It's four thirty in the morning and I just got home from seeing "Lord of the Rings". I'm not going to talk about details of the movie, but about how it affected me, because this is something quite new to me.

I don't think this is something foreign audiences will understand. I hardly know how to say it myself. All I know is that Peter Jackson has done something entirely remarkable. When I was nine, I read the trilogy for the first time, and J.R.R. Tolkein gave me a new world inside my mind. Tonight I saw that world, and -- how can I describe the wonder of this?! -- it was the REAL world. It was my OWN world, my own country.

The mountains, the rivers, the cliffs, the forests, the fields -- every rock and every tree said "this is here, this is real, and you know it because you live in it." Peter Jackson didn't make New Zealand's landscape seem different by adding elves and hobbits and magical fantasy sets. He made it more itself than I've ever seen it, and it moved me to tears.

I can't believe I was worried that familiarity with the locations would take away the magic of this movie. I was so afraid I'd sit there thinking "Oh right, it's just the Canterbury Plains with a digital castle pasted in." Well, I didn't. I sat there enraptured for three hours, watching reality blend into fantasy so seamlessly and with such visual force I felt that the land itself was a character in this movie. The backdrops, the sweeping mountain vistas or just the moss on the trees -- the whole soul and personality of my New Zealand was in every scene.

So yes, the magic is there, and familiarity only makes it shine brighter. But I also feared the other extreme: that the movie would *succeed* in its portrayal of Middle-Earth so well that people would only be able to see the real locations as "the place where that scene in LotR came from." And yet, somehow, superimposing Middle-Earth onto a known landscape doesn't take anything away from the country that was already in our minds. Next winter I can go back to walk in the snows of Caradhras without having lost anything of the Mt Ngaruahoe I already knew. Peter Jackson and his team have done the impossible: overlaid a dream world on our everyday one, to the glory of both. Thank you, more than you'll ever know.