The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Review

by Jerry Saravia (faust668 AT aol DOT com)
January 3rd, 2002

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (2001)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
January 2nd, 2001
RATING: 3 stars

I have not read the books of J.R.R. Tolkien's hugely popular epic fantasy though I have always meant to. This may be the year I choose to finally after abandoning what many deem as the epic fantasy of all time. There is no doubt about it because the characters and themes of this grandly surreal world has filtered through our pop culture radar ever since the books were first published. Many films have tried to capture the magic of Tolkien's world. For example, Tolkien's books are the models of fantasy for George Lucas's own "Star Wars" trilogy. I love stories about goblins, ogres, fire-breathing dragons, unicorns, etc. "Lord of the Rings" is an often breathtaking film adaptation but it is curiously overdone and remote, and I can't say that is true of "Star Wars," as unfair a comparison as it may be.

Tolkien's world, known as Middle-Earth, is entirely imaginary and comprised of creatures and sounds and sights entirely not out of our own world. There are the Hobbits, the good-natured, good-hearted, fondly talkative, hairy-footed, pointy-eared people who are about as tall as dwarves. They can live for years and years, as they do chatting it up, smoking herbs and eating merrily in their private world of Shire. The hobbit of pure heart in this story is Frodo Baggins (a perfectly well-cast Elijah Wood), who embarks on an adventure to bring a powerful ring, known as the One Ring, to the fires of Mount Doom and destroy it, once and for all time. Easier said than done. Is Frodo up to the challenge?

There are wizards in this world as well. There is the good wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and an evil wizard named Saruman (Christopher Lee) who wants the ring, as most of the characters do. There are storms of faceless horsemen riding in stallions and stampeding through Middle-Earth looking for Frodo. It is Gandalf who tells Frodo to carry the ring, rather than Frodo's uncle Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) who might be a tad greedy. After all, this Ring can make men and women do strange things - you need will power to use the Ring wisely. Not unlike the Force.

Along this perilous journey, Frodo is accompanied by three Hobbit friends, Sam (Sean Astin), Mercy (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd). Of course, Hobbits can only do so much damage in actual combat. Also along for the ride are the members of the Fellowship, which include Boromir (Sean Bean), the dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), an archery elf expert, and the mysterious, aloof Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen). Together their journey lasts through several different lands of beauty, endless caves, cascading waterfalls, a battle with a tree troll, a flaming duel with a vicious dragon known as Balrog, and so on. There are also more characters who pop up including the serene queen of elves Lady Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), the serene, dreamy elf Arwen (Liv Tyler), and more and more creatures such as Orcs and the ring wraiths, known as Nazgul, who gallop around in stallions that shriek. These silhouetted Black Riders are as fearsome as the Headless Horseman.

Director Peter Jackson ("Heavenly Creatures") does a massively complicated job of bringing all these characters and vistas together in a film that tops the three-hour mark. There is so much to take in and cherish in "Lord of the Rings" that it is no wonder it will take two more movies to bring closure to all the incidents and events. It is like a gloriously illustrated picture book come to life. Jackson and his band of set designers and special-effects artists spare no expense in creating this fictional world.

But if I am afforded the luxury of reviewing this film, I can honestly say that "Lord of the Rings" is deeply imaginative but at its core, somehow uninvolving. Jackson affords his actors the luxury of close-ups and there are so many in the film that there is nothing left to look at. You can only see Wood's beatific and worried Frodo face with wide blue eyes so often before it becomes repetitive. McKellen is a force-of-nature on film so I was not displeased with seeing his face so closely, but what of any close-up shots of Christopher Lee, the dueling wizard? More scenes where we see the interior of Bilbo Baggins's house were needed. These shots work because they are shown as master shots for the most part. Why we can't ever see a hobbit standing next to any of the taller characters for more than three seconds is beyond me. A hobbit has those hairy feet and pointy-ears, and I do not recall a single shot where we would see a hobbit walking through a given space showing his whole body. This may have been done to evoke how small the hobbits were but there are ways of conveying stature and size without all those random close-ups.

Just like "Harry Potter," Jackson never quite shows the grandeur, the mysticism of Middle-Earth. He too often cuts away from expansive long-shots to extreme, tight close-ups. When the camera swoops up and down in territories and castles, we notice them fleetingly but never long enough to feel like we are in them. It's as if Jackson felt that audiences might get bored at any given moment so he had to keep cutting away and show us an action scene and bring the Dolby noise level higher and higher.

The action scenes are also a disappointment. Just as in "Harry Potter" and any action film post-"Gladiator," everything is shot so tight that the fighting remains a series of blurry shots, nothing more. Jackson could have looked at those amazing fight scenes in Errol Flynn's "Adventures of Robin Hood" where we would always see the action in full shots and where the close-ups would occur when necessary. Here, everything is shot so tightly that unless you listen to the sound effects, it is never clear who is winning or losing in any of the countless sword fights (and no, I was not sitting too close to the screen). So all the sound and fury swallows up the screen in extremely fast edits that lose our focus as to what is occurring. The more intimate, quiet moments are beautifully done, as in the exquisite moment where Arwen tries to save Frodo from dying, but more often than not, they do not involve us. It is all magical to be sure but a fantasy epic often prides itself on engaging the viewer from moment to moment by seeing the fantastical settings as a backdrop for the characters.

I do urge people to see "Lord of the Rings" but I feel that it could have been so much more. Peter Jackson is a frenetic director to be sure but he needs to dial down the heat a bit. Tolkien fans may not care much but I prefer more intimacy in this epic than confounding action scenes. I like the characters, the situations, the landscapes (as brief as they may be), the varied color lighting schemes, and the dialogue. It is just too cramped and overheated to qualify as anything more than a decent epic.

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