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THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001)

A review by Bob Carrick

Director: Peter Jackson

Elijah Wood .... Frodo Baggins
Billy Boyd .... Peregrin 'Pippin' Took
Ian McKellen .... Gandalf The Grey
Viggo Mortensen .... Aragorn/Strider
Dominic Monaghan .... Meriadoc 'Merry' Brandybuck
Sean Astin .... Samwise 'Sam' Gamgee
Liv Tyler .... Arwen
Orlando Bloom .... Legolas Greenleaf
Christopher Lee .... Saruman the White
Cate Blanchett .... Galadriel
Sean Bean .... Boromir
John Rhys-Davies .... Gimli

The first part of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is visually a magnificent film. The attention to detail (real armour and hairy Hobbit feet) is such that this most fantastic of themes becomes utterly realistic, and conceptions such as Hobbits, Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, and the Balrog are brought convincingly to life.

Jackson was previously most well-known as co-writer and director of the imaginative Heavenly Creatures (1994). Although this realisation of LoTR has been rendered possible by modern computer graphics, let's not discount the decisiveness of Jackson's vision. He is after all a loving devotee of Middle Earth, and would not look out of place running a branch of 'Games Workshop'.

The adaptation of Tolkien's tale is not beyond criticism. It would be amazing if it were. The Hobbits' departure from the Shire and travel to Bree is reduced to a confused muddle. Tom Bombadil falls to the adaptors’ axe (as usual!), as do the Barrow-wights and most of Farmer Maggot. The hobbits Merry and a curiously Caledonian Pippin are rather defamed by being shown stealing Farmer Maggot's crops, when in the book the worst offence committed is minor trespass and scrumping by a juvenile Frodo rather than crass crop theft by adults. On the subject of crops, Tolkien would surely have raised an eyebrow at the Shire's fields of maize, an American plant little grown in England until very recently. Admittedly, he put tobacco and potatoes there, but by Tolkien's time they had entered English traditional culture.

Another unwelcome transatlantic influence was the bathetic reduction of the struggle between the wizards Gandalf and Saruman to a Wild West bar-room brawl conducted with staffs and spells rather than chair-legs and six-shooters. Even the moth Gandalf summoned to call the eagle Gwaihir the Windlord to his rescue was American (the Moon Moth, Actias selene). Though otherwise this was a pretty touch, given that the character who in the book fulfilled this role, the wizard Radagast the Brown, had perished at the hands of the adaptor. Saruman's stronghold of Orthanc was magnificent, exceeded in awe-inspiring scale and detail only by the Dark Lord's fastness of Barad-dur. But then ever since Star Wars the SFX wizards have excelled in depicting immense and impressive mega-structures, be they spaceships, cities or towers.

Having reached Bree the film picked up well. The much-criticised substitution of Arwen for Glorfindel at the Ford of Bruinen worked for this reviewer if not for many purists. Her Lara Croftish antics there did less violence to Tolkien's text than her resort in extremis to what can only be described as a prayer. Tolkien was very careful to keep overt religion out of the Ring trilogy and Jackson might have done well to do likewise. The rather Pre-Raphaelite romancing of Aragorn and Arwen on a bridge at Rivendell by contrast merely puts a tale Tolkien reduced to an appendix back where it belongs in the story. The Council of Elrond is well done. The more so given that, as Professor Tom Shippey observes in Tolkien:Author of the Twentieth Century, what Tolkien is giving us there is in essence the minutes of a committee meeting. The image of the Great and the Wise squabbling seen reflected in the Ring neatly reflects Sauron's delight in setting his enemies at odds with one another. The Mines of Moria and, as mentioned above, the Balrog were superb. With an amusing reference to a contemporary American fairground sport when Gimli growls: "NOBODY tosses a dwarf!" But Saruman zapping the mountain Caradhras onto the Fellowship with a well-aimed long-range spell contradicts Tolkien's point that Middle-earth contained many evil creatures wholly independent of the Dark Lord Sauron or anyone else. It will be interesting to see what Jackson does with another of these, the great spider-thing Shelob.

Lothlorien resembles the Christmas decorations in a rather tacky department store rather than the "Heart of Elvendom on Earth". But Cate Blanchett is a fey and witchy Galadriel, whose transfiguration into a sort of Queen of Air and Darkness while she considers Frodo's offer of the Ring was nicely depicted. As were the Orcs, Saruman's Uruk-hai and the Eye of Sauron. The battle and fight scenes were also impressive. The Elvish appeared accurate to this reviewer, but legions of the be-anoraked fans who have taught themselves to speak it will doubtless pore over every word and case-ending! The New Zealand landscape, where much of the filming was done, lends itself as a super-real, magical version of England and was often visually stunning.

To sum up, this reviewer felt Jackson's was not only a splendid spectacle but also a decent effort at expressing Tolkien's vision on film which would at least not have appalled the notoriously pernickety author. It is not flawless, but to measure it too closely against the book upon which it is based misses the point that books are books and films are films. In a sense the film illustrates the book, like the colour plates in the more expensive editions of Lord of the Rings. It is a sort of giant moving, talking colour plate. And for the most part it illustrates it brilliantly. Some of the scenes are breathtakingly realised. Jackson cannot, and undoubtedly did not hope to, replace the book. But I think he has certainly enhanced it.

Although enthusiastically adopted by the hippie generation, LoTR is hardy a work of Political Correctness. Conceived to satisfy the lack of a national epic, LoTR celebrates in the Shire a quintessential concept of Englishness - romantic, rural and parochial, and a strong resistance to industrialisation and 'otherness'. On another level, it is a victory for 'little people' - metaphorically as well as literally - and thus of universal appeal.

The other two parts - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) - are in the can. Let's hope they're as visually impressive and as true in essence to Tolkien's vision.

15 February 2002