Well done adaptation of the book

Rating: Null/10 (21 December 2001)

Lord of the Rings: Just the name of it conjures up memories for those of us who read the books voraciously in our youth. Several attempts have been made to try an make a visual presentation out of this mountain of words, but none captured the full flavor. Clocking in at 400 pages of small type per book, the three books of JRR Tolkien's masterpiece are a daunting task for any film maker. The slavish attention to detail among the readers of the series is something to reckon with as well. They will be very unforgiving of any glaring errors, and no doubt will still sharpshoot even the small ones.
I believe that Peter Jackson's monumental task of filming all 3 movies together, and then staging them a year apart will go down in history as a pivotal film making event in the 2000s. The audacity of tying up several noted and hundreds of lesser actors for a year and a half(ling) of principal photography took a lot of pull. The expenditure of money (approaching $300 million), the scope of the material and scale of the production and sets are all grand.
Now enough back story, what about the movie?
Several points of the story have been cut and rearranged to make the narrative flow to the point. Tolkien was nothing if not verbose, so to eliminate Tom Bombadil, or compress several of the events of the hobbits leaving the Shire was not too distracting. I took exception to the scene famous from the trailer of Arwen (Liv Tyler), dubbed "Xenarwen" by some 'net wag (because of her transformation from a shy elf daughter of Elrond to a sword swinging "if you want him, come and claim him" vixen on screen) because she was such a minor character in the first book. I suppose it was to "punch up" her character a bit and make her presence more known, and to have a strong female character in an otherwise male dominated cast. Still, the changes wrought in the narrative were but little distraction. The majority of the narrative strings together and follows the book closely, even using much of the dialog, where appropriate. I can't really complain about what was left behind given the movie's gargantuan 178 minute running time. Trust me, get snacks at the concessions stand, you will be in it for the long haul. Step out for a quick break, and you could well miss something important.
The scope and scale of the film is grand. The whole of principal photography was shot in New Zealand, and they were able to replicate Middle Earth quite well. The scenes of the various towns and the townsfolk were well done and believable. The out of doors, the woods, mountains, meadows and forests had a lifelike look to them, well lit without being too bright.
Forced perspective as well as CGI tricks were used to differentiate between the sizes of the different races, with hobbits coming in at waist high to Men, with Dwarves and Elves filling the gaps. I thought Gimli was quite small, being, um, dwarfed by Legolas.
Much scenery was filled in with CGI in order to create the huge stonework and the terrible landscapes of some of the settings. The underground scenes of the Mines of Moria had a bit of flat CGI hangover that comes from inventing the whole of the scenery from the heart of a computer. Still, the CGI scenery had less sheen and artifacts to it than Star Wars' CGI, so the state of the artform is improving, even if the pace of the change has slowed.
There was an unholy host of horrors animated with CGI, and they appear to best the Lucas creations by showing thousand strong armies gathering and working and forging weapons in the dark of their underground lairs. The animated characters were well done, without many cheap effects.
The acting in general was well done, without some of the leadenness that often pervades costume dramas. I am not a fan of Elijah Wood as Frodo, but he plays the role with the right gravity and reluctance. Viggo Mortensen was spot on for Aragon, once you got used to the haunted look that he brings to his character. Sean Bean as Boromir was perfectly cast, and there were no real glaring errors or standouts in the remainder of the cast. Little scenery was chewed, and events were articulated and feelings shown with honesty.
The pace of the film is not always even, but tends to build as the film progresses. If you are not familiar with the narrative, the long walks across the meadows or hills appear agonizingly slow, but when you realize they are covering for months of travel, they can be excused their slowness. I felt the balance of voiceover vs live action to carry the narrative was very well done, with much of what was spoken about at Rivendell in the book as stories are instead shown as live action events in a more or less time line sequence, rather than just as flashbacks.
The combat scenes are fast paced and excellently choreographed, without any Matrix-like camera chicanery, just good classic swashbuckiling. The portrayal of archery is well shot, as I am a former archer myself, and could feel the expectation of the shots, and the rain of the arrows as they fell. Headbutting is a worthless exercise unless you have no other choice, it invariably hurts both combatants equally, yet it crops up again and again in the combat sequences here as well as many many other recent Hollywood films. Anyone who has actually headbutted another person in anger will soon realize that action movie's over reliance on this trick is just eyecandy. Still the rest of the swordwork and so on were well done. The orcs were appropriately scary in kind of a Predator sort of way.
I believe that this is the first film to truly live up to such an expansive book as The Fellowship of the Ring. You will not want to miss this portrayal if you are a fan of the LOTR book series, and you will probably want to see it anyway just because it is so well staged. It is a masterwork, and while not the best movie of the year, it is one of the most ambitious and one that lands closest to the mark it aimed for. The tenor of the film, the acting, the pace and the story are all compelling and well played considering the gargantuan task they undertook to film. Definitely worth a look.