A treat for Tolkien fans

Rating: Null/10 (27 December 2001)

As a long-time Tolkien fan, I had great reservations about the live-action production of his now legendary trilogy, "The Lord of the Rings". I wondered how good it could really be; it seemed unlikely anyone could truly capture the breadth and scope of Tolkien's vision of Middle Earth and its inhabitants. Peter Jackson, the director, has taken upon himself a massive undertaking made nonetheless risky because of the demanding audience of "Rings" fans.
The film is actually a wonderful surprise. The filmmakers have wisely chosen not to merely migrate the book to the big screen, but transform it. The books are mostly about the journey; going from place to place with adventures and battles along the way but staying rooted in the travels of its characters. Jackson has created an overarching epic here that doesn't lose this quality but delves more deeply into the action. It is telling that the movie stretches scenes such as the flight from the Black Riders or the battle with the Orcs at Khazad-Dum into substantial set pieces, while in the novel these are relegated to a paragraph or two. I especially enjoyed a scene that conveys the traditional "crossing of the threshold": Samwise, Frodo's traveling companion, stops as they move through a field and says apprehensively, "If I take one step more I will be farther from home than I ever have been."
One problem any version of the Lord of the Rings must endure is the way its audience has already formed its own individual ideas of how things look. When I read the books, I pictured Hobbits in my mind as small, furry folk who loved to smoke and eat numerous times a day, living underground in their hobbit-holes. In the movie they look much as I pictured them. Then the orcs appeared, and I can't say they looked as I imagined (they seemed a bit too small and agile). Yet this didn't bother me because this is the filmmakers' vision and not my own. This is imagination brought to life from the minds of others who have read and loved the same stories and see it a bit differently.
It would be pointless to describe the plot of the film since it's target audience is intimately familiar with the books. I will say it is surprisingly faithful to the story (with some notable exceptions). One brief love scene seemed inserted to appeal to a broader audience but does nothing to detract from the story as a whole.
One truly astonishing aspect is the film's scenery, which is stunning. It was shot in New Zealand (along with the other two which were filmed simultaneously). Many sword and sorcery epics seem to take place in the woods on the fringes of suburbia, but here we see expansive mountainous regions and vast forests that seem to stretch for miles. One scene has the heroes floating down a river between two gigantic statues of kings with their hands outstretched as if in warning, and it brings home the dedication to detail and realism used even in this mythic setting.
The casting is largely on target. Elijah Wood hits just the right notes as Frodo by conveying an age beyond his tender years (and size). Viggo Mortensen is convincing as Aragorn, a secretive and tormented ranger. Ian Holm, practically a Hobbit himself, is perfect as the aging Bilbo, and Liv Tyler uses her already elfin appearance to the hilt as Arwen. The only odd casting choice to me was Sean Astin as Samwise, whom I last saw in "Rudy" where he played an undersize football player. He's now grown rather husky, but he uses this to his advantage in a largely thankless role (although he becomes more important in the later books).
"Fellowship of the Rings" could have been what I feared it would be: a silly sword-and-sorcery flick that gets mired in special effects while substituting action for depth. Take the summer film "Dungeons and Dragons" for example. Instead, it takes the time to develop its characters, and places them in a setting that is both epic on scope and mythic in dimension. The film is a bit long at three hours, and it ends abruptly; but it is based on a long book with a lot of ground to cover, and it is the first in a trilogy after all. I hope the remaining films live up to it's grand vision and ambitiousness, and I think that based on what I've seen here, I can be optimistic. This is a wonderful entry into a great epic.