23 Years Later, The Lord of the Rings’ Final Line Still Defines the Fantasy Trilogy

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy represents some of the finest blockbuster filmmaking of the 21st century. The director’s vision balanced the epic scale of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy saga with a light, humanist touch (as well as plenty of the gross-out jump scares that Jackson mastered with early films like his Muppets parody Meet the Feebles). In the trilogy, the human element is closely tied with the story of the four hobbits who leave their home in the cozy, provincial Shire to face certain death in exchange for defeating the great evils that haunt Middle Earth. The first film of the trilogy, 2001’s Fellowship of the Ring, sets its opening moments in the Shire, and those scenes become very important the further the characters get from home. As the movies go on, the hobbits face monsters, enter war zones, and find themselves spiritually tormented, leaving the Shire as just a memory.