Middle Earth is alive...and why some people love to hate it.

Rating: Null/10 (22 December 2001)

[Caution: may contain spoilers. You have been warned.]
In film, there exists, always, a certain sense of denial, when it comes to big screen literary adaptations; to say that a movie, any (adapted) movie is "true to the book ", is absurd. To directly transplant a novel to the local megaplex is impossible, and there are constant reminders of what can happen should you fail (remember Battlefield Earth? A two-thousand page book cannot be transposed into a movie with a total runtime of 117 minutes; too much will be lost in the story, and in ticket revenues.) And " The Lord of the Rings " is no exception. To Xerox " The Fellowship of the Ring " into a movie would be comical. The film would be 5-7 hours long with too much focus on sensory background. A film must be retouched for film, because film is a visual art form, while the written word is left more to the imagination. They are not interchangeable.
Tolkien's " The Lord of the Rings ", a whimsical adventure into the land and the hearts of those that inhabit Middle Earth, is considered by many to be one of the finest literary works of the 20th century, and therefore since its conception, has been awaiting a movie deal (and aside from the choppy 1978 cartoon, it waited.)
The first chapter of the Lord of the Rings, " The Fellowship of the Ring ", has just taken this step, and it is one of the best transitions of this sort in history, on par with The Godfather, and a narrow foothold higher than Gone With The Wind, but that doesn't make it a carbon copy of the novel. Most of the songs and poetic interludes have been cut out, certain passages, like the Hobbits' encounter with Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest, and the discovery of the Trolls from Bilbo's escapades in " The Hobbit ", are missing entirely. On the other hand, changes were added to help make the film move more smoothly, like Arwen's delivery of a wounded Frodo to Rivendell, and the unusual ending, which intermeshed the end of " Fellowship ", with the beginning of the second chapter of the saga, " The Two Towers. "
In the end, however, this matters not, because most of the people whom this will bother are the Tolkienites, who can never be completely pleased, because they each has a different perception about what each thing in Middle Earth should be like. And aside from everything else, The Fellowship of the Ring is a simply enchanting cinematic experience, with a scope and vision that hasn't been seen since Star Wars, and a well crafted story that would put the most gifted scriptwriter to shame. Brimming with action sequences rivaling Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan in their magnitude, and shot with intense care that puts you in the shoes of Aragorn, or Legolas, or whomever is battling it out with the forces of evil at the moment (and the forces of evil are truly that, thanks to the special effects crew: whether its the fiendish Orc-soldiers, or the enhanced Orc race, the Uruk Hai, the once innocent Stoor, Gollum, who slithers like snake in pursuit of his " precious ", and the most grandly designed creature of them all, the Balrog who haunts the caverns of Moria.)
All in all, Peter Jackson's first installment of " The Lord of the Rings ", is wondrous achievement that will remain a classic for years to come, and has (more importantly) done the epic novel justice.[Caution: may contain spoilers. You have been warned.]
In film, there exists, always, a certain sense of denial, when it comes to big screen literary adaptations; to say that a movie, any (adapted) movie is "true to the book ", is absurd. To directly transplant a novel to the local megaplex is impossible, and there are constant reminders of what can happen should you fail (remember Battlefield Earth? A two-thousand page book cannot be transposed into a movie with a total runtime of 117 minutes; too much will be lost in the story, and in ticket revenues.) And " The Lord of the Rings " is no exception. To Xerox " The Fellowship of the Ring " into a movie would be comical. The film would be 5-7 hours long with too much focus on sensory background. A film must be retouched for film, because film is a visual art form, while the written word is left more to the imagination. They are not interchangeable.
Tolkien's " The Lord of the Rings ", a whimsical adventure into the land and the hearts of those that inhabit Middle Earth, is considered by many to be one of the finest literary works of the 20th century, and therefore since its conception, has been awaiting a movie deal (and aside from the choppy 1978 cartoon, it waited.)
The first chapter of the Lord of the Rings, " The Fellowship of the Ring ", has just taken this step, and it is one of the best transitions of this sort in history, on par with The Godfather, and a narrow foothold higher than Gone With The Wind, but that doesn't make it a carbon copy of the novel. Most of the songs and poetic interludes have been cut out, certain passages, like the Hobbits' encounter with Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest, and the discovery of the Trolls from Bilbo's escapades in " The Hobbit ", are missing entirely. On the other hand, changes were added to help make the film move more smoothly, like Arwen's delivery of a wounded Frodo to Rivendell, and the unusual ending, which intermeshed the end of " Fellowship ", with the beginning of the second chapter of the saga, " The Two Towers. "
In the end, however, this matters not, because most of the people whom this will bother are the Tolkienites, who can never be completely pleased, because they each has a different perception about what each thing in Middle Earth should be like. And aside from everything else, The Fellowship of the Ring is a simply enchanting cinematic experience, with a scope and vision that hasn't been seen since Star Wars, and a well crafted story that would put the most gifted scriptwriter to shame. Brimming with action sequences rivaling Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan in their magnitude, and shot with intense care that puts you in the shoes of Aragorn, or Legolas, or whomever is battling it out with the forces of evil at the moment (and the forces of evil are truly that, thanks to the special effects crew: whether its the fiendish Orc-soldiers, or the enhanced Orc race, the Uruk Hai, the once innocent Stoor, Gollum, who slithers like snake in pursuit of his " precious ", and the most grandly designed creature of them all, the Balrog who haunts the caverns of Moria.)
All in all, Peter Jackson's first installment of " The Lord of the Rings ", is wondrous achievement that will remain a classic for years to come, and has (more importantly) done the epic novel justice.