Now, I admit that I feel a twinge of excitement whenever an auteur is given a big corporate check and encouraged to wreak unruly havoc on the big screen. I felt it when Tim Burton made Mars Attacks!, an outsider’s ode to misanthropy on a reckless scale, and when David Fincher somehow convinced Fox to bankroll Fight Club, a glorious complication of a movie that involved terrorism, underground boxing, and homosexual panic. But The Lord of the Rings is different. Where Burton and Fincher set out to up-end Hollywood tradition, Peter Jackson wants to reinforce it. Still intoxicated on the vapors of monster movies, zombie epics, and whatever schlock blockbusters have fed his movie-mad sensibility, Jackson is looking to leverage his unbridled energy to create the definitive fantasy epic.

Under the Wingnut banner, Jackson created six feature films that forged new paths in tastelessness and paid homage to everything from the films of Ed Wood to The Muppet Show. It’s hard to imagine how entertaining and inventive the no-budget alien-invasion comedy Bad Taste, just out on a new DVD from genre specialist Anchor Bay Entertainment, could possibly be without seeing it for yourself. Likewise, it’s hard to express the sheer squalor inhabited by his very black muppets-from-hell comedy Meet the Feebles. Probably Jackson’s worst film, Feebles is still unique and astonishing. He followed it up with Braindead, a horror-comedy masterpiece that made Sam Raimi look old and sad and held the first indications of genius.

Next up, in 1994, was Heavenly Creatures. Shamefully unavailable on DVD in the U.S. (and released in Canada only in an unwatchable pan-and-scan version), Heavenly Creatures launched the career of Kate Winslet and gave Jackson an art-house reputation that belied his origins in the world of heroin-addicted puppets and flatulating zombies. He squandered all that credibility with The Frighteners, a lowbrow but likable yarn that he shot for producer Robert Zemeckis. The Frighteners did what it had to do—it established Jackson’s New Zealand-based special-effects facility, WETA, as a global powerhouse that could make effects-laden films at a fraction of what they would cost in southern California. (Jackson also has an FX credit in Zemeckis’ Contact.) He followed that Hollywood debut with Forgotten Silver, an utterly charming "documentary" that purports to tell the story of troubled silent-film director Colin McKenzie, whose advances in cinematic technique Jackson playfully reclaims for New Zealand.

After an abortive fling with a King Kong remake for Universal, Jackson settled on an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings at Miramax, then moved the project to New Line when the Weinsteins balked at his plan to make two feature films. At New Line, Jackson had the corporate blessing to make three pictures simultaneously, budgeted at a total of $270 million. It’s fortunate that he got the green light when he did—while the film was in production, New Line parent Warner Bros. became part of AOL Time Warner, a new conglomerate that wasted no time in cutting costs and heads at its plucky filmmaking subsidiary. Were Jackson shopping for a studio today, it’s unlikely he’d be able to find one.

God bless New Line. The first of the three The Lord of the Rings films is a marvel. Jackson’s exuberance is evident in nearly every frame. He invests the film with a kind of gravity that's vanished from Hollywood filmmaking over the past years, eschewing anachronistic wisecracks and knowing nods at the audience and placing his faith in the timelessness of a story well told.

This particular story rests upon the shoulders of a hobbit—that is to say, a diminutive, hairy-footed cave dweller—played by Elijah Wood. It's impossible to tell from this film, really only the first third of a longer story, how well Wood fills out the role. He begins the film with an idyllic expression set on his face, which slowly transforms until he looks in almost every shot as though he's about to cry. As Frodo Baggins, Wood has good reason to look that way. He's been entrusted with the task of bearing a mysterious and powerful ring from its unlikely hiding place in his hometown of Hobbiton all the way to the dark country of Mordor, where he must cast the thing back into the fires of Mount Doom, in which it was forged lo, those many years ago ...

Yes, it sounds kind of silly on the page. I’ve read the books, but it was long ago, and I certainly have no truck with those rabid Tolkienistas who litter online discussion groups with posts bitching about the deletion of Tom Bombadil or the expansion of Arwen's character or the casting of not-pretty-enough Cate Blanchett as Galadriel. (Let me say that again, so you understand the depths of folly at which some of these Tolkien fans operate: one of them actually complained that Cate Blanchett was not good-looking enough. To play an elf.) But in a densely packed prologue with voiceover by Blanchett, Jackson compresses thousands of years of Middle Earth history into a single breathtaking overture. Before the title of the film proper has even hit the screen, Jackson has shown us an epic battle involving thousands of soldiers, introduced several major characters, and even hinted at the appearance of big-eyed, hunched-over Gollum, one of the novel's most famous creations. I find it hard to believe that anyone with even a glancing familiarity with the source material would lack gooseflesh upon hearing the voice of Gollum holding the ring in his hand and gushing over it: "Precioussssss."

Gollum is voiced by a fellow named Andy Serkis. How Jackson settled on this particular actor's perfect, pathetic rasp is frankly beyond me. It's just one of a multitude of very difficult tasks that The Lord of the Rings gets exactly right. It's the details that make the movie work—that sell the fantastic experience as something that could have taken place in the world you and I habit—and Jackson is nothing if not a stickler for the details. Notice how, when you see a close-up of somebody's palm, the ridges in their skin are full of dirt. The level of detail that went into the makeup for each of hundreds of orcs (essentially the footsoldiers of evil) is just mind-boggling. The crew even went on location to Frodo’s home shire of Hobbiton to plant foliage a year in advance, in order to give the setting a lived-in look that can’t be faked. And it’s not just the fantasy elements that gets the treatment here. Jackson seems to be in love with the faces of each of his performers, photographing them in extreme, screen-filling close-up. That the cast includes newcomers alongside such stalwarts as Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee is a blessing; Jackson could hardly pay them any more tribute than he does here, where their every expression seems to convey magnificent depth and beauty. (For his own part, McKellen brings astonishing conviction to the part of Gandalf, and Lee brings all his force-of-nature genre history to bear on the role of Saruman.)

If anything threatens to ruin the film, it's Jackson's dogged fidelity to the source material itself. The Lord of the Rings is an extended piece of work, so lengthy that its original publisher insisted in breaking it into three parts, against the author's wishes. Even at three hours in length, Jackson's film has the hurried gait (and continuity errors) of a movie that's been edited within an inch of its life, with bits and pieces painstakingly trimmed out to keep the running time down. I complained upon first seeing it that one of Jackson's primary limitations was his reluctance to spend much time with any particular scene or setting, never offering up the kind of grand imagery that would really sell a sense of place. On repeated viewings, I'm convinced that expedience, rather than an insistence on continuous forward motion, was probably to blame.

And in fact, there is a single scene of such amazing grace and beauty that I wonder if it's the only one that escaped intact from a brutal cutting process. In the final third of the film, Frodo and the rest of the fellowship row small boats down a river and to a passage flanked by two massive statues. The figures depicted have some kind of awesome significance in the world of Middle Earth, which Jackson conveys efficiently through one character’s understated awe. Only in this sequence, featuring majestic special-effects work, does the audience get the time to breathe deeply and drink in the elegant surroundings. (A friend says that his favorite shot in the entire movie is the one showing the back of the statues’ heads, after our heroes have passed. It’s a sense for that kind of beauty that helps make The Lord of the Rings so effective.) Of course, the scene is tinged with melancholy, as the awe-struck characters face not just the statues, but also potential world-ending events.

Again we come back to the seriousness of this endeavor, which is key to its power. In a way, The Lord of the Rings has been trumped over many years by its imitators. The existence of movies like Star Wars, which took great inspiration from Tolkien's stories, and of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, which lifted shamelessly from The Lord of the Rings in great chunks, have sapped much of the novelty that the story once had. But Jackson presses forward, as though nothing in the world of cinema could be of much greater import than this particular telling of this particular story. Wear and tear begins to show in the demeanor of the characters. Real weariness and fear creep across their faces. And when one of the fellowship falls, the characters pause in their grief and the film itself grieves with them. It's an illogically uncommon gesture in contemporary Hollywood cinema, which pays lip service to the idea of mourning but rarely stops to portray such a thing. Here, it hits you like a hammer.

I’ve seen the movie three times with paying audiences, at midnight shows and matinees, and they’ve reacted the same way each time—mostly rapt silence, punctuated by cheers and gasps at exactly the right moments, and capped with a smattering of respectful applause as the credits roll. To his list of accomplishments, Jackson can now add the demonstrated ability to have a mass audience eating out of the palm of his hand. (This particular hobbit’s journey has surely come to fruition!) And the greatest gift for viewers is the promise that just around the corner are two more films that promise to be equally rich and enthralling. It may sound unforgivably hokey for a critic to say such a thing, but The Lord of the Rings is nearly singlehanded assurance that it’s a great time to be a movie fan. At the very least, it provided a terrific climax to an uncommonly rich year for moviegoing.