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Review:Fellowship of the Ring
Everyone has expectations about this movie. I imagine most of you have read the books. You all have ideas about what a Balrog looks like. What Gandalf is like. And yes, hell, even what the ring should look like. And you simply can't expect a movie to meet everyones ideas... but this thing came just as close as I could have hoped.
In short, there aren't many great movies that come out any more... but this is one of them. Everyone seems nearly perfectly cast. The special effects are nothing short of brilliant. The sets from the Shire on out look so wonderful and believable that you just wanna move in... until the Ring Wraiths show up and make everything all miserable.
Elijah Woods pulls off Frodo quite well. Yeah maybe he fell down one to many times, but the angst is believable. And Gandalf? His desire for the ring is intense and his actions are truly heroic.
I can't imagine a film adaptation of perhaps the best book ever written being done better. The first 45 minutes are a bit slow going, but once the Fellowship starts coming together I just didn't want to blink.
I could find things to nitpick about: some scenes the audio mix wasn't quite right, but that could partially have been the mediocre sound system in the theater: dialog was a bit muffled under the music. Some of the effects were noticably CG, but those were rare. Quite frankly nobody has done CG monsters as convincingly in a film to date. There was a handful of shots that looked faked, and all the rest seemed as perfect as could be.
God damn. The hype is warranted. The wait was worth it. But 12 months for the next one? At least I have my copy of FFX to keep me occupied during maybe 40 hours of the next 8,760 or so I have to wait. But who's counting?
Admittedly, Arwen's role is greatly expanded in the film (seemingly subsuming the role of Glorfindle at the ford near Rivendell, at least from what I can tell from the previews), but I wouldn't say that the romance between her and Aragorn isn't mentioned in the book. It is, however, only glancingly hinted at. Of course, the story of their romance is expanded upon in one of the appendices. Aragorn's love for Arwen is also the source of his discomfort upon meeting the lovely Eowyn in The Two Towers. Without coming right out and saying so at that point, Tolkien makes it clear that Aragorn feels somewhat guilty about finding Eowyn attractive when his heart already belongs to Arwen.
It's all in the books, but if you blink, you'll miss it. Subtle nuances that one misses reading the book for the first time as a nine-year-old, then catch years later upon subsequent re-readings as an adult...
As for omissions, that is entirely understandable. I can't imagine American audiences sitting through a five hour version just to see scenes such as those involving Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Wights (hmmm, wonder if those parts were actually filmed? DVD anyone?), which, while adding to the overall mythic feel of the story, don't really advance the plot or contribute to character development.
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
All digital sound if off the print. The film contains the information for two channel stereo, and may contain some cues to help out SRS. DTS, SDDS, and Dolby Digital use off-film CD media. There are some non-digital four channel formats that are on the film itself out there, but they are usually magnetic strips on a 70mm print.
It is not uncommon for a film produced in massive quantities such as this to have sound problems. Expect replacement sound media to be out within a week, if that is, in fact, the problem.
I used to work as a projectionist for Landmark Cinemas, if anybody cares.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Tolkein was no Shakespeare, no Chaucer, no Hemingway, no Faulkner, etc.
... mishmash, baldly told, with little style. Moving on to Spenser, there's no doubt that Spenser's poetic and descriptive gifts are far above Tolkien's - when he's on. A good part of the Fairie Queen, however, is dull and lifeless, and if there's an overall plot to it, it got lost somewhere.
No, he wasn't, but then, few authors are. Tolkien's major relative failings are his prose style, which is servicible and clear, but rarely memorable, and his characterization, which is somewhat flat, without being too cliche'd. His strengths, however, put him among the greats of our century. If anyone has managed to create a complex world with a multi layered, epic mythology and married it seemlessly to a moving and relevant plot, it's escaped my attention. You've compared him to Malory, which is a good start - Malory takes the mishmash of Arturian myth and turns it into a
Moving on to Chretien DeTroyes, again, as far as I can tell in translation, he's a much better stylist, but his organizational skills were lacking. The Eddas and Sagas have a baldness of style that can be appealing but again, don't quite make a coherent whole. I could go on and on, hop, skipping and jumping in and out of the fantasy genre, but I'll save us some trouble by saying that I don't know of anyone in the field who's come up with a world of this kind of depth and integrated it so well into a meaningful story.
As far as the rest of modern literature is concerned, what are we comparing him to? SF novels? - not many can come close to him in that field, either. Mainstream literature? I don't suppose Tolkien had much to say about middle class angst in America or the joys of growing up in the ethnic subculture of the week, which seems to be what the modern novel has devolved into. There are a lot of good novelists around these days, but they have little to say that a lot of other good novelists aren't saying either. There were a lot of good novelists of the last century who aren't being read anymore. I can be fairly certain in 500 years that people will be reading Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner, and to a lesser extent Hemingway. And yes, they'll be reading Tolkien. He's already had an enormous influence on culture - not just in the fantasy genre, but in the concept of creating a fictional world so thoroughly that the reader/viewer has no choice but to be caught up in it totally. He was the one who showed the creators of Star Wars, Star Trek and Dune how it had to be done. Anyone who wants to create a unique place for his characters to interact with depth HAS to study Tolkien and how he did it. He had his weaknesses as a writer, none of them fatal, but in the matter of world-making, he was the master.