Subject: Review: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001)

From: Jonathan F. Richards <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 02:42:24 -0000

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

PG-13, 178 minutes

Directed by Peter Jackson

WHEN, WHERE

Now playing at UA North, DeVargas

     For the first magical hour of “The Fellowship of the Ring”, you hope it
will never end.  By the time its third hack-and-chop hour winds down, you begin
to think maybe it won’t.

     And in a sense, it doesn’t.  This three-hour epic is only the first
installment (all three already finished, to be released at the rate of one a
year) of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the classic fantasy novels by the late
J.R.R. Tolkein.  They tell the fabulous tale of the rings forged by the evil
Lord Sauron and distributed among the leaders of the races of the world that he
intends to dominate.  Three rings went to Elves, seven to Dwarves, and nine to
Men.  And the One Ring to Rule Them All, Sauron kept – until it was hacked from
him, finger and all, in a battle.  

     All the rings bestow extraordinary power, and all carry the corrupting
curse that power brings.  And the One Ring, the one that concerns us in this
story, has most improbably wound up in the possession of a certain hobbit, Bilbo
Baggins by name, of the Shire, the place in Middle Earth where Hobbits dwell. 
How that came to pass is the subject of Tolkein’s The Hobbit, the book that
preceded his Rings trilogy, and if you want to know more, you’ll have to read
the book, which is by no means a painful chore.

     As the movie opens, Bilbo (Ian Holm) is celebrating his eleventy-first
birthday, in the company of all the hobbits of the Shire, including his plucky
nephew Frodo (Elijah Wood), and visiting wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen).
 He disappears (literally) to write his memoirs, leaving the ring to Frodo.  But
Gandalf soon tells the younger hobbit what the ring is all about.  Sauron has
sent Dark Riders (the nine Men to whom the original rings went, powerful kings
now reduced to agony-enslaved Ring Wraiths) to recover it so that he can rule
the world.  The ring must be destroyed, and it can only be destroyed in the
fires in which it was forged, in the dark land of Mordor.

     The perilous adventure is joined, taking Frodo and his hobbit companions
Sam (Sean Astin), Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) well beyond
the Shire to be joined eventually by the humans Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), and
Boromir (Sean Bean), the elfin archer Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and the
rough-hewn dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies).  Led by Gandalf, this fellowship
strikes out for Mordor, pursued by the minions of Gandalf’s former mentor,
good-wizard-gone-bad Saruman (Christopher Lee).  .

     For a while the movie is awesome in every respect.  Its storybook visuals
are flawless, its characters are magnificently realized, and none better than
the great McKellan as the white-bearded Gandalf in his peaked wizard’s cap and
flowing robes.  Jackson’s visual imagination seems limitless, and he has
emploedy the services of original Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe to
create a look into which we slip without a moment’s hesitation or disbelief.

     But eventually the storytelling begins to flag, and it becomes one battle
after another, with monsters that could have been borrowed from any of a dozen
other computer-generated horror movies slathering and slicing, hacking and
hewing, dismembering and skewering, and this is followed by several
not-quite-heart-rending scenes of bonding.

     These failings are not enough to drag the whole thing down.  Even when it
loses its narrative power, the movie retains enough stunning visual imagination
to keep it alive.  “The Fellowship of the Ring” is a classic, with magic so
dazzling it makes Harry Potter look like a kid’s birthday trickster.

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