds a bit like 4chan's REEEEEEE meme.
  • Galadriel's big speech about what would happen if she took control of the ring, since she's played by Cate Blanchett. Cate stars in Thor: Ragnarok as Hela - a death goddess who is indeed as "terrible as the dawn" and it takes a literal apocalypse to stop her.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • When a depressing melody played after Gandalf's "death" fighting Balrog, the song "The Bridge of Khazad-dum" is used by Youtubers when parodying horrific flashbacks.
  • A short segment of Gandalf laughing◊ is popular on Imgur.
  • Saruman's "So you have chosen death." experienced a surge in usage as a reaction quote in 2017.
• Narm: Gandalf getting spun like a helicopter by Saruman, which is supposed to look horrifying, but it ends up looking more like Gandalf is doing a sick break dancing move.
• Narm Charm: Boromir's anguished rant at no one, punctuated by falling into a pile of leaves. In any other film, utterly ridiculous. But Boromir's Tragic Hero status and Sean Bean's acting sell the hell out of it, and it's a near-Tear Jerker.
• Never Live It Down: Tom Bombadil being cut entirely. Gets ironic especially after so many years later, since he's now more known as "the character Peter Jackson cut", rather than his nearly non-existing role in the story.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Figwit, aka "Frodo Is Great... Who Is That?", a random elf that got a sudden fanbase.
  • Sauron in his physical form in the prologue.
• Signature Line: Gandalf's "YOOOOOOUU! SHAAAALL NOT! PAAAAAAAASS!" is arguably the most remembered and most often quoted line out of the trilogy. Even if he only said it a couple times in one scene in the movie.
• Signature Scene: The "Gandalf vs. Balrog" scene. Just typing "lotr" into the Youtube search has that scene as one of the top answers.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Since the first act is spent entirely on exposition about the plot and contextualization about that world (Middle-Earth), it takes 50 minutes for Frodo and his friends to leave the Shire on their mission to destroy the Ring (in the extended cut).
• Special Effect Failure: These start to pop up to the trained eye after repeated viewings:
  • When Aragorn and Frodo are on the Collapsing Stairs of Khazad-Dum, it is...rather obvious that they are in front of a green screen, with a fan blowing at their hair. (Understandably, since they couldn't possibly be filmed on a collapsing 500-ton staircase...) This was a very rare case of a failure that was quite easily visible on first viewing.
  • Not so much "special effects failure" as much as "director didn't catch it when filming" but in the scene where Aragorn runs to the dying Boromir (It's the next wide shot after he kills Lurtz, specifically) pay attention to the Uruk-Hai corpses. One of the extras raises his head to look around after Viggo Mortensen moves past him.
  • When the Fellowship is running from the Orc army in Moria, there is a scene just after their escape from Balin's Mausoleum where the tiny, running figures are clearly CGI characters rather than the actors themselves. If you look at them, rather than the Orcs gathering around them, you can see their legs aren't bending as they run, and their heads are swivelling evenly, as if they were all made of Lego.
  • While Boromir is tempted by the Ring on the slopes of Caradhras (in an on-location shoot not a green screen one), you can clearly see that Merry and Pippin have been replaced by their scale doubles, wearing very fake looking rubber masks.

2002 Video Game

• Awesome Music: The score of the PC and console versions. It perfectly captures the atmosphere and tone of the novel, ranging from the peaceful and calm Shire music to the dark, ominous Black Rider theme. Sadly, it is also Brad Spear's only known credit as a video game composer, other than the cancelled sequel The Treason of Isengard.
• Breather Level: The Prancing Pony stage of the Bree level, and the entirety of the Rivendell and Lothlorien levels (all of which come after levels that require you to fight through an entire gauntlet of enemies, along with at least one boss battle) have no combat, so Frodo can relax and talk with the other characters at his own pace before advancing through the story.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Tom Bombadil became this thanks to the fact the game has him from the book.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Andúril, Aragorn's sword, is depicted as glowing red during the day and blue at night, much like a certain enchanted sword (Dawnfang/Duskfang) from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
  • The fight in Balin's Tomb is abruptly skipped via Battle Discretion Shot in this game. Conveniently, EA's The Two Towers released shortly afterwards has an entire level based around it. And as a strange coincidence, Fellowship of the Ring ends with Aragorn and Frodo atop Amon Hen, with the latter being ordered to escape after the Winged Nazgul is defeated. The Amon Hen level in The Two Towers practically continues right where the Fellowship of the Ring game left off (despite being made by a different company), since it begins with Aragorn and Frodo atop Amon Hen, and Aragorn orders Frodo to escape while he and the others hold off the Uruk-hai.
• Obvious Beta: The Game Boy Advance version, due to how severely rushed it was, is riddled with bugs and glitches. In addition to the examples listed under Game-Breaking Bug, there are glitches that causes items to duplicate upon saving and re-loading a game after dropping them, and even the music takes almost a minute to start playing or change tracks when entering another area.
• That One Boss: The Balrog is an exceptionally difficult boss battle in the console and PC versions, especially since it constantly spams Gandalf with fireballs that will knock him down if they come into contact with him.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: While not as severe for the console and PC versions, the GBA version is hit very, very hard by this trope due being left in an almost incomplete state upon release, and being riddled with innumerable bugs and glitches.