A cold, heartless, horror-movie treatment of one of the great epic stories of our time.

Rating: 2/10 (28 December 2001)

I really tried to go into this movie with an open mind. I knew that much would be left out due to time restrictions. I was aware through the promotional campaign that the dialog was going to be un-Tolkien, for reasons I wasn't clear about, since they seem to have gone to considerable effort to get pronunciations correct. I knew that there would be many things about both the story and the treatment of it that would conflict with my own hide-bound (some would say fossilized) ideas.
But still I looked forward to it.
Then they showed Sauron in the second shot of the movie and somewhere inside, I wailed in despair. I knew, from that alone, that Peter Jackson didn't get it.
What is the one thing in LOTR that is never shown? The one thing so evil and horrible that it isn't even described?
Sauron. The title character. The Lord of the Rings himself.
There he is, in the second shot of the movie. Some funny looking big guy whose armourer has either very very bad taste or a sick sense of humor.
The whole prologue was very aggravating to me, because as I watched it I knew that both the structure of the story and the slow building of understanding that characterized Tolkien's telling of it were being ignored. Throughout "The Fellowship of the Ring" (the book, that is) we see the story unfold largely through Frodo's eyes. We don't know about the conspiracy between Merry, Pippin and Sam because Frodo doesn't. We don't know who the Black Riders are because Frodo doesn't. And we don't know the history of the Ring until Gandalf tells Frodo about it. Putting us in the hobbit's shoes brings us into the story. The prologue in the movie separates us from it.
On a technical level, the cinematography and editing were completely wrong for a story of this type -- other than a few wide sweeping shots of the fellowship walking south from Rivendell, the movie seemed all wide-angle lenses, swish pans, jump cuts, Spike Lee zooms (zooming in while dollying back or vice versa) or gratuitous and excessive special effects. When Frodo puts the ring on, why does it suddenly get windy? I rather think Bilbo would have noticed something was odd about the ring if all that had happened when he put it on. Almost without exception, all the special effects were over-the-top. From the glow of the fiery letters shining on Frodo's face (which, I will admit, looked kind of cool) to the flaming eye of Sauron.
In a word, the film lacked subtlety. Tolkien would have been hopping mad.
And Arwen at the bridge made me mad, too. In the book, Frodo stands, weak and wounded on the opposite shore from the Nazgul, and yet with his remaining strength defies them. This is a crucially important moment in his development and our understanding of his character.
Though the waves with horses was a nice touch.
Speaking of Arwen at the bridge, there are many annoying examples of small changes to the plot done for no apparent reason. Why was it Frodo who figured out how to open the gates of Moria? And why wasn't Sam at the mirror of Galadriel? Why did Aragorn show up before the orcs finished off Boromir (actually, that one's obvious -- so we could waste more time with another damn fight scene, that's why)? and why was he not present when the black riders attacked the hobbits at Weathertop?
It is possible to transfer a book successfully to screen faithfully. For example, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone" does an admirable job. I gave the movie a seven out of ten and full marks for keeping within both the letter and the spirit of the book. It left some things out, but you could tell that the filmmakers respected the book, the author, and the book's legion of readers.
Several key dynamics from LOTR were thrown out in the movie. The whole business of the mysterious disappearance of Gandalf is left out, and replaced with one of the most bone-jarringly stupid scenes in the film: I call it Gandalf vs. Saruman in the temple of Doom. Was that silliness necessary? The Wizards in the film may have been quick to anger, but subtle they most decidedly were not.
The Legolas-Gimli relationship was likewise ignored, as well as the process of Aragorn gaining the hobbits' trust (especially Sam's). But this simply underscores the greatest weakness in the movie -- it doesn't build the characters, it takes them for granted.
And what of poor Barliman? He was given such short shrift. Not to mention Tom Bombadil. I read a viewer comment in this forum defending his omission which said (quoting here): `a man who stops the Hobbits being eaten, very slowly, by a tree with his power of song is just quite frankly ludicrous in this day and age'. That's exactly the point: LOTR is not about this day and age.
By and large, the casting was fine, with the following exceptions:
Agent Smith from "The Matrix" as Elrond. For God's sake, Weaving even slipped in and out of the "Agent Smith" voice.
Viggo Mortenson as Aragorn. He was capable of playing the fighter, but either wasn't capable or given the opportunity to reveal the historian, linguist, lore-learned Aragorn.
The interchangeable actors as Merry and Pippin. Except for their accents, they weren't easy to tell apart.
It's easy to say that even at three hours, the film was too short to cover all the ground in the book (and I will certainly not argue this -- I estimate a faithful, yet watchable treatment at about 24 hours -- but Ken Burns' "Baseball" was almost that long, wasn't it?), but far too much of that precious time was spent in the action and fight scenes. The Chamber of Mazarbul scene (the fight with the troll) was one of the better action scenes, and handled very skillfully, but I would have traded most of it for a better treatment of the Council of Elrond (like, why the heck is Boromir there? Who is Gimli, and why is he at Rivendell? Why wasn't Bilbo there? His offer to take the Ring was most revealing in the book). And, of course, the whole prologue should have been moved into Frodo's sitting room, where Professor Tolkien wisely put it.
It comes down to this. They didn't trust the book. The darned thing sold fifty MILLION copies. That's a BILLION dollars worth of books. And has a legion of admirers dwarfing Harry Potter's. But they didn't trust it.
One of the things I truly admired about the late Robert Shaw (I sing in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus) was that he never tried to put his own `stamp' on a piece of music. His purpose was always to get at the heart of the music, to serve the composer and the composer's intentions.
In a way, a film treatment of a book is a `performance' of that book. And the better the book, the more beloved by the reading public, the more incumbent it is upon the performer to strive for the heart and soul of the book. Peter Jackson got much that was superficially right, but missed the life at the center. The film is cold, frightening, and utterly unlike The Lord of the Rings.
Finally, the most disappointing thing: because any Lord of the Rings film would have to be a production of epic scale, this version may have to stand as the only real attempt at a film adaptation for many years, perhaps forever. There have been dozens of "Hamlet's, and even a bunch of "Tarzan"s. And that's one thing that kept running through my mind: "This is IT. This is the treatment that LOTR will get in the cinema. Damn."