THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001) Sucks! Ha ha, made you explode! No, seriously, after a looooong year filled with a lot of crappy movies and just as many mediocre ones I gritted my teeth and actually recommended because they were better than the bad ones (Planet Of The Apes...what was I thinking?...New Years resolution: do this less), it's nice to not only get a really good movie, but one of whose kind for which I've been hoping for some time. At last, a well-made, big-budget, fire-in-the-belly sword-and-sorcery adventure that doesn't wink or nudge or try to pander to demographics. It's got it all, well, almost. I've always said that the four big ingredients for a movie like this should be blood, steel, fire, and tits...I'm willing to substitute slime for blood, and as for the tits, well, this IS The Lord Of The Rings. It's a lot of good things, but nobody ever said sexy was one of them. Ah, well. I first tried reading The Lord Of The Rings in junior high. I quit maybe halfway through the first book. I just couldn't hack the cutesy stuff. The cute songs. The cute words, like "eleventy". The cute Hobbit names. I was cheering for Sauron in no time flat; there wasn't a Hobbit around I didn't want to kick right in his cute nuts. Tried it again last year, and got all the way through, and enjoyed it enough, though I was reminded why this kind of fantasy writing isn't really doing it for me the way it did when I was seventeen. The script for this movie (by director Peter Jackson, Frances Walsh, and Philippa Boyens) thankfully dumps a lot of the cute stuff; only one song is sung that I recall and that's by Gandalf, way in the background. There aren't even talking trees at the end. The Hobbit names are passed over so quickly I found that I didn't know which was Merry and which was Pippin (grr, cute names), let alone what makes them different from each other. (I am incongruously reminded of the similarly interchangeable Stan and Kyle on South Park) And the sound of the words "One hundred and eleven" were like music to my ears, baby. The plot is something of a blueprint for today's ultra-prolific fantasy fiction, which is good and bad. It's obviously a classic. On the bad side, its classic status does not diminish my weariness with magical artifacts which can singlehandedly undo creation, or something. Since there wouldn't be much of a story if it really DID singlehandedly undo creation, I suppose it's just a maguffin, though one which renders its wearer invisible and one that everybody wants. (The point that almost everyone who comes near the ring yearns to possess it is laboriously illustrated many times) Anyway, if Sauron (who's the king of all badguys) gets his hands on it, there'll be no more Super Big Gulps, or women with tits the size of Ethiopia. And it can't be safely used for good. So, it's got to be destroyed by being dropped into the roiling fires of Mount Doom...Sauron's seat of power. Chosen to do this are...why the hell am I explaining this? Can't you people figure this out for yourselves? The cast is almost all good, even Liv Tyler who looks suitably elfin playing, well, an elf, getting me past my usual incapability to take her seriously (though admittedly, I suspect that has more to do with her dad's crappy band than with her). Ian McKellen makes for a surprisingly vulnerable Gandalf, and the humans Boromir and Aragorn are both played well by Sean Bean and Viggo Mortensen. Less remarkable is John Rhys-Davies, rather wasted as Gimli the dwarf (almost inevitable, that he'd get this role), always talking about battle and drinking, probably listening to Manowar all the time. Maybe Gimli gets more to do in the next two films. Likewise, Christopher Lee plays Saruman as one would expect (lots of ominous intonations), but doesn't bring much more to the role than the obvious. Still, it's Chrisopher Lee playing a grand villain in a grand adventure, so I can't complain. No, casting-wise, only Hugo Weaving as the elves' head honcho seems all that out of place, neither looking nor sounding the part in the least. (goddamn wuss. If you wanted the ring destroyed that badly, you would've tackled the stupid bastard wearing it off the cliff. Now you're sending all these perfectly nice people to their likely deaths without even apologizing. You suck!) The (CGI) effects are almost all excellent, though they're often rendered so dimly (to fit in with the similarly dim surroundings) that one wonders how shaky things might've looked if Jackson had decided to make a brighter movie. That's one way to stretch your budget. It's the little touches which are most intriguing, particularly the essentially movie-long effect of making all these dwarves and Hobbits shorter than humans and elves. Effects-wise, only the orcs' teeth disappoint. Action is more plentiful (proportionately) than I remember in the book, which is fine by me, because action plays better on a big screen than a bunch of Hobbits sitting around singing their cute little Hobbit songs. Peter Jackson's direction is very "modern", which might mean a lot of bad things (lots of tiresome zips and zooms in Saruman's tower, not to mention the cringe-inducing Michael Bay MTV editing during the sorcery fight), but c'mon, look at...well, every other scene, it's not like he's doing a bad job. Gotta love those scenes with the creepy Dark Riders, which remind me a little of the Grim Reaper in The Frighteners. The battle scenes are fast-paced and exciting, and not slapsticky in the least, though there might be some unintended guffaws when a ring-wearing Sauron sends half a dozen men flying with every swing of his sword, but not from me. Nice to see Sauron, though; if I remember correctly, he's not actually in any scenes in the book. (If I DON'T remember correctly, I fully expect at least thirty-five people to correct me) He looks like he's got a bit of a potbelly, but he's huge and mean-looking and has a scary helmet, and when an entire army stops dead in terror and awe when they come face to face with him, you really feel in your gut that it's for a good reason. What more do you want? Oh yeah, and almost every set and outdoor scene is gorgeous (even if the sets are dim, dim, dim). At least 90% of the time, The Fellowship Of The Ring makes for an excellent example of how a heroic fantasy film should be made (I still prefer Conan, though...Sandahl Bergman kicks Liv Tyler's skinny ass). If you want to see an excellent example of how they SHOULDN'T be made, go see Dungeons & Dragons. Or better yet, don't see it and listen to the advice of everyone who did. At over three hours long, The Fellowship Of The Ring may well be an ass-numbing sit for people who aren't fans of the book or at least the genre. I thought it went by pretty quickly. The two followups (filmed at the same time, but being worked on in post-production now) are to be released one year apart from each other, which makes for a nice brief wait, though it's almost a gimme that the box-office take for these movies is only going down from here. To be honest, I'm less curious about the remainder of this project (I'm confident it'll likely all be at least as good as this) than I am about what effect it's going to have on this genre of filmmaking, which has been more or less dead for twenty years, and oh, baby I want it to come back to life. 2001 has definitely been an ass-crappy year for movies, enough to make me think "Come back, 2000! All is forgiven!" But it's nice to see it end on such a high note. There are a million ways this movie could've been screwed up. Jackson & company managed to avoid all but about a dozen of them. Su-poib. BACK TO THE L's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE