The holiday season just past was a time of magic and wizards in movie theaters around the globe.

Hollywood gave us Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to munch on with our Thanksgiving turkey and stuffed our Christmas stocking with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Sept. 11 attacks and the follow-up U.S. military action have created a climate in which tales of fantasy about good and evil seem to have special relevance. The Fellowship of the Ring, based on the first of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy of novels, dramatizes this subject with a moral precision lacking in Harry Potter because Ring's creators understand the nature of evil.

Director Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures) and coscreenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens achieve this by remaining faithful to the book in two important ways. First, they have fashioned a majestic epic that captures the transcendent dimensions of the conflict.

Second, they realize that evil is also an interior moral battle. The temptation to do evil is universal, and most of their major characters struggle with it. Once a person succumbs, the forces of darkness take over and use him to wreak havoc.

Through an individual act of creative intelligence, Tolkien, a devout Catholic, produced a new mythology comparable to folklore that took centuries to evolve. This was part of his genius. The film-makers have the imagination to find visual equivalents for his sublime achievement. The fantastic universe they conjure up seems authentic in its physical details and psychology.

Unlike many of their contemporaries, Jackson and company make no attempt to ironically deconstruct the genre in which they're working. Their sincere belief in Tolkien's message and method inform every frame of the film. But the viewer doesn't need to have read the book. The movie works as a dramatic spectacle in its own right. The necessary changes from the novel are in keeping with the spirit of the original.

The action takes place 7,000 years ago in Middle-earth, a land populated by men, hobbits, elves, dwarfs and wizards. These different species have long struggled against the dark lord Sauron (voice of Sala Baker), who wants to conquer them. His physical presence isn't human. He looks like a huge, flaming, dis-embodied eye of a cat.

Protected from much of this warfare is the race of hobbits. These midget-sized, pastoral creatures have human sensibilities and hairy, pan-like feet. They live in the Shire, a place that resembles pre-industrial England.

Their idyllic way of life is threatened when Sauron invades the Shire with his ghostly, black-clad, equestrian Ringwraiths. A scholarly, eccentric hobbit named Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) has a golden ring which the dark lord wants to recover because its possession would give him supreme power.

Gandalf (Ian McKellen), a wise wizard, knows the ring's history and insists that Baggins give it to his nephew, Frodo (Elijah Woods). This totemic object was forged ages ago in the volcano Mount Doom and must be returned there and destroyed to save Middle-earth from Sauron.

The ring brilliantly dramatizes the temptation of power and how it can lead to evil. Those who wear it acquire potent magical powers. But, even if they try to use these powers for good, the object always corrupts them — its wearers find themselves wanting to dominate and harm others. “There is only one lord of the ring who can bend it to his will,” Gandalf warns. “And he does not share power.” That, of course, is Sauron.

One of the movie's most chilling moments is the sudden, visual transformation of a jovial, cuddly hobbit into a demonic being when we see him coveting the ring's powers. This only lasts a few seconds, and then he resumes his usual friendly persona. But its horror matches that of Sauron's various armies of terrifying ghouls.

Gandalf goes for guidance to a more evolved wizard, Samuron the White (Christopher Lee). But his mentor has lost his own interior moral struggle and gone over to the other side, using his superior intelligence to aid the forces of darkness. This fallen wise man turns his tranquil, monastery-like dwelling into a turbulent inferno that seems lifted from Brueghel.

Frodo and Gandalf travel to Rivendell, where a pan-species fellowship of seven others is formed to escort them to Mount Doom. Three resemble medieval warriors: the moody Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), heir to the throne of Gondor; the hot-headed Boromir (Sean Bean); and the elf-archer Legolas (Orlando Bloom). Comic relief to their more traditional heroic conflicts is provided by a courageous dwarf (John Rhys-Davies) and three decent but bumbling hobbits (Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd).

“Even the smallest person can change the course of history,” they are instructed. Rivendell itself is an enchanting mountainside community that seems like a series of preRaphaelite drawings come to life.

The quest to return the ring is a dangerous, picaresque journey on which the fellowship encounters a variety of fantastical environments and ever more menacing minions of Sauron. Jackson stages a series of suspense-filled action scenes as thrilling as those in Gladiator or the Star Wars series. At two hours and 58 minutes, there's perhaps one battle too many. The violence, while never exploitative, is too intense for kids under 12.

Tolkien repeatedly pointed out that The Fellowship of the Ring is not a Christian allegory. But he also maintained that his Christian faith guided his imagination throughout his career. As Jackson has clearly gone to great lengths to faithfully reproduce Tolkien's vision, the film is grounded in a Christian world-view most Hollywood movies have cast aside for the last four decades. The grandeur of its intentions, the depth of its characters and the excitement of its action will stimulate your mind and elevate your spirit.

John Prizer writes from Los Angeles.