By far the best of the three: courage, temerity, resilience and tenacity

Rating: 10/10 (11 January 2007)

After death, severance, separation, loss and confusion, we must regroup and recoup, rejoice and return. So let's save Gandolf first who shifts from The Grey to The White, from powerless to finally magical. The details are all accounted for in the DVD. Then the two hobbits that were captured and thought dead were only prisoners and they will manage to escape and even win the battle of the film, without anyone knowing it really. They will make friends with tree-herders and they will lead the forest against the bad wizard in his tower. And then the trio man-elf-dwarf will liberate some king in some city from the power of some middle man of a wizard and lead his people and troops to a mountain citadel, and this same man and same elf and same dwarf will have the surprise to see the king of the elves and his army arrive to reinforce the humans against the orcs. Some kind of slow growing seeds of courage and commitment. Some call that love too. And the battle will start, spectacular and grandiose, and many will die on both sides and the final salvaging reinforcements will arrive under the authority of Gandolf The White. The orcs will be defeated. During that time the two lost hobbits and the tree-herders will start a tree war against the malicious bad wizard in his tower with his mine and giant smithy underground at the foot of his mausoleum-spire that had provided the army of orcs with all kinds of arms, weapons and armours. And it will all go drowned and soaked, overflowed and flooded. That's how a battle is won, with some courage not to feel pain, with a lot of luck not to hear the warnings of Ms Caution, Miss Prudence and Mrs Carefulness, the three witches of passivity, and a fair dose of blindness not to see danger. And here we are with a long film for a young audience, though the audience of the first film must have aged a little and the film is becoming a lot more human. We even have several heterosexual kisses along with quite a few man-to-man embraces. Going on that way we may have a couple of weddings at the end of the third episode. And it all ends with two hobbits raiding the cellar and kitchen of the bad gloomy dangerous vicious wizard and we even find that funny, even if we are slightly worried for their waistlines. And the real end of course comes with the declaration of total trust from Sam the hobbit gardener who guards no one but cultivates friendship and Frodon the hobbit adventurer guardian of the ring and carrier of its powers to the final destruction site somewhere in hell. This episode though manages to leave monsters and other diabolical figures behind, which is good, and to emphasize more on the human qualities of all these characters. It even gets in a way marvelous for children with walking trees even if this is nothing but the rewriting of Macbeth, but Macbeth deserves many rewritings. And we recognize what is going to become one essential sign of Stephen King's Dark Tower. The main human hero in the Fellowship of the Ring, even after scattering and especially after it, is the surviving son of the long ago destroyed Northern Kingdom. He is a Ranger, a dying out category of peacemakers and justice executioners, just like Roland is a Gunslinger. But still, and that is going to last till the end I imagine, no bridge or door from this medieval fantasy world to our modern world and it is a shame. It is some kind of model for many sagas to come, but it stops short of real science-fiction when the fiction speaks of our own world through another layer of time or space.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne