A missed opportunity

Rating: 7/10 (21 December 2001)

Contains Spoilers I was frankly disappointed. Visually and technically the film was great. The acting, particularly Gandalf, Frodo and Sam was fabulous. McKellen deserves Best Actor, he was flawless. However the screenplay and directing fall well short of what Tolkien's story deserves.
The film lacked the feeling of the books. Too much action/adventure, and not enough emotional balance. Clearly this is for the benefit of the audience who haven't read the books. I found the battle scenes rather boring; not a surprise when you know who is going to die when. I mean, they weren't going to kill off anyone but Gandalf in Moria, or Boromir at Amon Hen, were they? And neither Gandalf or Boromir was going to live through those scenes, no matter how heroically they fought. Of course, these scenes are important to the story, but they are not the story themselves, and the movie shouldn't lean so heavily on them at the expense of screentime for other things. There's no real suspense. The only suspense was: what are they going to change next in the story line...
Many changes to the story, purportedly made in the interests of time, seemed idiotic to me. In the book, Frodo resists the Nazgul ALONE at the Ford. Instead, in the movie, this heroic act was sacrificed to allow a minor character the opportunity to do something heroic. For all the hoopla over Arwen's expanded role, she is still little more than a cameo, and that at the expense of a fairly important moment (when Frodo resists the Nazgul) and who knows what else in the next films. And at the same time, they ignored the opportunity to bring out the tension between Aragorn and Elrond over Arwen's fate. This would have been dramatically compelling, and would have required less mutilation of the story.
Likewise, I found the changes to the Breaking of the Fellowship rather jarring. Here I'm afraid they succumbed to the need for some kind of perceived closure by giving Frodo and Aragorn a farewell scene. Rather than, in the book, Sam being the only one who figures out that Frodo is leaving, in the movie he's the last one to actually find him. It could have been done better by sticking closer to the book, even within the action/adventure framework. Imagine Boromir desperately fighting off the orcs as we cut back and forth to Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas racing to the scene - will they get there in time or not? Meanwhile cut to Frodo sadly preparing to leave and Sam racing back to the boats - will HE get there in time or will Frodo really go off alone? All we would have had to do without was the invented scene where Aragorn is almost killed by an Uruk-Hai - hello? He more or less waded into their ranks and slew them with impunity at Helms Deep (and most of them were so terrified of the very sight of him that they ran away). Here again, a sacrifice for mass-market appeal - the Uruk-Hai has killed one of our heroes, so we need to see another hero get revenge on-screen so that everything turns out neat and tidy, Hollywood-style.
The most disappointing character portrayal for me was Aragorn. I thought Viggo Mortensen definitely looked the part, but lacked any hint of the strength of personality and nobility which defined Aragorn in the book. Sure, he plunges into battle with gusto, but when there isn't a battle going on he seems almost indifferent to what's going on around him. After Gandalf falls, he starts telling people what to do, but it isn't clear why (on the strength of his determination and experience) he is CLEARLY the leader of the fellowship after Gandalf. They make him out to be somehow uncertain of whether to take up his heritage as heir of Isildur, when in the book there is no doubt in his mind or anyone else's. There ARE episodes in the book where Aragorn questions his own decisions - most notably at the end of Fellowship/beginning of Two Towers, but this doesn't come out in the movie since he more or less deliberately sends Frodo off to Mordor alone.
When I saw the movie a second time, I noticed that when Boromir inspects the shards of the magical sword which Aragorn is supposed to carry in Rivendell, Narsil has a sort of ring or open circle on the hilt. I also noticed that the sword that Aragorn uses at Amon Hen does NOT have the same hilt. It's possible this was just an oversight (they used a different prop in that battle), but with the attention given to detail, I doubt it. I'm afraid they are going to trample the story again and have Arwen bring it to him or something - otherwise how can they work her into the second movie...? It's also possible that I just saw it from the wrong angle, but if Aragorn had used a magic sword, they probably would (and SHOULD) have added effects to indicate that. Part of the wimpy Aragorn portrayal is due to lacking that sword, and the power it represents in the hands of Elendil's heir. It is supposed to be like a flame when wielded. Nobody else carries around swords like that, hence Aragorn is supposed to be uniquely powerful. In the movie, it's a toss-up whether he could even take Boromir one-on-one...
Most disappointing scene was in Lorien, of course. I didn't mind the Mirror scene and Galadriel's momentary transformation, per se except that Sam was excluded. For instance, in the (dare I mention it...) Bakshi version, I thought they went to the other extreme and downplayed the "edge" on Galdriel's character too much. In that version, she was just a goody-two-shoes, who sort of chuckled at the idea of taking the ring. But Lorien was spoiled in this film by the important character development which was left out. The interplay of Galadriel with Sam and Gimli are very important in the book, yet we see none of it. Sam's gift wasn't mentioned, so one has to worry about the ending of the trilogy in the Shire as well. What a pity that now we won't see Gimli almost starting a fight with Eomer over Galadriel! Or if we do see it, it won't make any sense. That would have been such a great scene, perfectly in line with Gimli's quirky portrayal in the film. Also missing was the CRUCIAL point that destruction of the ring will mean the end of both Rivendell and Lorien. There was some lame, unexplained voiceover about "footsteps of doom", but it wasn't brought out in any understandable way. Since we don't see that Rivendell and Lorien are unique places anyway, I guess it won't matter...
I have to agree with Roger Ebert's review that the hobbits are given short shrift. Merry and Pippin don't conspire to join Frodo because they are his friends and afraid for him, they do it by accident and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The hobbits actually do fairly well for themselves by evading the Black Riders in the book before Strider shows up. Merry goes off in Bree and after seeing a Black Rider snooping around, actually tries to follow it. Strider can't believe that he didn't simply run away, and it shows that hobbits (not just Frodo and Sam) possess a sort of naive fearlessness that is crucial to their significance in the story.
I don't deplore the changes in the story because there is anything sacred about the text (for instance, I'm glad they left out the bizarre Bombadil episode, which couldn't have made any more sense in the movie than it does in the book). Rather, I think the movie could have been better by sticking closer to Tolkien's story, while preserving much more of the feeling.

The part that I liked best was the opening of the movie in the Shire. Here, we saw the actual characters that we love, not the 1-dimensional "Die Hard" versions they fall into when the action scenes begin. If the rest of the film had been done with the same love that the first scenes are, we would have had the movie I was hoping for.