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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The heroic and epic film version of "The Lord of the Rings" brings beauty, awe and excitement back to the big screen.
Dec 18, 2001 | The most heartbreaking thing about faithful moviegoing is that awe, beauty and excitement, three of the things we go to the movies for, are the very things we're cheated of the most. The great wonder of "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" is that it bathes us in all three, to the point where we remember -- in a vague, pleasurably hallucinatory sensation from another lifetime -- why we go to the movies in the first place. It would be an insult to say the picture merely lives up to its hype; it crashes the meaning of hype, exposing it as the graven image it is. Advertising is dead: Long live moviemaking.
The first 10 minutes of "The Fellowship of the Ring" renders all hype -- whether it's the kind that's bought and paid for or the kind generated by eager fans -- inconsequential. In adapting the story of hobbit Frodo Baggins and his mission to guard and ultimately destroy a ring that has the power to bring cursed evil upon the world, director Peter Jackson has given us an epic in the true sense, with none of the pretentious fakery that the word "epic" has come to imply.
Jackson's approach is refreshingly egalitarian: I had feared that "The Fellowship of the Rings" would be a ferociously clubby movie, one that would, with a snobbish sniff, shut out people unfamiliar with Tolkien's books.
My guess, though, is that most fans of the books will warm to Jackson's version (even if the story has been streamlined a bit, with some characters' roles enhanced and other figures sliced out altogether). And as for everyone else, Jackson makes all the right moves in reaching out to them.
"The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring"
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Ian Holm, Sean Bean, and Liv Tyler
He explains the essential back story in a fleet, graceful expository passage at the beginning: In ancient times, in an undefined place, a set of powerful golden rings were forged and dispersed to various kingdoms across the land. The dark lord Sauron himself made the One Ring, the ring that would complete and intensify the power of all the others. But the ring was taken from him, and ages later, it accidentally found its way into the hands of a humble Hobbit by the name of Bilbo Baggins (here played by Ian Holm). Sauron will stop at nothing to get the ring back, but he needs to find it first. That's the tale told in "The Hobbit," the prequel to Tolkien's trilogy.
As the movie opens, the aged Bilbo has decided to bequeath the ring to his favorite cousin, Frodo (Elijah Wood), who is unaware of its significance. A great wizard, Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), clues Frodo in to its dangerous powers, and urges him to transport the ring to the one place where it can be destroyed forever. Frodo sets out, along the way assembling a ragtag crew of colleagues. Some of them, like Frodo's faithful friend Sam (Sean Astin), come from the hobbits' home, the grassy, idyllic Shire. Gimli (John Rhys-Davis) is a gruff, rough dwarf. Strider (Viggo Mortensen) is a mysterious human who understands how crucial it is to keep the ring out of Sauron's hands. And Legolas (Orlando Bloom) is a golden-handsome Elf warrior.
Jackson captures the spirit and flavor of Tolkien's storytelling in the way he lays the group's adventures before us. Early on we're introduced to the Black Riders, a nightmare-haunting group of faceless horsemen who have been sent by Sauron to find and capture the ring. They're the movie's earliest clue that "The Fellowship of the Ring" isn't going to be a sprightly, cheerful jaunt: At moments, in fact, it's terrifying.
