An overrated mis-adaptation

Rating: Null/10 (14 August 2003)

The Lord of the Rings, when it debuted in 1954-1955, was an original attempt to present a full high-mythic tale in the form of a fantasy novel. It took a bit of time, but the novel caught on. Since Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara (1972), which was published because it was basically a regurgitation of Tolkien, written fantasy has gone into self-referential cycles. The end result is a series of doorstops that present a world that is a caricature of Tolkien's.
In many ways, this is reflected in Peter Jackson's Dungeons & Dragons-esque retelling of Tolkien's novel. The visual cues are obvious, from the elves bearing requisite pointed ears (not even vaguely implied in Tolkien) to the showy wizard duel to the added fight scene with the cave troll to the overtly D&D Balrog to the climactic battle scene (whereas Tolkien ended Book II of his novel with a departure scene and began Book III with a decidedly different interpretation of the battle scene). Scene after scene reveals how profoundly Jackson's films have been affected by the literary chaff and dross that are Tolkien's imitators, and they are a decided first strike against him.
In the adaptation of Book I of the novel (the much-maligned Shire business), Jackson hacks away at Tolkien's deliberate, measured pacing. He eliminates many of the scenes that set up the bucolic Shire and summarizes many of the rest. With Tolkien's pacing lost, though, Jackson is an utter failure with regard to replacing it. He meanders rather quickly through the Shire with little reason, making it a sort of bizarre muddle to lead into an action sequence (though many of the more suspenseful and exciting sequences from the novel are dropped). The film makes it to Rivendell, where it succeeds at being pretty, but still lacks any continuity of pacing. The lion's share of the Book II adaptation is spent on the massive set piece mines of Moria, where it really turns into a big game of Dungeons & Dragons (well, with a Balrog instead of a Dragon, but still). He plays up the melodrama of Tolkien's story but none of its human drama; little wonder that the snippets of Lothlorien that follow Moria are terribly awkward. Then some obligatory scenes, the final battle set piece, and the overly-ominous setup for the following two films. It just stops, never having figured out what to do with itself, and sends its audience home in sensory overload.
There are some good actors and some awful ones here; I'll leave it to you to sort them out, but none of them is near his or her prime in the muddle that Jackson cranked out. There's no really classic shots that don't look rehearsed in front of the camera, no epic moments that don't seem forced. The direction is rather bland and fails to convey anything of the sense of wonder that Tolkien created. Nothing about the story rings true in this retelling; it's all rather mechanical, and the main differences are alterations that just don't work too well. The music, technically proficient but unable to provide differentiation or rouse emotion, doesn't give it a hand there.
Despite its extreme length, Fellowship of the Ring comes off as something not far removed from David Lynch's adaptation of Dune: a lengthy highlights reel of scenes from the book without a sense of coherency. We cut off at a drastically different point than Book II of Lord of the Rings did, and are left with a film that is far more of a mess than it initially seems. It has exciting moments (though mostly not in the fashion that they were exciting in the novel), and these may even trump the bad storytelling for many viewers  but in the long run, speaking of it as a film, it doesn't cohere.