A Noble Effort

Rating: 10/10 (26 December 2001)

I think the problem with those of us who are Tolkien fans is to avoid following into two different traps that prevent us from giving this film an unbiased and fair review. The first trap is that of holding the director to task for our own little pet bits of material being excluded or just not quite done quite the way we had envisioned. I am very disappointed that Tom Bombadil was excluded from the film. Merry and Pippin are portrayed in a way quite different from what I had envisioned. The Lothlorien section should have been longer, I particularly lament some of the excellent Gimili material that is absent as a result. I thought the Galadriel's Mirror scene would have been stronger without the special effects. The problem is that this isn't my vision of Middle Earth.. it's Peter Jackson's. We can't expect him to have directed a film that includes all of our personal favorite bits. We can demand that he create a film that treats Tolkien's material with dignity and makes his world come to life. I'll reserve judgement till later in the review.
The second trap is that of being so excited at seeing Tolkien's world come to life on the screen that we forgive too much. I've seen a lot of reviews calling this film perfect, or the best film ever, or both. I'm not saying that conclusion is impossible to reach I am saying that it is likely to come from being to eager to like the film.
Here's how I see the film. There are some excellent performances. Viggo Mortensen really captures Aragorn. Sean Bean was Boromir. Ian McKellan does a good job showing Gandalf's kindness, and his wrath. Elijah Wood is nothing short of brillant as Frodo. Orlando Bloom's Legolas is convincing indeeed. Liv Tyler does a verry good job with Arwen in what little time she is on the screen (I must say that though not textual this part of the film really worked for me), ditto Kate Blanchette's Galadriel. Merry and Pippin are played as comic relif, there is no character development here. The actors don't do a bad job, they simply are crippled by the script. The screen writer and director don't seem to have a grasp on these characters. That being said I did laugh and their antics, and it does serve to add some lightness to the film that would otherwise be absent. I also argue that part of this is do to a weakness in Tolkien. Tolkien didn't write character driven fiction. He wrote epic. John Rhys Davies is a total dissappointment as Gimli. He turned Gimli into a caricature. His performance is by far the worst in the film and it is fortunate his role isn't that large. So on the whole we have several outstanding performances, a couple of so-so ones, and a absolutely terrible Gimli.
The special effects were too much. Sauron looked like a Cartoon character. The cave troll battle was stupid and not in the text. Frodo receives his wound from "a huge orc" of "nearly man size" not a massive deformed Troll. This is is a major weakness in the film. The evil in this film is too comic book like. I thought the Balrog worked, but most of the other visual effects were simply overkill. Evil in this film is based on a Spawn like vision of Hell and it lacks the subtlty to be truly frightening. The Ringwraiths are an exception here. The are done perfectly. Some of the effects seem to have been done with a, because we can do it mindset (the non textual and insipid Troll battle, the and the visual chicanery in the Galadriel scene were particularly troublesome to me). The digital world creation worked for me.
On the whole this film is, for me at least, an odd mixture of really strong elements, and some really bad ones. There is little mediocrity here. Everything is either a marvelous success or a spectcular failure. I think this is why the reviews have tended to extremes. I think in the end Jackson succeeds in breathing life into Tolkien's world. At times he succeeds at making the story come to life as well, the Boromir scene at the end of the film was remarkably well done. I don't think this is the best movie of all time. It's a good film with flaws. It is however the best fantasy film of all time. That's good enough for me to give it a 10, inspite of it's flaws.