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THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
Rating: 
USA/New Zealand. 2001.
Director – Peter Jackson, Screenplay – Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens & Fran Walsh, Based on the Novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, Producers – Peter Jackson, Barrie M. Osborne & Tim Sanders, Photography – Andrew Lesnie, Music – Howard Shore, Visual/Creature/Makeup Effects – WETA Workshop Inc (Creature Effects Supervisor – Richard Taylor, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jim Rygiel), Additional Visual Effects – Animal Logic, Digital Domain, Rhythm and Hues, Special Effects Supervisor – Mark O. Forker, Production Design – Grant Major. Production Company – New Line Cinema/Wingnut Films.
Cast:
Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn/Strider), Sean Bean (Boromir), Ian Holm (Bilbo Baggins), Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee), Billy Boyd (Pippin Took), Dominic Monaghan (Merry Brandybuck), John Rhys-Davies (Gimli), Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Christopher Lee (Saruman), Hugo Weaving (Elrond), Cate Blanchett (Galadriel), Liv Tyler (Arwen Undomiel)
Plot: In the peaceful Shire where the halfling Hobbits live, Bilbo Baggins celebrates his 111th birthday and announces he is going to depart on a journey. Under pressure from the wizard Gandalf, he leaves the ring he obtained on one of his adventures in the care of his young nephew Frodo. Gandalf explains to Frodo that the ring is the One Ring forged by the dark lord Sauron that both holds great power but is capable of corrupting all who wield it. The only hope is for Frodo to find a way of disposing of the ring. And so Frodo sets forth on a journey, joined by three hobbit friends, Samwise Gamgee, Pippin Took and Merry Brandybuck. However Gandalf’s superior Saruman has been corrupted by Sauron and imprisons Gandalf and sends forth the Nazgul, former kings corrupted by other rings who live as half-dead Ringwraiths, and an army of orcs to obtain the ring. Frodo and the others arrive in Rivendell, the home of the elves. There a fellowship of all the peoples of Middle-Earth – men, hobbits, dwarves and elves – is formed to undergo the perilous journey to carry the ring to the only place it can be destroyed – in the fires of Mount Doom in Sauron’s realm Mordor.
A general reader’s survey of the greatest works of literature in the English language conducted a few year’s ago by Penguin Publishers had The Lord of the Rings emerge as the single most popular work of fiction ever. The Lord of the Rings was the creation of J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon literature and later English Language and Literature at Oxford University. J.R.R. Tolkien first visited Middle-Earth with The Hobbit (1937), essentially a primer for the The Lord of the Rings that was expanded from a tale he told to his children. J.R.R. Tolkien then spent the next sixteen years perfecting the saga of the The Lord of the Rings. He was fascinated with the idea of epic myths and the lack of them in the English language. Borrowing substantially from the Icelandic Edda, Tolkien spent a decade-and-a-half not only creating the story that would become The Lord of the Rings, but also several different languages for the peoples that inhabit his world and an entire series of myths and histories behind the saga.
The Lord of the Rings was published by Allen and Unwin between 1954 and 1956. They considered Tolkien’s million plus word epic too big to be published as one book and split it into three, each published a year apart. The Lord of the Rings’s popularity never really grew until the 1960s and the whole Berkeley counter-culture movement, but by the end of the decade the saga had grown into a cult. There are few books that can be said to have singlehandedly created an entire genre, but The Lord of the Rings is one such case. By the 1980s the fantasy saga with invented kingdoms and detailed maps, stories spread across multi-volume sagas and the characters of small innocent creatures, wizards, dark lords, ethereal elves and ancient artifacts of power had become both cliche and an entire publishing industry. Without J.R.R. Tolkien, fair to say, there would be no David Eddings, no Terry Brooks, no Stephen Donaldson, no Tad Williams, not to mention more blatant pillagings like the Dragonlance and Elfquest series of shared world stories and the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game and its outright modeling of character types on Tolkien’s various racial types. And the books themselves have become a major industry, even prior to this film, with dozens of calendars, illustrated books, specially bound and anniversary editions, exigeses, publications of early texts and uncompleted story fragments, even a 12 volume History of Middle Earth edited by J.R.R. Tolkien’s son.
The Lord of the Rings has been considered as a filmic saga many times. Both Stanley Kubrick and John Boorman considered the idea during the late 1960s/early 1970s, but were defeated by the size of project, unable to find the means of scaling it down to a single film at a time when the multi-volume film series was inconceivable. Children’s animators Rankin-Bass adapted The Hobbit into an animated tv special with songs, The Hobbit (1977), which is better than many gave it at the time and is probably due re-evaluation. But then the success of Star Wars (1977) popularized sf and fantasy and allowed Ralph Bakshi to get his animated adaptation, The Lord of the Rings (1978), off the ground. Bakshi planned to split the story in two parts but the film was not a success and as a result he left the saga only half completed. Bakshi’s version was reviled by all fans of the books, although is actually a little better than many gave it at the time. Rankin-Bass later completed the saga sort of by boldly filming The Return of the King as Frodo: The Hobbit II (1980).
Enter New Zealander Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson first emerged from nowhere with the hilarious zero-budget splatter film Bad Taste (1988). Jackson then made two other equally riotous low-budget splatter hits, Meet the Feebles (1990) and Braindead/Deadalive (1992), films that brim with a wacky perverted inventivity amid the late 1980s trend of popcorn splatter. Jackson then found critical acceptability with the overrated Heavenly Creatures (1994), based on a sensational true life murder in 1950s New Zealand, which proved to be a worldwide arthouse hit. But Jackson failed to quite follow the acclaim that Heavenly Creatures enjoyed up with the surprisingly slight ghost comedy The Frighteners (1996), which was a box-office flop. Both Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners were where Jackson discovered visual effects and CGI technology, in fact creating his own visual effects studio, WETA, in Wellington, New Zealand. Alas Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners were also the point where Peter Jackson’s fascination with the new technology started to overwhelm his natural creativity. They are films that feel like WETA is wagging the creative dog, where Peter Jackson’s abundance of wit and humour is drowned out by a fascination with technological experimentation.
New Line Cinema had purchased the rights to the Tolkien books from Saul Zaentz, who’d produced the Bakshi film, as a means of offsetting the cost of funding of Zaentz’s production of The English Patient (1996). Peter Jackson pushed to be able to make the film and New Line placed an incredible $300 million + into the project for Jackson to make three films all in one, each to be released a year apart. This was quite unprecedented as film series go. There have been filmic trilogies before but none that have all been filmed at once, not even any of George Lucas’s Star Wars films. There had been two films shot back to back before – Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Back to the Future Part III (1990) and the two Matrix sequels, but both were already sequels to a big established hit that had a ready audience. The nearest comparison might be to Alexander and Ilya Salkind’s notoriously problem ridden productions of Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980). The Lord of the Rings was such an outlay that the entire financial future of New Line Cinema as a studio was riding on the dependence of the films’ success. There’s also a clear irony that one can see in both film productions of Lord of the Rings – both owe their source to George Lucas. The Ralph Bakshi version was inspired by Star Wars in 1977, and the Peter Jackson versions come in a clear attempt to follow the success of Lucas’s second Star Wars trilogy beginning with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).
Making a film out of a work with as strong a following as The Lord of the Rings is a daunting task for any filmmaker. There is probably few other literary works with such a fanatical following and an army of readers who not only know every detail of the stories but also have their individual images of what the characters should look like. And there are few film sagas that have been waited on with such anticipation, with the film’s website (www.lordoftherings.net) gaining a record number of hits (reportedly a million a day at one point) in the year up to the film’s release. And within a matter of days of its release, The Fellowship of the Ring even accumulated a nomination from the Golden Globes as Best Picture, followed a little while later by a whole host of Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.
And Peter Jackson, partner Fran Walsh and the army at their disposal (literally so – the New Zealand Army were recruited as extras in the battle scenes) do a pretty good job on the books. Some aspects have been trimmed. Jackson and his writers have stripped out all the songs and most of the accounts of Middle-Earth’s myths and histories that were part of the book’s texture. Out has also gone the stopover with the character of Tom Bombadil. These probably won’t be missed too much by anybody except those who get so far into Tolkien as to manage to finish reading the whole of The Silmarillion (1977). Surprisingly though there are quite a few additions, such as rather unnecessarily pumping up the character of Elrond’s daughter Arwen who is barely a name in the book into a major character played by Liv Tyler. Gandalf’s conflict with Saruman, which only happens offscreen in the story, is shown in detail, as is the depiction of the raising of the orc armies, which is something that Tolkien doesn’t even dwell upon. Most notable though are the visual escalations – the journey through the Mines of Moria comes with giant-sized trolls and entire armies of orcs that seem to number into the thousands, while the traversal of the Bridge of Khazad-Dum is pumped up onto a far grander cinematic scale than the relatively smaller one that J.R.R. Tolkien envisioned it with on the page.
That said the rest of the story remains exceptionally faithful. Jackson has determined to find a visual equivalent of the books and to write the saga on an epic widescreen canvas. And for the most part it succeeds quite enthrallingly. Jackson shot the entire film in New Zealand [he being one of an increasing number of filmmakers who look to the relatively unspoiled scenery of New Zealand to represent fantasy kingdoms – previous examples being George Lucas’s Tolkien copy Willow (1988) and the massively successful tv series’ Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-9) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001)]. And New Zealand offers a stunning visual rawness (albeit one that Jackson and WETA are not above digitally retouching) that depicts Middle-Earth with a luxuriant hyper-real beauty.
There are some dazzingly impressive effects sequences – battles of clashing armies; the stripping of Isengard, which come with incredibly detailed shots of the earth torn open and tiny figures working on multiple levels of the mines in its interior; and the journey through the colossal caverns of Moria. Jackson even throws in a journey by water through the gates formed by the giant statues of Isildur and Anarion for nothing other than the awe and beauty of the image – many other filmmakers would have scrapped the sequence as unnecessary. There is great subtlety to many of the effects rendering the hobbits and dwarves as much smaller in size than the humans through the use of forced perspective shots and digital trickery, which is a care to detail that most other filmmakers would either have ignored or padded around by casting children or some such. Sometimes there is the sense that Peter Jackson is pumping the film up toward the momentous to make the story larger in scope. Scenes that seemed small on the page – Frodo rescuing Sam from the water, Cate Blanchett turning into a vision of her dark self, the need to have a building or statue in almost every shot – seem larger than a straight dramatic reading might have given the scenes. There is the feeling here, and in images like where Ian Holm momentarily turns into a slavering Ring-obsessed figure, that Jackson seems a little untrusting of his actors to carry the scene and has to overinsistetly make the point with visual trickery. But by and large this is one of the increasingly all-too-rare examples of a fantasy film being carried by the power of story.
Jackson has also corralled an amazing cast. Elijah Wood is alas a far too cute seeming Frodo and Sean Astin, who only a few years ago was a teen idol, a rather pudgy Sam. Much better are unknowns Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan as the other two hobbits, who craft the parts with an irascibly likable charm. (Amusingly where for Tolkien, the Shire represented a mythic idealization of untouched rural England, the way Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan play the parts and the way the hobbits are costumed makes them seem like out of a mythic storybook representation of rural Ireland). Ian McKellen is the star of the show, giving a magnificently dignified performance as Gandalf. A 79 year-old Christopher Lee plays opposite McKellen with great stature as Saruman. It is good to see Viggo Mortensen, who one has always maintained as being one of the actors most deservous of wider recognition, get a major part like Aragorn, even if he doesn’t get to do too much but brood with dark handsomeness. Clearly his part will grow in the successive films and here he gets the show taken out from under him by Sean Bean as Boromir and an unrecognizable John Rhys-Davies as Gimli. All the actors were statedly chosen for their suitedness to the parts. Orlando Bloom seems a little too youthful as Legolas but certainly holds his own when it comes to the action scenes – the only one who seems miscast is Hugo Weaving as Elrond who, instead of a regally ethereal elf ruler, comes across as merely cross. Liv Tyler feels only there in a superfluous role, presumably added to fill out the surprising dearth of females in the original stories and bring a dash of romance.
The other two films are The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). New Line have announced plans to next film The Hobbit but the fate of Peter Jackson’s involvement in this has become caught up in legal disputes between Jackson and New Line with they having fired him and announced the project under a new director. This and an original Middle Earth work taken from fragments in Tolkien now appears to be going ahead with Jackson
as an executive producer. Also of interest is Frodo is Great ... Who is That!!? (2004), a documentary about a peculiar sector of Lord of the Rings fandom.
Peter Jackson subsequently went on to conduct his remake of King Kong (2005) and The Lovely Bones (2008).
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2001 list. Winner for Best Supporting Actor (Ian McKellen) and Best Special Effects, Nominee for Best Director (Peter Jackson), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Musical Score, Best Makeup Effects and Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2001 Awards. No. 2 on the SF, Horror & Fantasy Box-Office Top 10 of 2001 list).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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