An insult to the book AND to the art of cinema

Rating: 5/10 (14 January 2002)

Predictably, the film's apologists are saying things like, "Well, books and films are separate media, changes have to be made, etc." OF COURSE you have to make changes when you film a book. Everyone knows that. My complaint is that Jackson made THESE changes rather than other ones. Most of his choices have no justification other than laziness. The result is a bad, flat, lazy film ... and you don't have to read the book in order to realise how bad, flat and lazy it is (although it helps).
I'm not the first to complain of the fact that we see Sauron almost immediately. "But it's a MOVIE," others have explained patiently in response. "We HAVE to see the villain early on..." It's people who say THIS that betray how little they understand film, not those who complain of infidelity to the book. In "The Usual Suspects" the master villain Kaiser Soze dominated almost every scene - as an unseen threat. (Clarification: after a while there are hints that Soze MIGHT be one of the characters we've already seen, but this is inessential to the sense of menace.) I hasten to add that I don't think much of "The Usual Suspects", but at least the unseen villain aspect worked, if nothing else did. I'm not convinced we need to see the villain at all (arguably we don't in "The Exorcist"), but even if we must, we needn't see him so soon. Think also of "The Third Man", "Jaws", the EFFECTIVE screen versions of "Dracula" (not Coppola's), "Ladyhawke"... The odd thing about Jackson's film is that we see the villain BEFORE we see the heroes; even "Star Wars" did it the other way around. And a lame and unimpressive villain it is too. Darth Vader was twelve times more scary.
The fact that Jackson's Sauron looks like a plastic samurai reminds me: there IS a successful film that adopts Jackson's strategy of showing us the villain(s) at the start, before cutting to the story of the good guys: Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai". I'm not saying the technique can't work, merely that it needn't be used (and anyway, it doesn't work here). Any ONE of Kurosawa's samurai is more menacing than Jackson's Sauron, including the one played by Mifune - and the Samurai are the heroes.
The point is that Jackson completely ignored the tension, the sense of stability gradually being eroded, in the book, in favour of an info-packed, voice over montage. Does anyone seriously think this is a good CINEMATIC device? It's simply the easy way out for a director who lacks either the courage or the skill or the good sense to do anything else. Jackson is giving us information so that we'll know what's going on later; we get the feeling we should be taking notes. In the book, Tolkein USED his information, holding it back until the right moment, so that when it was revealed, it had a dramatic and emotional effect. Tolkein's is the better literary device; it's also the better cinematic device. ("Star Wars", for instance, favours Tolkein's method.)
If Jackson must have had a prologue, why not just a very short one - Bilbo finding the ring 61 years earlier? Its significance would not be immediately obvious, but it would become clear soon enough, and clearer still as the narrative progressed. Now THAT would have been good cinema. It would also have required careful work, though, which is why Jackson took the easy way out and just gave us all of the back story in one hit.
And he makes the mistake of telling us everything at once again and again. There's no mystery to Frodo's flight from the Shire, since we know where the Black Riders are (and WHAT they are), where Gandalf is, etc., before Frodo does. I can understand a director's reluctance to use an extended flashback, but they CAN work, IF handled with skill, which is no doubt why Jackson took the path of safe mediocrity. ("The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" and "Citizen Kane" both use extended flashbacks, so don't tell me the device can't work.) The reason we are free to sit and listen for a long time in Tolkein's Council of Elrond is that it's a natural pedal point in the narrative; after a long and desperate flight, the heroes are at last safe, and it's time to relax and take stock. This could have been just as true of the film as it is true of the book, IF Jackson had paced the action correctly ... or indeed, at all.
In my earlier remarks I complained about how ugly and grim Jackson has made Middle Earth look; I won't belabour the point here. But if THIS change from the book (in which get a true feeling of how lovely everything is) isn't a cinematic crime, I don't know what is. As is the fact that the characters look as if they have been digitally pasted into the settings (even when they haven't been). If you want to see more beautifully filmed landscapes to which the characters are more meaningfully related you needn't look far: try "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) (or anything by David Lean from the 1950s on), "Himalaya" (1999), "The Widow of Saint Pierre" (2000) - and these are just a few of the colour productions; "A Canterbury Tale" (1944), "The Seven Samurai" (1954), "The World of Apu" (1959), "Andrei Rublyov" (1969) and other films by the directors of these show how often it has been done in black and white. Jackson uses colour so poorly I found myself wishing he HAD used black and white. Indeed, his film is so bad that even a random change would probably be for the best.