An enchanting, epic fable about absolute power corrupting absolutely, Peter Jackson's long-awaited The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is finally here. And to get right to the question everyone's dying to know — does it live up to the hype? — the answer is, in a word, yes.
The first installment in a series of massively budgeted big-screen adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's much admired trilogy, Jackson's movie arrives with all sorts of baggage to live up to, as well as some to live down. The books' fans will inevitably wonder how such an elaborately imagined, grandly scaled vision can ever be translated to the screen. The book's detractors (and yes, there are a few) are likely to be skeptical about how the movie can possibly rise above the perceived limitations of Tolkien's teenage boy-oriented dragons-n-dungeons fantasy.
Most of us, of course, will not have read the books at all, but will surely still find ourselves victimized by all the snowballing hype — mounds and mounds of movie hype that make it very difficult to avoid walking into the theater with an enormous chip on our shoulder.
As always, the best advice here is to leave your chips at home. But even if you don't, you're likely to be impressed and maybe even a little amazed because this is a movie that succeeds on just about every level it's supposed to, and then some. At the risk of playing into a phrase I fear we're going to be hearing a lot over the weeks to come, what Jackson has managed with Fellowship is to create a Harry Potter for grown-ups.
Not that I'm knocking Harry, mind you. That little movie about the Potter boy wowed us mainly through sheer charm and a wide-eyed recalling of those grand old, cliff-hanging adventure serials of yore, more recently recycled as the Indiana Jones franchise. Fellowship, with its epic scale, iconic heroes and powerful, self-obsessed mythology, reminds us more of the Star Wars movies — although Jackson's film is actually somewhat more complex and, frankly, just plain better than almost any single component in George Lucas' legendary trilogy (the sole exception being The Empire Strikes Back). On an even loftier cultural plane, Fellowship can't help but seem positively Wagnerian with all its brooding poetics about history and destiny, its heightened emotions in the shadowy twilight of the gods. For virtually its entire three-hour running time, Jackson's movie keeps us happily immersed in the stuff of legends.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring begins by cramming a thousand years of backstory into a remarkably concise 10-minute prologue that could easily have been made into a whole movie all by itself. We begin very close to the beginning, with the forging of a mystical ring so powerful that it brings its evil owner, a supremely nasty entity named Sauron, this close to bringing about the end of the world. Sauron's plans go awry, he loses the ring (and, apparently, his life) and a series of figures vie for ownership of the all-powerful ring. Great armies clash, civilizations emerge and vanish, and the ring passes from hand to hand over the course of years, finally winding up, through a curious chain of events, in the possession of an odd little creature by the name of Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm).
Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit — a good-natured, pint-size race, furry of foot and pointy of ear, about whom it's said, "You can know everything there is about hobbits in a month, but still not really know them after a hundred years." The hobbits inhabit a place known as Middle-earth, a magical realm they share with communities of elves (graceful and impossibly beautiful), dwarves (feisty and squat) and a variety of other beings, both benevolent and malicious.
A visit from a friendly wizard called Gandalf (Ian McKellen) alerts Bilbo to the fact that all is not well in Middle-earth, seeing as how the Dark Lord Sauron, the original owner of the ring, may not be quite as dead as previously imagined. All Sauron needs to finally succeed in plunging the world into total darkness is to be reunited with the ring — a threat that necessitates Bilbo's handing said ring over to his nephew Frodo (Elijah Wood), in order to keep it out of the wrong hands. Along with a small, dedicated band of elves, dwarves, hobbits, and even a man or two (that would be Viggo Mortensen as the brave but secretive Aragon), Frodo is charged with delivering the ring back to the fires in which it was forged and where it must be destroyed.
On its most basic level, Fellowship unfolds as a hero's journey much in the Joseph Campbell tradition, complete with elements of exile, character-building and self-discovery through fiery trial-and-error, and what appear at first glance to be clearly defined figures of good and evil. What soon becomes apparent, and what makes the movie interesting, is that very few characters in Jackson's film are quite what they seem. The Middle-earth of Jackson's Fellowship is a world of shifting political alliances, conspiracies and the sort of deceit that would do a vintage film noir proud. It's not absolute Good and Evil that permeate the film's world but a moral relativism where even the strongest and most ethical of heroes fight a constant battle with their own weaknesses and baser instincts. The beauty of the story's concentration on the seductive power of the ring is this: Even the good guys here are corruptible, malleable, and as potentially dangerous as the bad guys.
What gives the characters (and the movie) resonance is that, despite those flaws, they remain undiminished. Peter Jackson hails from New Zealand, and most of the cast here are Brits and internationals, but Fellowship has a distinctly American feel to it, in the best sense of the word. A movie about a band of upstarts struggling to rise above their limitations, The Fellowship of the Ring might best be summed up in the words of one its more optimistic characters, who claims that "even the smallest person can change the course of the future." Tolkien, who was a Brit and a scholar, might have thought of it as historical momentum, but it's the same thing.
On the technical side, the movie looks as good as you might imagine, with imagery that glides effortlessly from the inspirational and lyrical, to the spooky and just plain horrific (something for which Jackson has always displayed an enormous soft spot). As with Harry Potter, a top-notch ensemble of big-name actors throw themselves into their roles, most notably McKellen, Cate Blanchett (particularly fine in an 11th-hour appearance as a mysterious elf queen) and Christopher Lee (who brings down the house by apparently channeling two of his better roles, Rasputin and Count Dracula). It doesn't hurt that most of the actors actually do resemble unearthly beings, and I mean that in the best possible way. Wood, Holm and, particularly, Blanchett look particularly fetching in their cute little pointy ears.
Jackson makes excellent use of scope and scale here as well, giving us an utterly believable sense of both the diminutive hobbits and the giant creatures that inhabit Middle-earth. Similarly, quiet dialogue and scenes of considerable intimacy are handled with as much care and conviction as the fantastic, sprawling battle scenes that are laced throughout the movie and that give it much of its unique energy. Through expert choreography, editing and digital manipulation, these amazing battle sequences occasionally go to places where even the best state-of-the-art action scenes rarely go, offering not just a sense of genuine excitement, but of actual danger too.
Of course, all of this would mean very little if The Fellowship of the Ring weren't so much fun to watch. The movie's overall tone is heartfelt, graceful and even surprisingly cheery for a film about, among other bits of nastiness, the impending end of the world. That's the real trick of Jackson's movie: its ability to so effortlessly convey both the bleakness and brightness inherent in its story — and all without losing its soul. Jackson has made something of a career of balancing light and dark, dating back to his gleefully primitive splatter-comedies Bad Taste and Dead Alive. That he's able to execute the same sort of delicate balancing act on this grand a scale, and on this high-stakes a stage, is an achievement that's nothing less than remarkable.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2002.