It could have been much more

Rating: Null/10 (16 January 2002)

This is, I agree, and by a wide margin, the best fantasy-adventure film yet made; that assessment, unfortunately, says as much about the paucity of the genre as the splendours of 'Fellowship'. For once, the vast expenditure was not a case of `improved means to diminished ends'; no one who sees it will ever forget the nightmare vision of the orcs swarming down the pillars in Kazad-Dum (and as swiftly reversing the process at the appearance of the Balrog), nor the brief, chilling instant when the gentle Bilbo (Ian Holm's performance is faultless), reaching for the Ring, becomes a snarling pseudo-Gollum, a true cinematic translation of Tolkien's text. While many of the special effects have the familiarity of old acquaintances, none are bargain-basement, very few gratuitous (the silly `hallucinatory' stuff when Samwise nearly drowns is worse than unnecessary, but happily brief). But as so often in this era, where technology is prized above literacy, and websites equipped with state-of-the-art bells and whistles are not embarrassed to parade infantile errors of syntax, usage, and spelling, one is staggered that with all that money and all that technique being splashed about, people who claim to admire Tolkien can commit such follies at the purely verbal level. Did no one have enough of an ear to be jarred when either Pippin or Merry (I'm not sure), escaping from the irascible Farmer Cotton, says "He's definitely overreacting"? -- a phrase as impossible in Middle Earth as "No way", or "I am SO not okay with that." And Elrond, at the Council, is made to trot out the absurd mixed metaphor, "The LIST of our allies is growing THIN" -- the RANKS of one's allies might grow thin, or their list grow SHORT; as given the line is unmeaning.
As for omissions and condensations, most are unworrying; I wouldn't much miss Tom Bombadil if he were left out of the book, and the Barrow-Wight might well be one peril too many, but it seems to me very damaging that the film completely leaves out the ancient enmity between the Elves and the Dwarves, a hostility to which only the threat of Mordor can bring truce, and which, in the book gives edge to the exchanges and a poignancy to the developing friendship between Legolas and Gimli; deprived of it in the picture, these two characters are reduced to wallpaper. Again, if it was a question of time (though it would only have taken about a minute-and-a-half), I would have readily sacrificed one or two of those circling helicopter shots of battle to get in Gandalf's explanation of WHY the Dwarves of Moria "delved too deep and awoke ancient evils" -- that they were seeking mithril, found nowhere else. Gandalf's review of the properties of the metal, lengthy in the book, could easily be condensed, to reach the real point, his remark that Thorin gave Bilbo a mithril corslet, and that its worth was "more than the value of the whole Shire, and everything in it." Cut to a wonderstruck Frodo, slipping a hand inside his shirt -- all of which, at small cost, would give a great deal more point to the scene, soon to come, when the chain-mail saves Frodo's life. The only point of the silly bit of political correctness when the besworded Arwen gets the drop on Aragorn (who has maintained virtually sleepless vigilance for about sixty years) is perhaps to remind us that Zena, too, came from New Zealand, though the scene at the Fords of Bruinen, to which it leads, is admirably realised, the effect exactly as described by Tolkien. The film makes nothing of Lothlorien, although I would have thought its dreamlike quality, the sensation, as Samwise puts it, of being "inside a song", would be readily conveyed in purely cinematic terms. In general, and although New Zealand certainly supplies the raw material, and the cinematography was fine, what I missed most from the book was the author's acute feeling for place, terrain and climate and differing texture. All the great films derived from books -- Tom Jones, say, Great Expectations, The Third Man -- find visual-aural equivalents for verbal magic; "Fellowship" is a pretty good flick and perhaps a landmark in an otherwise undistinguished genre, but not the classic it might have been.