Bored of the rings again

Rating: 5/10 (19 November 2005)

'The Lord of the Rings' is a much liked, but also widely derided book (aactually three books, just as it is now three films). It's not hard to see why both opinions are held. The narrative has epic sweep, but the moral motivations of the characters are simplistic in the extreme. They may be torn between good and evil, but these are presented as primeval, opposing forces: the concept of mixed motive scarcely exists. The much noted absence of sex from the book typifies this: it's not that the book would benefit from sexual content per se, rather that the heroic model of its universe cannot accommodate anything as challenging as the fusion of love and lust.
Yet I actually like the book, with its rich descriptive language. In fact, the monsters and landscape so described were long considered unfilmable; but with the aid of modern computer graphics, Peter Jackson has achieved a visually perfect reconstruction of Middle Earth, with almost everything looking exactly as you imagined it from the text (though the orcs seem to be a little influenced by the 'Alien' with their ferocious, flashing teeth). The virtual Gollum is perhaps the most skillfully animated character of any yet rendered on screen. Yet there was another reason why the book should have been tricky to film, and this is the relationship of its the characters to history and time. The novel's best point, in my opinion, is the way that it conveys a sense of a vast, slow journey, one that criss-crosses the routes of a thousand past journeys that collectively have brought the present to pass. Stories are told, often in fragmentary form; and the end of the quest represents not just the end of the foregrounded tale, but the end of an fictional era, and the end of the reader's quest to understand that era as well. This is all essentially wordy stuff, narrative and dialogue, that does not just fill the spaces between the action points, but provides them with their context. And in spite of making his movie over nine full hours, Jackson seems to have been unable to find time for this, and the first film, as well as the first part of this instalment, precede as an unbroken series of fairly meaningless happenings, all spectacular but pointless. For example, when Frodo (the hero) visits the dead marshes, he needs to know how they came to be; otherwise, the fact he sees corpses lying below the water is just empty decoration. In Osgilliath, we see just a random ruined city, not understanding it was once the capital of Gondor. And so on. Jackson has been generally very faithful to Tolkein's plotting (though he takes a few liberties in the second half of this film), but this faithfulness takes the form of completism: almost every image from the book needs to be rendered, but if you don't already know the story, you might struggle to work out why.
So although the description of travel was one of the very best things in the novel, this film actually improves in its second half, when the travelling slows or stops, and the story starts to feel less sequential. The changes to the plot, however, are not so successful, because where Jackson should have cut selectively, he has instead largely embellished the action, usually adding more melodrama than was present in the original. So all the heroes need to nearly die in battle; Farmair must be tempted by the ring, just as his brother Boromir was, and the heroes must join him when he fights his rearguard action in Osgilliath; Pippin and Merry must trick the ents into helping out, and so on. Quite why Jackson considered the story needed more incident is hard to fathom, especially as there's a shallow obviousness to this extra material. The emotional impact is further deadened by the decision to play every scene with music. The music is not awful or ill-chosen, but there's no contrast, and one cannot stay in state of heightened arousal for three hours at a stretch. This is a film for which you could make a terrific trailer; but when every scene is played as a climax, the cumulative effect is lessened, not increased. Indeed, the battle with Saruman is given an apocalyptic tone that seems to pre-empt the final part of the story; but this second movie two ends short of the second book, ignoring the potential of tremendous, pessimistic cliff-hanger with which Tolkein concluded his second part.
In conclusion, the visuals are great. But the film misses what allows the book to transcend its peculiarities. If you like 'The Silmarillion' (Tolkein's more literary, sophisticated prequel), then this probably isn't for you.