The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Review by Neil
Randall
Published in edited
form in the K-W Record, December 19, 2001
Peter
Jackson’s task was enormous.
With forty-five years worth of J. R. R. Tolkien fans lying
in wait, possibly the most demanding fans of any work of fiction,
Jackson had to transform the
nearly 500 pages of The Fellowship of the Ring into a more three hours of film
that would lose nothing of major importance in the translation.
Almost unbelievably, he pulled it off.
The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of three movies
based on Tolkien’s much-loved trilogy, enchants from beginning to end. Its
three hours is jammed with detail after detail from the books,
punctuated with a pacing that can only be described as inspired. Jackson
constantly moves us from soft to hard, light
to dark, and calm to frenzied, telling the story through these shifts.
For the uninitiated, The Lord of the Rings tells the story
of Frodo Baggins, an unpresuming hobbit (think four-foot high medieval
English villager) who takes on the quest of destroying the Ring of Power. The
Ring is absolutely evil,
containing the essence of Sauron, the Dark Lord,
whose goal is the enslavement or destruction of all living things and
everything of beauty.
Frodo must carry the Ring to Sauron’s
land, Mordor, and throw it into the volcanic fire
where it was created. He receives assistance from the other free peoples of
Middle-Earth, the Elves, Dwarves, Men, and Gandalf the Wizard, but set against
him are Ringwraiths, Orcs
and other evil
beings.
The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of three movies
based on Tolkien’s trilogy, begins with two great armies fighting for the
world and ends with two small hobbits walking naively into impossibility. In
between we find, again and again, that same range from majesty through
humility, not as great as in the books,
but more than enough to satisfy most fans of the book.
Jackson shows
care throughout the film
not to stray from the books,
but he does not rigidly adhere to them. He allows himself license, and the
changes bear a very wide range of significance.
One of the less significant changes has Liv Tyler’s Arwen Undomiel taking the role played in the book by the ancient
Elf Glorfindel. Glorfindel
does not appear in the movie, but his absence is unimportant. In fact, the
change is clever, allowing Jackson
to bring into the movie a love story that appears almost exclusively in the book’s appendices.
Of course, it also brings a woman into the main part of the story, something
that rarely happens in the book. Tyler,
incidentally, does a decently credible job with Arwen,
defying the many fans who nearly despaired when Jackson
announced that he had cast her.
Other changes are more drastic, but work well nevertheless.
In the book,
Frodo begins the quest at the age of 50, and overweight, but here he is in
his 20s and svelt. You can fill in your own reasons
for this change, but it works just fine. Elijah Wood still manages to portray
Frodo as more mature and thoughtful than his hobbit companions, and that’s
really all that matters.
Wood is very strong, by the way, and the other crucial
hobbit, Sam Gamgee, receives a more than worthwhile
treatment from Sean Astin. One thing omitted from
the movie is the book’s
fact that Sam is Frodo’s servant, but that is probably Jackson’s
nod to the times.
In one case, however, a change has the potential to alter
a core component of the story, and while it works in the movie it remains to
be seen how it will affect Tolkien’s creation.
Saruman, the once-good Wizard now turned evil,
is portrayed as an active ally of the Dark Lord Sauron,
building an army for Sauron and trying to capture
the Ring on Sauron’s behalf.
In the book, Saruman is practicing double-treachery, first against the
powers of good but also against Sauron himself. Saruman wants the Ring for himself, and he builds an army
for his own sake, not for Sauron’s. This is a
crucial change in a story with already very little emphasis on the gray areas
between good and evil.
It also, in a strange way, renders Saruman’s
actions as possibly less evil than his original treachery would have. Over the course
of the three films,
this change might very well come back to haunt.
Jackson omits
one other major issue. In the book, the Elves are
willing to help destroy the Ring even though, in doing so,
they will destroy all that they have accomplished in their thousands of years
of existence. The destruction of the Ring means the end of their days in
Middle-Earth. This fundamental notion is nowhere to be found in the movie,
except in an oblique reference offered by Galadriel’s voice
as the characters
enter the woods of Lorien.
But as important as this omission might eventually become
as the series goes along, it does nothing to detract from this movie itself.
Ian McKellen brings Gandalf the Wizard to life in
ways that even the most critical fan could only applaud. Also strong is Viggo Mortensten’s Aragorn, and
Cate Blanchett’s
Galadriel, although too sparsely shown (as is all of the spectacularly
rendered forest of Lorien in which she lives),
captures the otherworldly mystery of the Elves. Particularly pleasing is Sean
Bean’s Boromir, a part that could have been botched completely.
As for the rest, Jackson
renders the clothing, the sets, the weapons, and the props in extraordinary
detail, and the scenes of Orthanc and Barad-dur, the Two
Towers of the title of the second
movie in the series, enthrall in all ways. Hobbiton
itself, with its underground houses
with round doors set in a rich and rolling countryside, is perfect. Perhaps
most importantly, the scenes that should inspire awe manage to do just that,
especially in the case of the ruined Dwarf kingdom Moria.
Yes, he pulled it off. For Tolkien fans, and for anyone
who isn’t. Just go.