The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Review
by Shane Burridge (sburridge AT hotmail DOT com)December 25th, 2001
The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) 178m
Like many other kids in high school, I became absorbed in Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. In fact I was so taken by it that I adapted my own 320-page homage in comic strip. I can't really explain the trilogy's phenomenal popularity, but I do know that the thing that hooked me at 15 years old was the pedigree of the product. Here was one of the few books you could read as a teen which included such fare as dwarves, magical rings, and monsters - a sophisticated literary package born from a supposedly childish genre. It was grand, epic stuff that appealed to the kid inside all of us, and now Tolkien's fantasy cycle can be read as a blueprint for countless imitations - the naïve hero/magical token/quest/confrontation-with-darkness plotline is rarely strayed from in the fantasy fiction that has since followed.
Then, too, there was BAD TASTE, the Peter Jackson film I saw some years after reading LOTR. Prior to the film's opening at the Auckland Film Festival, a scruffily-dressed Jackson shuffled on stage after being introduced by the Festival co-ordinator. This wasn't terribly surprising - New Zealanders don't subscribe to a notion of 'celebrities' being any different to most other folk. As if to confirm this stereotype, Jackson leaned into the microphone, said "Uh, yeah, if you're gunna throw up try not to hit the guy in front of you" and then shuffled offstage again to the sound of laughter and some applause. He was only half joking. Audience members *had* been vomiting at the premiere - a reputation of the film perpetuated by one friend of mine who gave away barf bags at his theater's ticket counter. Jackson disappeared from the auditorium leaving me to think "Who *is* this guy?". I had already known that BAD TASTE had been a labor of love patched together by Jackson and friends on a minimal budget over a few years' worth of weekends, and I enjoyed the film on that basis alone - it was an 8mm home-movie buff's dream project finally realized. I assumed that it would be Jackson's sole project, but of course the rest is history. Who would have thought that the laconic Wellingtonian on stage that night would have gone on to be nominated for an Oscar and then pulled off one of the biggest coups in filmdom - directing the long-anticipated screen version of LORD OF THE RINGS.
There were no shortage of LOTR fans in the film industry who wanted to see the book on the big screen since its first publication. Among those associated with the project at one time or another were talents as diverse as Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman (he made EXCALIBUR instead), and even The Beatles (an intriguing idea which would have been fun even if the result couldn't have possibly been any good: Paul and Ringo were to play Frodo and Sam, George was to be Gandalf, and John wanted to play Gollum!) The most logical way to approach the task of adaptation was to film each volume of the trilogy as a separate work, but this was easier said than done - the only other film-maker to produce a version of LOTR was animator Ralph Bakshi, who in 1978 had gotten as far as squeezing the first half of the story together into one movie, a decision that infuriated audience members who were expecting the entire book (in one New York screening seats were torn up!). When Jackson got down to finally putting the trilogy onto celluloid he opted to shoot the three films back-to-back and stagger the release dates, saving both time and money. Filming on location with a New Zealand crew and post-production studio wasn't just cost-effective: it was literally the only way the film could have been made.
It wasn't only the scale and length of the story that had deterred film-makers previously, but also the logistics and expense of creating the variety of landscapes and lifeforms of Tolkien's fantasy milieu. These may have seemed fittingly 'epic' obstacles, but it was the more basic problem of constantly integrating hobbits with men that proved one of the major stumbling blocks in past attempts at film production. As 'halflings' are basically half-sized men, distinct from the dwarves they sometimes keep company with, it would have been inappropriate to cast real life 'little people' (to keep it politically correct) in their roles. However, with 21st-century advances in CGI, Jackson was not only able to recreate convincing monsters and fantasy landscapes, but was also given the means to place 'half-sized' men alongside full-sized adults within the same frame.
And finally, there is the question of interpretation. This may seem less daunting for the producers than it is for audiences; for are there any among us who have not seen a filmed adaptation of a book and felt disappointed that it didn't look the way it had first been imagined? And in the Ring Trilogy, there is a lot to imagine. In some cases it may be safe to go for a generic image (The Black Riders appearing as black silhouettes, for example) while in others it might be worth taking a conceptual risk. Just going by the book leaves some room for embroidery, and Tolkien's descriptions often promote different images in the minds of different readers. The Balrog, a monster that makes a brief but memorable appearance in 'The Fellowship of the Ring', is described as a sort of shadow with wings (I'd always pictured it looking like the mountain demon in FANTASIA), but appears as a more three-dimensional manifestation in Jackson's version. Remarkably, and perhaps because of a fusion of images that are generic, imaginative, and by-the-book, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING really does look how the book "should", and I would think few Tolkien fans would be displeased with it (after laboring for a year on my comic I knew how difficult these issues of interpretation could be - Jackson has a photocopy of it somewhere - and found it easier to assume that the way I imagined everything was going to be the same way everybody else did).
While we have only FELLOWSHIP to view at present it is a certain indicator of the films to follow. The most consistently exciting of the three volumes, 'Fellowship' begins several decades after Tolkien's earlier book 'The Hobbit' left off (we would hope that anyone planning a film version of this prequel would get Ian McKellan and Ian Holm to reprise their character roles of Gandalf and Bilbo for the sake of completeness). The power of the Dark Lord Sauron has been reawakened after an era of peace and a representative group of the free races of Middle-Earth (dwarves, men, elves, halflings) are dispatched to take the key to his power - a magical ring - to the heart of his domain in order to destroy it.
Jackson's film sees the book brought to vivid life, and makes the old and archetypal seem revelatory and new. Some story material has been pruned to accommodate the cinema translation, but writing novels and writing screenplays are two different arts, and the editing works in favor of the film experience (I always thought the chapter with Tom Bombadil was a hiccup in the first book anyhow). While some characters are excised or reduced in the film, the roles of Arwen and Saruman get beefed up. You can already sense the strategy of the screenplay molding the arc of the book to audience expectations: the romance of Aragorn and Arwen is highlighted so that their wedding at the trilogy's conclusion will seem more of an ante-bellum reunion and less of an arbitrary decision; meanwhile Saruman is being groomed to represent the Dark Lord by proxy, and is established as the most visible enemy of the Fellowship (in the trilogy there is no final confrontation with Sauron, and we know how audiences love to see the villain get his comeuppance in the final reel). These roles are ably played (by Liv Tyler and Christopher Lee, respectively) and add to the varied cast that brings FELLOWSHIP to life. The performances cannot escape mention: Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Orlando Bloom, McKellan and Holm inhabit their characters utterly, creating a depth of 'humanity' that prevents the film from becoming nothing more than a smorgasbord of effects technology. The one-on-one moments between Bilbo and Frodo are just as involving as the film's many dramatic action scenes (the whole 'Moria' chapter is a show-stopper). The film is a fantasy; yet it is real, just as real as the geography of many of its epic landscapes. The menace of the dark forces is persuasive, and the One Ring impresses itself as wholly malevolent. When Boromir (Sean Bean) weeps for 'his people' at the end of the story we believe his conviction, just as we are ready to believe in the history of this entire world (this is revealed effectively throughout the narrative in stunning flashbacks, and it doesn't hurt that we get three hours of immersion into the story, either). We accept it because Jackson never tips us a wink and jolts us out of the story - he treats the tale as seriously as the characters within it.
I imagine there will be two types of nitpicking performed upon this film. Firstly, there will be the Tolkien cultists who will complain that somewhere in the film they heard a character mispronounce an Elvish consonant - although they would do better to notice some of the subtle, unspoken detailing that demonstrates this film was made by those who care (Legolas can stand on snow; the Uruk-hai wear the White Hand as warpaint; the hobbits rest in the shadow of three petrified trolls) and remember that it is nigh impossible to adapt books for the screen in their entirety (I can think of only one offhand that succeeded, and that was James Dickey's slim novel 'Deliverance'). The other nitpickers will be film critics - God forbid one of them should be crossbred with a Tolkien fanatic - and in this area I'm sure there will be some grumbles about narrative or miscasting. My personal peeves are so minor I'm almost embarrassed to mention them - but I did find that bucolic pseudo-Celtic tootling on the soundtrack distracting (it got an Oscar for TITANIC, so why not?); the comic relief offered by Merry and Pippin falls flat, but is at least short-lived; and the Black Riders make squeeching noises that sound too much like the pterodactyls in old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. And if I had to pick a vote for miscasting, I'd go for Cate Blanchett, who appears hell-bent on making her Elvish queen Galadriel as mysterious and aloof as possible, short of waving her arms and making "wooo-ooo" noises.
It's good that my only quibbles are paltry: it's a clear indicator of how satisfying the film really is. FELLOWSHIP is a faithful retelling of a modern classic; a fine work of cinema that whets our appetites for the next two films, in which we can look forward to seeing Gollum, Shelob, oliphaunts, ents, Helm's Deep, and Mordor. There will be the usual glut of trading cards, picture books and sneak previews for those who can't wait, and want to catch a look ahead of time. I want to see Parts 2 and 3 even more badly than that, which is why I'm content to stay ignorant until they reach the cinema in their own good time.
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