AS with Captain Corelli's Mandolin, anyone producing a film version of Lord of the Rings is going to have a difficult time satisfying fans of the book.

And any interest in Louis De Berniere's book can be multiplied by 50 to get an idea of the weight of expectation surrounding the release of The Fellowship of the Ring (12), the first of three installments of the Tolkein trilogy.

After all, Ring fans have been waiting 65 years for film technology to progress sufficiently enough to bring their favourite story to life.

Ironically, it is this technology that almost mars a wonderful piece of filmmaking by director Peter Jackson.

For anyone who thinks JRR Tolkein was the chap who wrote the book about Fly Fishing in the Yellow Pages adverts, The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy of books that occur 60 years after the events of the author's The Hobbit.

A hobbit, named Frodo Baggins, (played by Elijah Wood) nephew of the famed Bilbo Baggins (played Ian Holm), is entrusted with a mysterious ring.

This ring though is no mere trinket, but a sacred symbol crafted by a force of pure evil.

Now the evil, which has lain dormant for centuries, wants the ring back .

If this happens the world is doomed and so Wood is tasked with keeping the ring out of harm's way by the wizard Gandalf (played by Ian McKellen).

Eventually the task is changed and Wood is sent to take the ring back to the volcanic fires where it was first forged to destroy it forever.

In the best traditions of these stories, Wood finds help in the form of a band of undesirables including a few hobbits from home, including his best pal Sam (Sean Astin), Gandalf, a sophisticated elf (Orlando Bloom), a mean dwarf (John Rhys-Davis), and a couple of tough humans, including one who is a king in exile (Viggo Mortensen).

They journey in the constant shadow of the evil that stalks them and it is that air of menace that cranks up the tension throughout. A series of eye-popping backdrops (some computer-generated, some real) go almost unnoticed because of the unbearable sense of something very bad being about to happen.

Along the way the group encounters several villains sent by the evil Sauron, a band of grotesque creatures vying to recover the ring. Also along the way they find help from a variety of good guys, including Hugo Weaving, Liv Tyler, and Cate Blanchett.

This is an epic film in every sense. Wood is suitably naive as the hapless hobbit plunged into a showdown between good and evil.

There are spectacular sequences involving monsters and sensational battle scenes featuring a cast of thousands.

It has been a long wait, and at three hours in duration it is almost a feat of endurance to watch it, but it is worth it.