More great images - more clumsy storytelling

Rating: 3/10 (22 August 2003)

Review applies to both The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.
The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers are visually impressive films having wonderful sets, costumes and make-up. The computer-generated effects are generally effective and occasionally wonderful, even awe-inspiring. However both films are boring. The vivid and well-realised images on the screen are not sufficient compensation for the very poor story-telling.
Director Peter Jackson can justly take credit for the feat of organising and being responsible for an apparently huge undertaking in getting support for three ambitious, expensive films and then making them on an apparently epic scale. The art direction is wonderful and he has gathered some great teams about him that convincingly bring Tolkien's Middle-Earth to the cinema. Not least, it must be a feat to be entrusted with millions of dollars and keep all those film executives at bay whilst one gets on with the job.
That said, the storytelling is inept. Jackson shares the writing credits with two others and they take great liberties with Tolkien's story. This might have been all right if they had made the story better or more suitable for the medium of film, but the changes are not very good and they are badly handled. The screenplay also misses much of the wit and interest of Tolkien's work. It also lacks the drama and tension.
Even when considered as a film independent of Tolkien's tale, the story-telling is very poor. This is a director who relies on vivid imagery and hasn't much of an idea as to what makes a decent script. Many of the exchanges between characters are extremely limited; there is nothing deep or profound. Every now and again some of Tolkien's dialogue appears (easy to spot because they're the good bits) but Jackson and Co. appear to have cut and pasted such sections into their script without much care as to whether it comfortably fits into the stuff they have written.
Perhaps it is no accident therefore that the film has not attracted true film stars to play the major roles. This is a B-movie cast to go with a B-movie script. That's not to say that some of the actors aren't good: Ian McKellen, Ian Holm and Sean Bean give good performances, but one suspects that with a decent script the film series would have been attractive to star actors to take the lead roles. Sometimes the casting of virtually unknown actors can pay off but I'm afraid that they aren't really given much to work on and thus little chance to show what they can do.
I don't think that Peter Jackson's direction helps his actors much. This is not a director with a great range, and things such as subtlety lie outside it. Nor do I think he rates the intelligence and comprehension of the audience very highly. Everything is thrust into the viewer's face. Nothing lurks menacingly just out of sight, nothing is merely glimpsed or suspected, no tension is built up: bad things or monsters just appear - "bam!". Slow motion, backlighting (at night and in the wilderness) and extreme close-ups are laid on thickly. The lighting is artificial and the editing is very careless and disjointed.
(This is an occasion where the medium of DVD may really be useful. The good thing about DVD is that people will be able to choose the sections they wish to watch and will thus be able to oogle over the wonderful set-pieces as often as they like without having to suffer the tedious parts.)
I shouldn't really be bothered going on about all this as it's just a film, but I think that undeserved kudos and plaudits are being heaped on Peter Jackson (not to mention tons of money). What is more, studios will may be further encouraged to think that a decent script is unimportant for a good film.
The fact that quite a number of people rave about this film means that the money and effort used to make it were not entirely wasted. (I suspect that they were so impressed by the imagery and the grand theme that they have been able to overlook the films' serious shortcomings.) The sad thing is that a first-rate production was let down by a bad script and clumsy direction. It deserved better.