The Lord of the Rings: The
Fellowship of the Ring
The Fellowship of the Ring on DVD |
The Lord of the Rings: The
Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson's film of the first volume of the Tolkien
trilogy, is an amazing adaptation that translates many of that epic's literary felicities
into cinematic ones while keeping the spirit of the work intact. Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's
epic trilogy will love it. However, it is also an exceedingly tedious film for anyone
unfamiliar with Middle Earth and its inhabitants. Yes, the film is excellent and
its biggest flaw is probably also its biggest selling point to Fellowship's natural
audience.
Filming LOTR would seem to be an impossible task.
Tolkien created an entire world -- one marked by fantastic landscapes and populated by
many races, ranging from the older elves, dwarves, and trolls to the malevolent Orcs and
unnatural nazgul (and, of course, the lovable hobbits). For each race and country
Tolkien created spoken and written languages, rich histories, and epic legends -- all of
which were on ample display in his voluminous notes, maps, and appendices. Tolkien, an
Oxford philologist, was so compelled to make Middle Earth believable that he even
incorporated linguistic drift into the ancient tongues he created for his back-story. It's
not just that LOTR is long -- it's dense.
And then there are its fans, who can be -- shall we say?
-- a tad obsessive. Tens of millions of folks have read LOTR, many of them
repeatedly. The Tolkien purists bridled at the slightest suggestion that director Peter
Jackson even contemplated simplifying the plotline or skipping a single character.
Tolkien's son Christopher, the "literary protector" of the literary franchise,
said, shortly before the film's release, "My own position is that The Lord of the
Rings is peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form."
So the fact that Jackson managed to create a coherent story
set in a totally believable fantastic realm with a richly nuanced history is definitely
not a small accomplishment. In fact, it's epic -- in every sense of the word.
The film's special effects are awe-inspiring and, if
Jackson's Middle Earth isn't precisely the same as mine, that says more about my
failures of imagination than any imperfection in his. In fact, Jackson's ability to create
a mythic universe out of the raw materials of New Zealand is deeply impressive -- nerd
that I am, I shed tears upon sighting Hobbitton, so perfectly did it overlay my mind's
map. Later in the film, Jackson puts an image to the Pillars of the Kings at Argonath,
which is several degrees more majestic than the one I'd imagined.
And he does a fantastic job of cutting through the
narrative thicket and setting up the history of the one true ring and its place in the
power shifts of Middle Earth. He also manages -- although not without some continuity
glitches -- to make the various races and creatures inhabiting the epic distinct and
believable. I was fascinated with the elves, who are so close to human, yet so obviously other.
Best of all, Jackson has filled the film with superb
actors, most prominently Sir Ian McKellan as Gandalf the Grey, Elijah Wood as Frodo
Baggins, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, John Rhys-Davies as Gimli, and Orlando Bloom as
Legolas. To a man, the cast is supremely believable.
But Jackson's sole miscalculation is a doozy. The film
takes a leisurely path during its opening scenes -- a move that does much toward making us
care about the hobbits, the eldritch Gandalf, and their companions in the fellowship of
the ring. But once having established their mission and its importance, the film squanders
the audience's hard-won goodwill in a seemingly endless sequence of battles with one
fantastic creature after the other.
True, all of these struggles are in the book, but
Tolkien's narrative pace was leisurely, quaint even when it was published 50 years ago.
These encounters established the individual personalities of our protagonists (and
recapitulated them a time or two) on the way to the climactic events that end the first
volume and set up the bifurcated structure of the second volume of the trilogy. Tolkien told
the story and his style gave him all the time he needed to take side paths into history,
myth, poems, songs, and even linguistic analysis. By contrast, film shows us the
story and after a certain point in this one, viewers who do not hold the canon as sacred
will be fidgeting and urging everyone to get on with it.
I've read the books and, once the band of
adventurers entered the mines of Moria, I couldn't distinguish between the battle with the
Watcher of the Gates, the one with the rock troll, the showdown at the bridge of
Khazad-Dum, and the ongoing running fight with the Orcs -- what chance could anyone who
had not read the trilogy have to distinguish one dimly-lit special effect from the other?
A pivotal plot point takes place in the midst of this
unceasing barrage of swordplay, but most of the rest of it could have been jettisoned
without actually damaging the tale's narrative arc. And even after coming back into the
air, the doughty band runs into a continuing string of skirmishes before concluding with a
rousing set-up for the next film.
And yet, fans of the books will probably lap it up. In
fact, the two-disc DVD set carries an ad for a November release of an extended
version of the film -- a four-disc set that includes 30 extra minutes of film plus
two complete discs (six hours!) of "extras."
It could certainly be argued that Tolkien's fans are the
true guardians of his legacy and that any major cuts in the story that offended their
sensibilities would doom the films to endless recriminations. There's some truth to that.
Jackson has been roundly criticized for deleting some characters entirely (Tolkien's
amiable stoner, Tom Bombadil, for example) and inflating -- distorting, true fans charge
-- others (Liv Tyler's Arwyn), but the guardians of the text have been almost completely
silent about the embellishments he has added, such as an overly protracted battle
between Gandalf and his mentor, Saruman.
That struggle was crucial to the plot of the trilogy, but
Tolkien chose to relegate it to an off-hand reference, a technique Jackson probably should
have employed more in FOTR's second half.
Of course, if you are a fan of the trilogy, you may well
agree with Jackson's narrative decision. I myself have engaged in fan-boy speculations
about editing Tolkien's narrative. What to leave out? Surely not the Watcher of
the Gates . . . the rock troll . . . the balrog . . . But films and books are, of
necessity, very different critters and no film, no matter how well wrought, can reproduce
a novel's ability to portray inner dialogue, for instance.
In Jackson's defense, however, it must also be said that most
films can never match the sense of wonder or the fantastic landscape of a complex fantasy
such as The Fellowship of the Rings -- and he has. He made a choice to cater to the
knowledgeable fans of the trilogy, and ticket sales and DVD sales (it has already set new
sales records as the fastest-selling new release ever issued) would seem to validate that
decision. I can't help but feel that a few judicial nips and tucks would have gone a long
way toward making The Fellowship of the Ring into a complete success -- one that
did not simply mirror the books but expanded upon their strengths while establishing its
own claim on Middle Earth.
All minor grumbles aside, the DVD is the very model of a
major DVD release. (Be careful, however, as it comes in both widescreen and full-screen
editions.) One disc contains the film in its entirety and the anamorphic picture is a
pristine wonder. While the film is packed with CGI, focus remains sharp and distinct --
scenes of massed armies are remarkably realistic, with individuals moving within the
crowds in seemingly random patterns, and the fantastic landscape looks completely
believable, even as your mind is telling you that what you are seeing cannot exist.
The hobbits do seem to change size and scale from time to
time -- probably the result of Jackson's decision to use forced perspective as much as
possible to make his small actors seem even more diminutive, but I felt this was
preferable to enveloping half the major players in a CGI mask and forcing everyone to act
to a blue screen.
The DVD's sound is flat-out perfection. First, there's
Howard Shore's superb score, which features leitmotifs and genuine development.
It's ambitious and completely satisfying -- and deserves a place in the orchestral
repertory with Holst's The Planets as a crowd-pleasing work of true symphonic
worth.
And then there's the sound itself, which is quite simply
the best, most spectacular, and most effective multichannel soundtrack I've ever heard.
You want bass? Throw FOTR at your subwoofer. Want to hear the sound in front, to
the sides, behind you? Cue this disc.
The release's second disc is devoted to the sort of
"special" features now considered de rigueur for major releases,
including a 10-minute "behind the scenes preview" of The Two Towers,
three features on the making of the film, 15 short "featurettes" on the
locales and cultures of Middle Earth, Enya's music video for "May It Be," and a
host of DVD-ROM features, most of which fall into the so what? category as far as
I'm concerned. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
And in November, we have the extended edition to
look forward to. Whether you choose to hold out for that or not depends, of course, on
your devotion to the story. When it was first announced, I thought it sounded like a great
idea -- after sitting through the DVD with a non-Tolkien-reading spouse, I'm dubious about
the wisdom of a version running almost four hours. As Voltaire put it, "The best way
to be boring is to leave nothing out."
Wait if you wish, but I'm happy with how well the
theatrical-release DVD came out. In terms of transfer and sound, it's about as good as it
gets, and if I harbor doubts about its accessibility for the Tolkien-deprived among us,
that's simply another good reason to recommend reading the trilogy, because what The
Fellowship of the Ring does well can hardly be done better.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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