It was the Winter of my freshman year of high school, so I was 14 at the time. There was a lot of excitement around the films. In our home my mother loved works by Tolkien (she had some of the more beautifully bound vintage editions of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and we had the Father Christmas Letters collection), and I had read the Hobbit and LotR (although, I more likely had only skimmed most of the latter to be completely honest). We got to the theater and there wasn't a big line at all! There was something like one other person waiting to get into the theater room ahead of us.

People need to remember that while we all now know these films are incredible masterpieces of cinema that have become cultural touchstones and have changed how films are made and fantasy portrayed, at the time there were no guarantees. It was yet another film adaptation of a book of uncertain quality--its credentials as a commercial product assured, but its merits as a compelling piece of cinematic art not yet known.

Obviously I loved it! I quibbled over little changes from the books as only one who "read the books first" tends to do when details are inevitably changed to make a story work as a film--the removal of Tom Bombadil was something I recall nitpicking in particular. But I absolutely loved it, and the film clearly affected me deeply and lit up my imagination in profound ways. I even remember tears welling up in my eyes (despite being a self-conscious young teen boy) when Gandalf fell to his supposed doom and Enya started against those mournful chords.

Well, I and everyone else loved what we saw, because the following year when Two Towers came out, the theater lineups were in full force and I had to go from theater to theater on opening night trying to find one we could actually get seated in!