The movie world redeems itself

Rating: 10/10 (28 January 2002)

My experience up until now has been that movie makers could only ever ruin a perfectly good, even great, story by translating it to the silver screen. For this reason, 40 years ago, I made a pact with my best friend that if they ever tried to make a movie of Tolkien's classic, we would pay good money to be allowed not to see it! How glad I am that we agreed, in the autumn of 2001, to set aside that pact.
Watching Peter Jackson's production, the feeling was one of finally getting to meet people whom I had only heard about before - most of them didn't look anything like my mental picture, but I recognized them instantly nevertheless. In particular, Ian Holme was the perfect Bilbo Baggins. The moment he appeared on the screen, I knew him at once, and Holme didn't just play Bilbo, he became him.
From the point of view of the actual action, my impression was of watching someone else telling the tale of an experience we had both shared. Some things I would have found important, he left out, some things I thought trivial, he left in, and some things he saw completely differently from the way I did, but he was nevertheless still talking about the same incident.
On the negative side, I was disappointed with the casting of Liv Tyler as Arwen. Personally, I had looked for a more ethereal beauty than Liv Tyler possesses. I also found that leaving out the entire confrontation between the Nine of the Fellowship and Galadriel meant that parts of the subsequent story must either also be omitted, or must be hard to understand for those who don't know the story line as well as I do. We shall see, as parts II and III come out, how Peter Jackson is going to cope with this.
Overall, I must say that in this film, Peter Jackson has redeemed the film-making industry. It was a stroke of genius on his part to require that all concerned re-read the trilogy before picking up the film script. By so doing, he made sure that any rank departures from Professor Tolkien's original intent would be immediately short-circuited. I hope that others will follow his example when their turn comes to translate classic works to the screen, and that from now on, producers, directors, actors and screen-writers will work together to preserve the artistic integrity of the original works, as Jackson has now shown us can be done.