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

From: Harvey S. Karten <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 19:39:55 -0000

LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

 Reviewed by Harvey Karten
 New Line Cinema/ Wingnut Films
 Director: Peter Jackson
 Writer:  Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson
 Cast: Sean Astin, Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom,
Billy Boyd, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, Dominic
Monaghan, Viggo Mortensen, John Rhys-Davies, Andy Serkis,
Liv Tyler, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood.

   If you're of a certain age you remember the song that goes:

   Three little words,
   Oh how I long for those three little words,
   I love those three little words...etc.

   Those are the three little words that every guy dreads hearing
from his steady: "Where's my ring?"  If you think that only modern
women would kill for a ring, you haven't seen anything yet.  In
Peter Jackson's lavish, muy expensive adaptation of J.R.R.
Tolkien's blockbusting sci-fi trilogy, "Lord of the Rings," a
diminutive fella is so reluctant to give up that little gold band with
its really cool engraving that he fights terrible contenders for the
prize: and none of them are even women (or at least he doesn't
look closely enough to find out).  With a faux-Shakespearean
screenplay penned by the director together with Philippa Boyens
and Fran Walsh and at least three pairs of wide, turquoise blue
eyes which may have been courtesy of Bausch & Lomb,
Jackson's epic tale filmed by Andrew Lesnie across the length
and breadth of New Zealand is likely to hold only its key audience
age for the entire three hours.  

   The targeted audience, I'd wager, is not the same as the Harry
Potter crowd.  Raise the typical age from nine to, oh, about
sixteen, and you'll find the key people to fill the seats of theaters
across the U.S.--where the film opens at about the same time as
it premieres to an eager band of Kiwis who spent parts of 274
days watching the entire trilogy take form.  There's quite a market 
for a certain category of sci-fi tale, the sort that elevates
stories into legends and legends into myths.  If in pre-literate
days (and I don't mean the current era) the bright, wide-eyed
children would gather around their elders to hear tales of ghosts
and goblins, elves and spirits, the current hi-tech, wired
generation prefers the videogame to the verbalizer, the big
screen to the story-teller.  

   Though the story takes part in the so-called Middle Kingdom at
a time that weapons varied from the large stones known to
paleolithic humankind to the bows and arrows familiar to Robin
Hood and his Merry Band, its New Zealand topography evokes
current events, in its most horrifying scenes the efforts by the
Northern Alliance and its compatriots in Afghanistan to smoke out
the evil forces hidden in the innumerable caves of Tora Bora. 
During an over-narrated introduction that punctuates a landscape
familiar to any who have traveled into rural areas, we are
introduced to a band of leprechaun-type folks, Hobbits, who are
each about four feet tall and whose elder statesman is the 111-
year-old Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm)--who has custody of the title
ring and who with the blessing of his wizard friend Gandalf (Ian
McKellen) hands it for safekeeping to his adopted nephew Frodo
(Elijah Wood).  The presentation may not be a mistake when you
look at civilization as a whole, but from the teenager's point of
view the gift is a disaster.  This is a ring capable of giving its
possessor great power for evil, the sort of link that Osama bin
Laden would love so much that he'd send scores of young men
to kill themselves to get it.  With it he could wreak havoc on the
eighty percent of the world with infidel inclinations and about sixty
percent of the people who are true believers as well.  What's
more the ring actually WANTS to be owned by the bad guys, so
that everywhere Frodo goes he seems to be pulled in the
direction of evil beings.  

   The Tolkien trilogy, which was filmed at a cost (including
marketing) of $400 million--is the epic story of Frodo's fights with
fanatics, the latter led by turncoat Saruman (Christopher Lee)
who rules over assorted birds, simian-like creatures, and
tentacled terrors of the marshes like a lion tamer whose charisma
requires no whip.  Not even the wizard Gandalf, employing the
language of Milton and Shakespeare, is a match for this albino-
countenanced Satan who is determined to wrest the prize from
the hands of its young protector using scores of persistent
horsemen and sabre-rattling devotees.   Opposing them are
Frodo, whose team includes the noble warrior Aragorn (Viggo
Mortensen), bowman Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and a Dwarf,
Gimil (John Rhys-Davies), whose Scottish accent could almost
charm the horse from under its misguided Mephistophelean. 
Hiking across Hobbiton hills into forests and Alpine-like
panoramas, they are helped at one point by Galadriel (Cate
Blanchett), who is queen of the elves and that tribe's princess,
Arwen (Liv Tyler).  Fighting back and escaping, dodging and
skirmishing, the good guys relentlessly clutch to their prize, their
scariest battle taking place in the murky Moria mines where they
come across cadavers, are attacked by Orcs and ogres, and
resume their odyssey to Mordor.  Only there can this ring
destroyed and the world saved.

   With only a slim risk of being accused of spilling spoilers, I'd
add that if you are reading this now, you can safely assume that
Frodo and his fearless fellows did ultimately succeed to ravage
the ring.  When we troop to the theaters in December of 2002
and 2003, we go not to determine the final outcome but because
we know that the journey is far more important than the
destination.

    While this picture is anything but an indie, New Line Cinema
must be congratulated for emulating art-house distributors--for
taking a risk with a young New Zealand director whose claim to
fame is the critically well-received but decidedly specialized
"Heavenly Creatures," a dark story of New Zealand teens whose
obsessive relationship drove them to murder.  In that 1994 New
Zealand-produced work, Jackson uncovers a bizarre, Freudian
fantasy world created by the girls, Paulie Parker and Juliet
Hulme, that must have caught the attention of the producers
seeking the precise man to take the helm here.   "Lord of the
Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" is not the sort of sci-fi I'm
accustomed to or fancy.  I prefer the more credible and realistic,
the type that sends up our current civilization rather than aims at
widening the pupils.  "Stepford Wives" is my cup of cappuccino
with its parody of men's fantasies while "Logan's Run" yields
epiphanies of our youth-crazed culture.  There's too much one-
darn-thing-after-another in Tolkien's tale, and the filmmaker who
wants to remain faithful to the text must of necessity pitch a
plethora of battles.  After a struggle with an octopus-like killer, yet
another with equestrian beings out of Washington Irving, then
some fisticuffs with an ayatollah-like madman with hair as white
as an elf-queens' ghostly pallor, I cry "enough!"  Is it possible that
our young hero holding firm to his prize could be equally wide-
eyed at every adventure?  I'd guess he'd be more like the twelve-
year-old boy grooving on his long-haired, silver-tongued
geometry teacher on the first day of the new term only to have
eyes wide shut by the sixteenth time that he is frustrated trying to
prove that side-angle-side does not really equal side-angle-side.  

Rated PG-13.  Running time: 178 minutes.  (C) 2001 by
Harvey Karten, [email-masked]

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