Movie 666

I lost money on this film. I bet four dollars against someone’s back issue of Teen Beat that it was going to flop. Sword-and-sorcery films are a tired and mined-out genre. They flop. Willow, Legend, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Whatever-it was — who remembers them? Adaptations of thousand-plus page books flop. I ask you, who remembers the film version of The Brothers Karamazov starring William Shatner? And adaptations of well-loved books flop. Hook may not have been the worst travesty of Peter Pan ever made — wait a minute, it certainly was. Considering all this, Tolkien’s Ur-fantasy The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring seemed like the worst candidate for a movie adaptation you could imagine.

Almost Heaven, The Shire Lord of the Rings

Peter Jackson pulled it off. Critics loved this film Audiences stampeded the box-office gates. Tolkien purists grudgingly approved (check the Slate magazine archives for one hardcore Elfgeek’s complaint that Arwen’s lineage — only 42% Elf — qualified her as a half-breed!) Audiences who couldn’t tell a Balrog from Dick Cheney (I still have trouble) followed the plot without any trouble.

How did he do it? You can find reviews crammed with superlatives on most film websites, and pontification on the Right Choices that Jackson made, and so on. The most obvious Right Decisions that I can see are the choice of seasoned actors, the simplification of the storyline, and a well-written script.

You can see this right at the beginning: Gandalf and Frodo sit around the hobbit-hole and discuss their troublesome Ring. That’s pretty much it, but it’s a masterful scene, a real corker. The actors, both seasoned Shakespeareans, banter about Ancient Evil and Minions of Sauron with grave authority. The Ring itself, a nondescript band of brass, begins to look more sinister than an army of drooling Orcs. And yet there isn’t any fancy camerawork, there’s no stern music that I can remember, and the only special effect in sight is Ian McKellen’s beard (which has to be digital — that thing has a life of its own.). I can picture Ron Howard or Penny Marshall directing this scene, with a camera circling around Ian McKellen’s head and a John Williams score thundering away, and I’m grateful that Peter Jackson has more sense.

Later on when the special effects bacchanal begins, when Orcs start pouring out of the woodwork — well, there’s been a lot written about the beautiful digital effects. I want to point out that it’s not enough to punch up digital bogeymen on your computer (George Lucas!) you also have to be able to direct them. I slept through the onslaught of CGI armies in The Phantom Menace. Yet I watched the snarling hordes surround Frodo and Co. and never for a moment did I think “pricey special effects.”

Now comes the part where I should warn the reader that I am not only about to commit heresy, but I’m also going to do some serious spoiler work, so anyone who wants to be kept in suspense over the next two Christmases had best stop right here. Here is the heresy: Having only read The Trilogy (that seems like the best way to refer to the paper-and-ink version) as a young teenager, so that I am neither a Tolkein newbie nor someone exceedingly familiar with the books, I reread them after seeing the film. My conclusion? Whatever Mr. Jackson has done, he hasn’t adapted Tolkien in any recognizable form.

No, wait, it’s true, and what’s more, it’s not necessarily a fault. The Trilogy is the greatest work of fantasy ever written. I admit it. Tolkien’s world is all-encompassing and irrefutable. In the landscape of our literary imaginations, Middle Earth is a required tourist-stop, and deservedly so. It is so great a Trilogy, in fact, that it is not hurt one bit by Tolkien’s hamfisted plot, his draggy pacing, and his cardboard dialogue.

Has anyone else ever felt like this? Has anyone ever confessed to being swept away by the books while at the same time wincing at exchanges like “Riders! Many riders on swift steeds are coming towards us! Tireless are their steed and keen is their sight!” While snoozing through entire chapters? While wanting to throw the book across the room about two thirds of the way through The Fellowship Of The Ring? And yet still being swept away?

I think the truth is that while the folklore and background of Middle Earth are compelling and first-rate, one gets the impression that the story itself would only rate a third-page sidebar in the Middle-Earth Washington Post.

Go back to the books and see how much time Tolkien devotes to telling you where his heroes camped for the night and how they found water and how much Elf-bread was left in their packs. He does it again and again and again. And the plot? The journey of Frodo and Sam to Mordor is a beeline. They get waylaid by a giant spider and Frodo gets captured by some Orcs who leave him unguarded in a tower, apparently counting on his inability to climb down ladders, but no setback lasts more than a few pages. (That last one does span the gap between two books, making for some genuine suspense but it never pans out into anything) The Orcs steal Frodo’s mail shirt and show it to Gandalf, who takes it to mean his little friends are roasting on an Orc-fire somewhere, but it doesn’t affect his plans at all; in fact, he seems to forget about it rather quickly.

And that conclusion! Once Frodo throws the ring into the volcano, the entire nation of Mordor just up and crumbles. No one even has to sweep up. The Land of the Dark Lord morphs back into West Virginia, which it pretty much resembled all along, and Frodo, who passed out, you will remember, on the slope of an exploding volcano in the middle of enemy territory, wakes up — in a nice bed with everything all right and someone bringing him breakfast. Wha–how? Well, Gandalf, you see, swooped to the rescue on the back of an eagle and snatched him away to safety. No martyrs in this book.

I could further kvetch about how Gandalf spends twenty pages galloping here (on the back of the Wonder Horse Who Never Gets Tired, Shits Or Needs Feeding) explaining about Elves, and ten pages there galloping in the opposite direction explaining about Orcs. I could quibble that Sauron’s Secret Hobbit-Sniffing Police, who debut with such menace, don’t seem terribly bright or efficient, and that the All-Seeing Eye of the Dark Lord always seems to be conveniently looking in the wrong direction. But that’s not really what falls flat. The problem is that the menace of Sauron simply never manifests itself in any believable way.

Good plots turn not only on reversals of fortune, misunderstandings, suspense, trickery, but on the sense that something of vital interest to the cause of Good and Right is at stake. Well, everything, I mean bloody everything is at stake in this trilogy, even the bloody remote control. Yawn. So all-encompassing is this evil that you wonder why everyone our protagonists meet in Middle Earth has to be told about it, at length. You never see any consequences of this, just hordes of gnarly-looking brown people, who make a lot of noise but don’t set the cause of Good Little Elves And Wizards back in any real way. Couldn’t the Orcs have just one little victory, to make them feel better? And to give out heroes some real cause for worry?

And oy! that conclusion! Gandalf, I know you can’t take the ring yourself, or you might start Getting Ideas, but couldn’t you have boarded your eagle, plopped Frodo in your lap, and flown him to the volcano yourself? Well, no, you see because blah blah blah. Much safer to have two hobbits sneak through the front door of the Reich. Plus it will take three books as opposed to the four pages an eagle-flight might take you.

From what we’ve seen in this film, these problems might not only be remedied, but might be eliminated. This first installment is I believe almost three hours long, but it flew by. It’s very well paced. The dialogue has been improved somewhat: the characters speak English that’s elevated but not stilted, and the actors, as I have mentioned, have the Shakespearean chops to pull it off. Most of all though, it’s helped along by being a movie. When it comes to believability, the standards are much lower for films than for novels. The books ultimately have to compete with Dostoevsky. The film is in an arena where even the greatest competition is still a bit hokey (even Casablanca — a masterpiece, but no slice of gritty realism.)

What can’t the film do? Well, it can tighten up the pace, and transform the story into a tour-de-Orcs of pounding suspense. Alas, those qualities are not quite what raises The Trilogy stratospheres higher in quality than, for instance, the Goosebumps series. There are elements of Middle Earth that had to be left out of any competently-made film, with the medium’s demand for pacing and economy, and the need to please an audience that votes with its feet. I enjoyed the film, and some of it looked passing familiar. There’s Gandalf, there’s Bilbo, there’s the Ring and there are the Orcs, all convincingly filmed. I only wish they lived in Middle Earth. They don’t.

This is too bad because the greatness of the books is that they aren’t really about Wizards, Rings or Orcs. The star of The Trilogy is Middle Earth, a character who is one of the greatest in modern fiction. and one sadly absent from the movie.

In Middle Earth, not much happens. To Hobbits, with their comfortable bourgoise lives out in the backwater, (comfortable but not idyllic — witness Bilbo’s petty

By Jove! Someone call Orkin.

squabbles with his relatives) Dragons and Orcs and Elves are nearly as fantastic and far-off as they are to us. Bilbo is seen as a suspicious character by his neighbors because of his past adventures (related in The Hobbit) and his congress with wizards and dwarves and the like. The cause of the real danger in The Fellowship of the Ring is that Frodo and company take far too long to pack their things and begin the journey. The rhythms of daily life are hard to escape. They decide to undertake the quest in Spring, the summer passes by and they don’t get started until October, by which time the Black Riders have started sniffing around their back door. The suspense builds unbearable as the reader wrings his hands and yells at them to get their asses in gear. Well, if I were a hobbit, I’d probably procrastinate until the following May and end up as an Orc’s lunch.

This is Tolkien’s genius. You can live in Middle Earth. The lives of the characters are quotidian and sedate, and this life is more real to the Hobbits than the quest they must undergo. In lesser works of fantasy, the heroes wake up in full armor and battle three dragons before breakfast. In Middle Earth, the things most on the heroes’ minds are breakfast, a smoke, planning parties, and what the neighbors think. The pipeweed is smooth and pleasant, the hobbit-holes are like English country cottages. Who would ever want to leave the Shire, especially when your relatives might try to swipe your silverware? It takes almost as much effort for Frodo to imagine an Elf as it does for us.

The fanshaws of fantasy exist for the hobbits as folklore, as rumor, as the tales told in old songs. Those songs are lovely, by the way, and they draw you into their world. The song the dwarves sing in The Hobbit “The King under the Mountain/ The King carved out of stone” (if I recall it correctly) has followed me about ever since I was young. Their absence in the film is regrettable — only a snatch of “The Road Goes Ever On” shows up, as Bilbo sets off on his last twilight adventure.

The film is thrilling and full of action, but it doesn’t have the bittersweet sense of tragedy of the books, the sense of something once glorious that is now out of place in a new age, and passing into the sunset. At the end of the third book, Sauron is defeated, but the Elves must go, and outside the Shire you can see processions of them heading for the Western sea and the eternal shore. In time no one will believe they ever existed.

The battle against Sauron is the chief concern of the film, but it is a mistake to think it is the chief concern of the books. The real story of the books, as Tolkien says right at the beginning, is the passing of Middle Earth — which would happen Dark Lord or no Dark Lord — into an age where the Elves and Dwarfs have gone forever and things that were once noble and magnificent are forgotten. I predict that at the end of the third installment of Jackson’s trilogy, the viewer will feel a sense of exhilaration at the defeat of Evil. When I finished reading the Return of the King, on the other hand, I felt a grand and cathartic melancholy, and spent the rest of the day looking out windows and avoiding conversation.

– Matt Amati

Related posts:

1. Are Trees Ecoterrorists? Defending the Forst in the Two Towers
2. Top Weird Movie List
3. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Hollywood Blockbuster
4. Quantum of Solace
5. This Borg Needs Blood… and a Brain

Tags:action, adventure, fantasy, Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson

Trackback Post