A miserable montage of drab images, pretending to be an epic

Rating: 5/10 (30 December 2001)

No doubt I'll be accused of setting my expectations too high. In a sense, I did. I honestly expected a good film, even though the other works of Peter Jackson I'd seen ("Meet the Feebles" and "Heavenly Creatures") gave me little reason to expect one. But in the end, so what? The film is not bad because it failed to live up to Tolkein's book, or to my expectations, or to my hopes, or other to other people's expectations and hopes, or to anything external to itself. It's bad because it's bad. It would be bad even if Tolkein, and all his readers, had never existed.
I don't mind in the least that the images of Middle Earth are different from my own private ones. In itself, this would please me. It's always so much more of a delight to be presented with unexpected beauty - with illustrations we feel we couldn't or wouldn't have come up with ourselves. The trouble with these images is that they're NOT particularly beautiful. And that's not all that's wrong with them...
This is a story in which it's heartbreaking when so much as a single tree is felled, because the trees are so beautiful, and so rich in detail - except that they aren't. Jackson's trees and landscapes are shot on grainy, unsaturated film (there's so little colour one wonders why he didn't shoot in black and white - in fact, I found myself wishing he had), with a camera that can't keep still long enough for us to get a clear look at anything (when he bothers to venture out of doors at all; this is a horribly studio-bound production). The story tells us that Middle Earth can't possibly be one tenth as drab as Jackson's images say it is. For that matter, the countryside around Wellington isn't one tenth as drab as Jackson's images say it is. As usual, the cheesy digital effects only serve to make everything look even more ordinary - but I'm sure the damage was done long before the CGI people even saw the footage.
Given the fact that I'd read the book, and so had a sense of the wondrousness of Middle Earth that stood a chance of surviving Jackson's lousy camerawork, editing and effects, I might have been able to ignore all this - if the script hadn't been, in a word, dreadful. To see what's wrong with it it's best (although not necessary) to look at how Tolkein paced the story in his book.
Tolkein is careful to deny us information for as long as he can. Judging from the first chapter, "The Lord of the Rings" might well turn out to be a comedy of manners about hobbits in the vein of Jane Austen; only at the start of the second do we start to feel the static electricity that precedes a storm, and only AFTER we've become thoroughly engrossed in the characters and the stagnant world of the Shire does Tolkein even start to clear away the mystery he has created. The quest begins slowly and it looks (to the characters, if not to us) as though it is almost over before we have a firm understanding of what was going on. A film version of the story can be as cavalier as it likes with regard to detail so long as it preserves the slow pacing of the opening chapters, the mystery, and the GRADUALLY building threat.
So what does Jackson do? He tells us everything at once; he spends the first two-thirds of his film on rushed, unimaginative exposition; he fast-forwards through any scenes that might have been able to generate atmosphere or magic in order to concentrate on action scenes that (in the book) only have any effect at all because of what surrounds them. An inordinate amount of time is spent in the mines of Moria. This is absurd: the Moria sequence does not lie at the heart of the story, it's not (apart from one detail, which could have been far better handled) important in itself - and it all takes pace in near-perfect darkness. That's the central flaw, but there are a hundred others. Notice how we're shown the scene where Sam says goodbye to his pony, even though we never saw the part of the story where he acquired the pony - indeed, we never even knew that the pony existed until we saw the "sad" farewell? This may be the result of careless editing, but unfortunately, the entire script looks as though it might have come about as the result of careless editing.
If Jackson's complete lack of visual skill adds insult to injury, Howard Shore's music adds insult to insult. Tolkein's epic - in fact, ANY epic - deserves something better than this tuneless, pseudo-Celtic drivel.