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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?
We invest Hobbits with qualities that cannot be visualized. In my mind, they are good-hearted, bustling, chatty little creatures who live in twee houses or burrows, and dress like the merry men of Robin Hood--in smaller sizes, of course. They eat seven or eight times a day, like to take naps, have never been far from home and have eyes that grow wide at the sounds of the night. They are like children grown up or grown old, and when they rise to an occasion, it takes true heroism, for they are timid by nature and would rather avoid a fight.
Such notions about Hobbits can be found in "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," but the Hobbits themselves have been pushed off center stage. If the books are about brave little creatures who enlist powerful men and wizards to help them in a dangerous crusade, the movie is about powerful men and wizards who embark on a dangerous crusade, and take along the Hobbits. That is not true of every scene or episode, but by the end "Fellowship" adds up to more of a sword and sorcery epic than a realization of the more naive and guileless vision of J. R. R. Tolkien.
The Ring Trilogy embodies the kind of innocence that belongs to an earlier, gentler time. The Hollywood that made "The Wizard of Oz" might have been equal to it. But "Fellowship" is a film that comes after "Gladiator" and "Matrix," and it instinctively ramps up to the genre of the overwrought special-effects action picture. That it transcends this genre--that it is a well-crafted and sometimes stirring adventure--is to its credit. But a true visualization of Tolkien's Middle-earth it is not.
Wondering if the trilogy could possibly be as action-packed as this film, I searched my memory for sustained action scenes and finally turned to the books themselves, which I had not read since the 1970s. The chapter "The Bridge of Khazad-Dum" provides the basis for perhaps the most sensational action scene in the film, in which Gandalf the wizard stands on an unstable rock bridge over a chasm, and must engage in a deadly swordfight with the monstrous Balrog. This is an exciting scene, done with state-of-the-art special effects and sound that shakes the theater. In the book, I was not surprised to discover, the entire scene requires less than 500 words.
Settling down with my book, the one-volume, 1969 India paper edition, I read or skimmed for an hour or so. It was as I remembered it. The trilogy is mostly about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains, valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while paying great attention to mealtimes. Landscapes are described with the faithful detail of a Victorian travel writer. The travelers meet strange and fascinating characters along the way, some of them friendly, some of them not, some of them of an order far above Hobbits or even men. Sometimes they must fight to defend themselves or to keep possession of the ring, but mostly the trilogy is an unfolding, a quest, a journey, told in an elevated, archaic, romantic prose style that tests our capacity for the declarative voice.
Reading it, I remembered why I liked it in the first place. It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands that there were many pages to go, many sights to see, many adventures to share. I cherished the way it paused for songs and poems, which the movie has no time for. Like The Tale of Genji, which some say is the first novel, "The Lord of the Rings" is not about a narrative arc or the growth of the characters, but about a long series of episodes in which the essential nature of the characters is demonstrated again and again (and again). The ring, which provides the purpose for the journey, serves Tolkien as the ideal MacGuffin, motivating an epic quest while mostly staying right there on a chain around Frodo Baggins' neck.
Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director who masterminded this film (and two more to follow, in a $300 million undertaking), has made a work for, and of, our times. It will be embraced, I suspect, by many Tolkien fans and take on aspects of a cult. It is a candidate for many Oscars. It is an awesome production in its daring and breadth, and there are small touches that are just right; the Hobbits may not look like my idea of Hobbits (may, indeed, look like full-sized humans made to seem smaller through visual trickery), but they have the right combination of twinkle and pluck in their gaze--especially Elijah Wood as Frodo and Ian Holm as the worried Bilbo.
Yet the taller characters seem to stand astride the little Hobbit world and steal the story away. Gandalf the good wizard (Ian McKellen) and Saruman the treacherous wizard (Christopher Lee) and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), who is the warrior known as Strider, are so well-seen and acted, so fearsome in battle, that we can't imagine the Hobbits getting anywhere without them. The elf Arwen (Liv Tyler), the Elf Queen Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Arwen's father, Elrond (Hugo Weaving), are not small like literary elves ("very tall they were," the book tells us), and here they tower like Norse gods and goddesses, accompanied by so much dramatic sound and lighting that it's a wonder they can think to speak, with all the distractions.
Jackson has used modern special effects to great purpose in several shots, especially one where a massive wall of water forms and reforms into the wraiths of charging stallions. I like the way he handles crowds of Orcs in the big battle scenes, wisely knowing that in a film of this kind, realism has to be tempered with a certain fanciful fudging. The film is remarkably well made. But it does go on, and on, and on--more vistas, more forests, more sounds in the night, more fearsome creatures, more prophecies, more visions, more dire warnings, more close calls, until we realize this sort of thing can continue indefinitely. "This tale grew in the telling," Tolkien tells us in the famous first words of his foreword; it's as if Tolkien, and now Jackson, grew so fond of the journey, they dreaded the destination.
That "Fellowship of the Ring" doesn't match my imaginary vision of Middle-earth is my problem, not yours. Perhaps it will look exactly as you think it should. But some may regret that the Hobbits have been pushed out of the foreground and reduced to supporting characters. And the movie depends on action scenes much more than Tolkien did. In a statement last week, Tolkien's son Christopher, who is the "literary protector" of his father's works, said, "My own position is that 'The Lord of the Rings' is peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form." That is probably true, and Jackson, instead of transforming it, has transmuted it, into a sword-and-sorcery epic in the modern style, containing many of the same characters and incident.
-RE
Hey, I've never read LOTR and haven't got a clue what it's about except for taking a ring into the heart of bad-guy country to destroy it. Some geeks stuck with hard sci-fi and never moved into fantasy / D&D. I'm one of them. Spoiler free is appreciated.
The movie was the first book. The next two movies (due out December 2002 and 2003) cover the rest of the story.
Virg
OK, I loved the movie. Very nice. They cut the right parts and I have no major bitches about the changes... save one:
Was anyone else pissed off when Gandalf was made to look like a bit of a tottering old fool? In general, for the first 20-30 minutes, but specifically hitting his head on the DOOR? I mean JINKIES! He's a bloody WIZARD, one of the most powerful beings in middle earth. I don't recall him hitting his head on a bloody DOOR in the book!
OK, end rant. Good movie. Go see it if you haven't.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
I saw "The Fellowship of the Ring" on Sunday night. (Yes, I went to the Hollyweird premier.) I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't had a headache, but were all the changes necessary? No Glorfindal, no explanation of Gollum's ancestry, Narsil on display in Rivendell instead of in a scabbard on Aragorn's hip, and the Kodak moment that was the Council of Elrond...
I guess I will have to wait about 20+ years before someone else gets a chance to bring LOTR to the big screen again. Maybe this time correctly. I hope...
First off, I thought it was really good, and the flaws were minor. That said:
The movie gives away what's going on with Gandalf before Frodo reached Rivendell. Most everyone knows anyway, but I still preferred the effect of the book where they're really hoping Gandalf will show up any minute, and it's a big mystery why this wizard, who's always on time, is late.
Frodo doesn't shout anything at the Nazgul on Weathertop. Having him shout Elbereth and saving himself long enough for Aragorn to get back helped to set up the effect where Frodo sometimes just does the right thing, without knowing that it's right, because he's fated to be doing these things.
The effect of wearing the Ring was a bit over the top. If I were Bilbo and that happened when I put on the Ring, I'd have thrown it away long before finding out that it made you invisible. And I'd have never worn it for as long as Frodo does near the end.
Some of Moria didn't make much sense. They were surrounded by a huge army with range weapons and good vantage points. Then they're saved by the balrog, which scares away the orcish horde. The orcish horde almost certainly could have done them in with a bit of persistence. Then they cross the broken stairs. If they were fleeing the balrog, it must have ended up behind that area when it crumbled. So how did it catch up with them at the Bridge? It can't fly or anything, and it didn't look like there was a way around that chasm. And if the stairs were in that bad shape, they'd probably have broken under Balin's group.
Merry and Pippin didn't intentionally join Sam and Frodo. It saved a bit of time, I guess, but it seemed odd that they'd follow him halfway across the world after running into him randomly in a field.
Things I thought they did particularly well:
Bilbo, when he sees the Ring. I thought for an instant he might actually be able to take it away. Yow. Also Galadriel, when she sees it. I noticed that, despite the transformation, she didn't actually reach towards it, and Frodo didn't draw back.
Aragorn running into Frodo near the end. I was worried that it would be bad, because it wasn't in the book at all, but it worked really well. They really got what Aragorn would have done, had he found Frodo, and having it happen helped demonstrate his character even more.
The Nazgul looked more true to the text than my imagination was. The cloak is a real cloak, the horse is a real horse, and the rest is shadows.
I wished:
They'd had the camera swoop through Middle-Earth from important event to important event. The movie didn't really give the idea of Middle-Earth being a really long walk; one thing I liked about the book was the feeling that there was a really big world that they go through.
Frodo had worn the ring when he was about to try crossing the lake. But that's just because I wanted to see the boat launch itself. Plus he could have just gone by the orcs.
It had been winter outside Lothlorien, for the contrast.
And a couple dozen tiny details they didn't bother with.