Mixed Emotions

Rating: 7/10 (5 January 2006)

There are at least two ways to look at Tolkien's epic fantasy.
One is to see a story about an intellectual of the landed gentry who lives in a conformist parochial society and yearns to travel to an exciting locus of art and culture. His chance comes when he travels there with his legacy, a tool enabling dominating power that an ancestor cheated from a disreputable primitive in a foreign land. Discovering that his inheritance is the basis of a war between his friends and ambitious evil, the intellectual volunteers for a task for which he is not really qualified. Losing most of his friends, he suffers terrible psychic wounds and although he manages to survive his task to the final victory, he is no longer able to feel comfortable in his old home and, bequeathing it to the former tenant class, he leaves to live forever in a rarified world of ancient culture.
The other way is to look at it as a heroic sword-and-sorcery epic in which the good guys beat the bad guys.
The trilogy works because it's BOTH those things and a lot more. The movie works, too, but only in the second way. It DOES make a noteworthy effort to reference the cultural richness of the novels, the special effects are amazing, and the performances are universally good. As entertainment, it's great (although I do think the screenplay is episodic and clunky). But as a visualization of a complex, underrated, and yes important 20th century novel, it falls very short.