Sad puppy goes to Mordor

Rating: 6/10 (26 December 2001)

OK, folks, I was willing to give this movie a shot and just see it as it was coming at me, without going back to the text and wondering how come Glorfindel had a sex-change operation. But even one succeeds in separating Tolkien from the Lord of the Rings s/he still has to face the facts. The facts are: it's a bunch of mediocre actors (save two or three) thrusted into an animated Tolkien calendar. Young Mr. Frodo has only two facial expressions - sad puppy and happy puppy, and I quickly grew tired of both. Galadriel needs some cheap special effect to show the transformation as she measures herself up to the One Ring - people used to ACT this sorta stuff, you know. Gimli can only growl under all that makeup - good thing though, since his role has been reduced to a mere cartoon, his as well as those of Legolas, Merry and Pippin. The plot has been dumbed down, in two major ways: 1) the only way Jackson can show a conflict is to film a fight - everybody fights in this flick, Gandalf takes on Saruman, Aragorn goes into a swordfight with the Nazguls, Lurtz gets written into the script only to be hacked to pieces, etc. 2) there is no internal struggle, for anyone but especially for Frodo - he volunteers to be a Ring-bearer because everybody else is having a fight at the Council, he does not face Nazguls - at the Weathertop he just cowers under their gazes, at the Ford he gets carried away by Arwen, he does not ponder taking his friends to Mordor - they are running away from farmer Maggot anyways, why don't go to Mordor as long as they are at it? Stuff just happens in this movie. Altogether it's a sad story of how great special effects were wasted on one lil' director's lil' thoughts. Maybe if he wasn't so short he would not be so fond of cheap melodrama and Aragorn would be spared his (Jackson's) inferiority complex...