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

From: Jerry Saravia <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2002 20:17:50 -0000

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (2001)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
January 2nd, 2001
RATING: 3 stars

I have not read the books of J.R.R. Tolkien's hugely popular epic fantasy 
though I have always meant to. This may be the year I choose to finally after 
abandoning what many deem as the epic fantasy of all time. There is no doubt 
about it because the characters and themes of this grandly surreal world has 
filtered through our pop culture radar ever since the books were first 
published. Many films have tried to capture the magic of Tolkien's world. For 
example, Tolkien's books are the models of fantasy for George Lucas's own 
"Star Wars" trilogy. I love stories about goblins, ogres, fire-breathing 
dragons, unicorns, etc. "Lord of the Rings" is an often breathtaking film 
adaptation but it is curiously overdone and remote, and I can't say that is 
true of "Star Wars," as unfair a comparison as it may be. 

Tolkien's world, known as Middle-Earth, is entirely imaginary and comprised 
of creatures and sounds and sights entirely not out of our own world. There 
are the Hobbits, the good-natured, good-hearted, fondly talkative, 
hairy-footed, pointy-eared people who are about as tall as dwarves. They can 
live for years and years, as they do chatting it up, smoking herbs and eating 
merrily in their private world of Shire. The hobbit of pure heart in this 
story is Frodo Baggins (a perfectly well-cast Elijah Wood), who embarks on an 
adventure to bring a powerful ring, known as the One Ring, to the fires of 
Mount Doom and destroy it, once and for all time. Easier said than done. Is 
Frodo up to the challenge?

There are wizards in this world as well. There is the good wizard Gandalf 
(Ian McKellen) and an evil wizard named Saruman (Christopher Lee) who wants 
the ring, as most of the characters do. There are storms of faceless horsemen 
riding in stallions and stampeding through Middle-Earth looking for Frodo. It 
is Gandalf who tells Frodo to carry the ring, rather than Frodo's uncle Bilbo 
Baggins (Ian Holm) who might be a tad greedy. After all, this Ring can make 
men and women do strange things - you need will power to use the Ring wisely. 
Not unlike the Force. 

Along this perilous journey, Frodo is accompanied by three Hobbit friends, 
Sam (Sean Astin), Mercy (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd). Of course,
 Hobbits can only do so much damage in actual combat. Also along for the ride 
are the members of the Fellowship, which include Boromir (Sean Bean), the 
dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), an archery elf 
expert, and the mysterious, aloof Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen). Together their 
journey lasts through several different lands of beauty, endless caves, 
cascading waterfalls, a battle with a tree troll, a flaming duel with a 
vicious dragon known as Balrog, and so on. There are also more characters who 
pop up including the serene queen of elves Lady Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), 
the serene, dreamy elf Arwen (Liv Tyler), and more and more creatures such as 
Orcs and the ring wraiths, known as Nazgul, who gallop around in stallions 
that shriek. These silhouetted Black Riders are as fearsome as the Headless 
Horseman. 

Director Peter Jackson ("Heavenly Creatures") does a massively complicated 
job of bringing all these characters and vistas together in a film that tops 
the three-hour mark. There is so much to take in and cherish in "Lord of the 
Rings" that it is no wonder it will take two more movies to bring closure to 
all the incidents and events. It is like a gloriously illustrated picture 
book come to life. Jackson and his band of set designers and special-effects 
artists spare no expense in creating this fictional world. 

But if I am afforded the luxury of reviewing this film, I can honestly say 
that "Lord of the Rings" is deeply imaginative but at its core, somehow 
uninvolving. Jackson affords his actors the luxury of close-ups and there are 
so many in the film that there is nothing left to look at. You can only see 
Wood's beatific and worried Frodo face with wide blue eyes so often before it 
becomes repetitive. McKellen is a force-of-nature on film so I was not 
displeased with seeing his face so closely, but what of any close-up shots of 
Christopher Lee, the dueling wizard? More scenes where we see the interior of 
Bilbo Baggins's house were needed. These shots work because they are shown as 
master shots for the most part. Why we can't ever see a hobbit standing next 
to any of the taller characters for more than three seconds is beyond me. A 
hobbit has those hairy feet and pointy-ears, and I do not recall a single 
shot where we would see a hobbit walking through a given space showing his 
whole body. This may have been done to evoke how small the hobbits were but 
there are ways of conveying stature and size without all those random 
close-ups. 

Just like "Harry Potter," Jackson never quite shows the grandeur, the 
mysticism of Middle-Earth. He too often cuts away from expansive long-shots 
to extreme, tight close-ups. When the camera swoops up and down in 
territories and castles, we notice them fleetingly but never long enough to 
feel like we are in them. It's as if Jackson felt that audiences might get 
bored at any given moment so he had to keep cutting away and show us an 
action scene and bring the Dolby noise level higher and higher. 

The action scenes are also a disappointment. Just as in "Harry Potter" and 
any action film post-"Gladiator," everything is shot so tight that the 
fighting remains a series of blurry shots, nothing more. Jackson could have 
looked at those amazing fight scenes in Errol Flynn's "Adventures of Robin 
Hood" where we would always see the action in full shots and where the 
close-ups would occur when necessary. Here, everything is shot so tightly 
that unless you listen to the sound effects, it is never clear who is winning 
or losing in any of the countless sword fights (and no, I was not sitting too 
close to the screen). So all the sound and fury swallows up the screen in 
extremely fast edits that lose our focus as to what is occurring. The more 
intimate, quiet moments are beautifully done, as in the exquisite moment 
where Arwen tries to save Frodo from dying, but more often than not, they do 
not involve us. It is all magical to be sure but a fantasy epic often prides 
itself on engaging the viewer from moment to moment by seeing the fantastical 
settings as a backdrop for the characters. 

I do urge people to see "Lord of the Rings" but I feel that it could have 
been so much more. Peter Jackson is a frenetic director to be sure but he 
needs to dial down the heat a bit. Tolkien fans may not care much but I 
prefer more intimacy in this epic than confounding action scenes. I like the 
characters, the situations, the landscapes (as brief as they may be), the 
varied color lighting schemes, and the dialogue. It is just too cramped and 
overheated to qualify as anything more than a decent epic. 

For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at 
http://moviething.com/members/movies/faust/JATMindex.shtml 

E-mail me with any questions, comments or general complaints at 
[email-masked] or at [email-masked]

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X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 276604
X-RT-TitleID: 1108476
X-RT-SourceID: 875
X-RT-AuthorID: 1314
X-RT-RatingText: 3/4