Fellowship 3 - Let Fly
Minute three and we're still in setup mode, but once again it's brevity that comes to the rescue. We're doing two things at once here: one, the rapid flow of "rings exist" → "Sauron sucks" → "elves beat Sauron" gives us everything we need to understand what's going on without drowning us in meaningless trivia. Today's Hollywood would spend the first half of this movie on meaningless lore-dropping and cameos, but the discipline on display here is truly legendary.
Second, we're about to spend a solid half-hour watching hobbits set up birthday decorations, so we need a little action juice to keep us going. Bilbo's party isn't quite Godfather-bad1, but you can't go straight from a history lesson into a pastoral landscape without putting half the room to sleep. A quick, shiny battle scene with an actor2 who clearly appears later in the film is exactly enough of a hook to keep us going, without it feeling like a betrayal when we don't see another sword for an hour.
It's wild to me how the world's greatest mafia movie starts with two scenes of actual character work and then burns forty straight minutes on a backyard wedding and Tom's sidequest.↩
It took all my strength to not turn this post into a Hugo Weaving thirst essay, so I'll just say this: dude looks *good*.↩