Cub Scouts on a Quest

Rating: 1/10 (10 February 2002)

Oh boy, another Cub Scouts on a Quest story.
Tolkein stole from the best, and Peter Jackson is an efficient director. The acting is all pretty good, with the possible exception of Hugo Weaving, and the film looks expensive. But how come none of the characters of any age are more than 8 years old?
There's a huge loss of emotional interest stemming from the absence of real women (the two so far are just hallucinations out of Burne-Jones paintings), and all the males are just goddam kids - unready or uninterested.
And the characterization of Sauron as the Ultimate Evil is almost zero - a failure of imagination by Tolkein that Jackson does not remedy.
I must say I got more pleasure out of the TV mini-series of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. It may be inferior as a piece of film-making, but at least there are people in it.