Visually splendid but astonishingly, rather wan

Rating: Null/10 (7 January 2002)

Those who see The Fellowship of the Ring because they want to see Middle-Earth on the screen will be thrilled. Tolkien's visual world has been brought triumphantly to life in Peter Jackson's film: All of it, including the Shire, Bree, Rivendell, Caradhras, Isengard, Lothlorien, and particularly the mines of Moria look spectacular. Here we see hobbits, wizards, Rangers, men, elves, dwarfs, Half-Elven, Ringwraiths, orcs, Balrogs, and all the rest, even Sauron's eye. How did they get those hobbits to look so small compared to the others? A close look reveals that in many scenes between hobbits and Big People, the `hobbits' have been digitally inserted at the `correct' scale. When shot from behind, the hobbits are played by children or midget stand-ins. In facing long shots, the hobbits are clearly not the credited actors but `little' stand-ins.
To compress the book into a 3-hour film, compromises were, of course, inevitable. Still, those who hope for more than pretty pictures may well be disappointed. I didn't mind the elimination of whole sections featuring characters that don't advance the plot, such as Tom Bombadil, Bill Ferny, and Glorfindel. But if you treasure the richness of the story behind the surface appearance, you will find little of it here. The outline of the plot has been preserved---as how could it not---but instead of the leisurely, majestic journey of the books, this is a race, a breakneck dash through a fever dream. Those who delight in Tolkien's rich, textured, muscular dialogue will find little of it here: It has largely been replaced, mostly by flaccid, leveled, banal language. What little of Tolkien's original dialogue remains has been moved around and chopped up so that it has lost most of its power. The great sweep and turning of the seasons, so much a part of Tolkien's story, is barely touched here, and then only by the scenery. Whole sequences have been rearranged or transposed for no reason that I can fathom; I cannot see where the original would have been less cinematically successful. Some changes seem almost heretical; for example, in the final scene by the river, Aragorn meets up with the fleeing Frodo and gives him leave to slip away. In the original, of course, he never saw him after Frodo went off by himself, and had nothing to do with Frodo's decision to go off on his own. In some cases, the film is explicit where Tolkien is indirect; for example, Jackson saw fit to depict the breeding of Saruman's orcs in great detail where Tolkien did not. Some scenes are embellished and baroque---e.g., Gandalf and Saruman's confrontation atop Orthanc---where Tolkien was plain and simple, and also much more effective. Wonderful scenes of dialogue---especially The Shadow of the Past and The Council of Elrond---have been trimmed to almost nothing, and the Council of Elrond was particularly badly handled. (And who else was unhappy that the character of Elrond, not merely wise but benevolent and compassionate in the book, comes across as merely pessimistic and gloomy? And that Sam Gamgee was reduced to almost nothing? Presumably he will be more important in the next two films.)
About 20 years ago, the BBC produced a 12-hour radio serial of The Lord of the Rings. I was curious how this film would compare to it. It turns out that the radio version still conveys the true feel of Tolkien's story better than Jackson's vision. It is also interesting to note that 12 hours of radio works out to 4 hours per volume, or only about an hour longer than the filmed LR is to be per film; nevertheless, it is much more leisurely and measured, much more like the book. I can still recommend it as the best version of the books ever created.