THE LORD OF THE RINGS: FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) ***

Reviewed 12/19/01

J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy is both the most influential and most lauded story in the sword and sorcery genre, and while this critic finds Tolkien’s imagination far outstrips his writing in style and plotting, the books are nevertheless among the most beloved in existence.  So when another attempt to adapt them into the film medium comes along, so do great expectations.  That other much anticipated fantasy adaptation of the season, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE, has only been around as books for a few years.   Director Peter Jackson has the wait and the weight of decades riding on his shoulders.

For those who have not read the story, the movie’s comprehensibility is going to be proportionate to how much one understands the barely distinct gutteral growlings of the many characters.  Rather than lay out the history of the setting of Middle-Earth as the story progresses as Tolkien does in the books, Jackson opts to have a narrator give a lesson at the very beginning.  Long ago, various magical rings of great power were fashioned and given to elves, dwarves, and men, but the dark lord Sauron corrupted them by creating one ring for himself that ruled all the others.  In a great war for Middle-Earth, Isildur cut off Sauron’s finger and took the One Ring himself.  Tragedy befell him in the form of an ambush and the ring was lost for over two thousand years.  It was finally picked up by a creature called Gollum (voice of Andy Serkis) who in turn lost it to a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm).  (Hobbit are a race of halflings, little people the height of dwarves but less stout and with fat hairy feet.)

After the celebration of his 111^th birthday, Bilbo bequeaths his home and the ring to his nephew Frodo (Elijah Wood).  Bilbo’s friend, the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), suspects Frodo’s ring to be the One Ring, and goes to the eldest of his order, Saruman (Christopher Lee), to decide what must be done with it.  Saruman however has fallen under the influence of Sauron.  Frodo and his hobbit companions Sam Gamgee (Sean Astin), Pippin Took (Billy Boyd), and Merry Brandybuck (Dominic Monaghan) journey with the help of Strider the Ranger (Viggo Mortensen) to Rivendell, home of the elves, where a council decides the ring must be cast into Mount Doom where it was forged and so destroyed forever.  The catch is Mount Doom is located in the heart of Mordor, Sauron’s realm, and so a failed quest means returning the ring to Sauron.  Frodo the ring-bearer sets out with his fellow hobbits, the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom), the dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), Gandalf, Boromir (Sean Bean), a warrior from the realm of Gondor, and Strider, who is revealed to be Aragorn, descendent of Isildur.

If any one thing needs to be said about THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, it is that it looks amazing.  Peter Jackson, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, and especially the production design team led by Grant Major have vividly captured the look of Tolkien’s world.  The movie has easily the most evocative art and set design of the year.  From Rivendell, surrounded by waterfalls, to Moria, the cryptic cavernous home abandoned by the dwarves, and from Lothlórien, filled with spiraling walkways winding through the trees, to the gigantic Argonath, Pillar of Kings, the movie fashions just the kind of awe such a fantasy world should induce.

If the measure of the film was how great it is as a guided tour of Middle-Earth, this would be a masterpiece.  Alas, FELLOWSHIP falls flat just about everywhere else until the movie picks up in its last third.  Jackson, who does have one masterpiece under his belt with HEAVENLY CREATURES, seems so reverential to the source material here that the tone keeps it from coming to life.  Even though he cuts out a lot (some of it like Tom Bombadil thankfully), the movie still feels rushed.  It moves like a list of highlights from the book, one right after another.  Right after Frodo suffers injury, Arwen (Liv Tyler) shows up; Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) appears only mere minutes after the balrog attack.  There is no time for the movie to properly build up momentum for the next peak.  A roller coaster quickly gets boring if you’re always going down.  The main exception to this is the best sequence in the movie, when the demonic balrog makes it entrance and attacks.  It was no accident that this was the footage shown at Cannes this year.

As far as the actors go, they don’t.  Only Ian McKellan and Cate Blanchett have any sort of strong presence on screen.  Sean Bean also manages to get some good acting in at the end in his underwritten role.  Boyd and Monaghan as Pippen and Merry play the comic relief and achieves one laugh between them in the entire three hours.  They are this movie’s equivalent of Jar-Jar Binks.  MATRIX villain Hugo Weaving, playing the head of the elves, is miscast, making Elrond look downright demonic.  The rest of the cast makes little impression.  For the most part, this isn’t the actors’ fault.  The characters are quite bland in the books too.

What THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RINGS speaks to is that if you make one major element of your movie a staggering achievement and just get by on the rest, you still make a lasting impression.  It is not a great movie, but it is great spectacle.

ADDENDUM:  A second chance viewing showed that the picture’s pacing would have been hard to improve upon given how much of the book makes it into the film (a whole lot).  The balance still errs too much on the side of faithfulness over narrative flow, but the faithfulness is some kind of achievement.  The second viewing also reinforces the impression that Peter Jackson has nailed the Tolkien look better than anyone could have imagined and that the balrog sequence is one of the most exciting in any movie this year.