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Louis Malle |
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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring |
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review by Dane Hitt |
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Peter Jackson |
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This movie LONG awaited by my Tolkien-loving family and myself. The few days that remained before the first showing on the 19th were long, hectic days. Now I may seem like the typical cult fan that’s going to like it no matter what, but after I saw the cartoon renditions made out of it, I proved myself wrong. For some odd reason, I trusted Peter Jackson wouldn’t distort it too much from the book. Accuracy was my main concern. I wasn’t worried about bad casting, although my friend seemed to believe that Elijah Wood was incapable of starring in a good movie after “North”. I strongly disagree after seeing Wood’s performance as the central character in the whole trilogy. His portrayal of the hobbit is very similar to the way Tolkien created him in the books. He, like all the other hobbits, loves guests, food, and fun, but he seems to be a bit more on the serious side, especially when he discovers his inheritance from his Uncle Bilbo: The One Ring. Now, I could go on for days about the story, but I think after the movie was released, if you hadn’t seen it or read it, you had heard enough to know about it. I didn’t find any of the characters poorly portrayed. Sure, the movie’s image of them differed from mine, but that’s expected. The cast is a unique one, boasting Ian Holm, who has been the voice of Frodo on the BBC radio taping of the trilogy. He also played Fluellen in “Henry V”, and a German officer in “All Quiet on the Western Front”. His role of Bilbo was done superbly. He is the simple, bumbling hobbit who had a great weakness to The Ring. “Lord of the Rings” boasts Ian McKellen as the wizard Gandalf. All I can say about his portrayal was, “whoa”. Pardon my informal opinion, but that’s the best way for me to put it. If any character from the movie matched my imagination of their behavior while reading it, that character was Gandalf. He was just an old man shooting fireworks for hobbits, and then suddenly, he is the defender of the Fellowship from the Balrog of Khazad-dum. As my friend said, “He couldn’t die if he tried.” Another notable performance was by Sean Bean, as the tortured warrior Boromir, my favorite character. Tolkien made Boromir to show The Ring’s true power…the power to corrupt. In the book, Boromir’s death scene isn’t as dramatically done as it is in the film. Aragorn finds him just seconds before he dies. I do believe it was a nice touch, however. I could go on about the cast, but then the HTML file for this review would get a bit, uh, huge. So I’ll continue on to other aspects of the film. I have heard a few critics complain about this movie being boring. I find that a miserable folly. Everything kept me interested. Just seeing how Peter Jackson designed every little aspect of Middle-earth kept me into the film. Hobbiton, Mordor, the Balrog, and every other place and creature of Middle-earth were so beautifully done. The effort Peter Jackson put into making Tolkien’s world live deserves recognition. I’ll finish up my little speech here with something I thought was interesting: the ending. I’m glad Jackson ended it the way he did. After every one of the six times I saw this film, someone said, “That’s it? That’s the ending?!” and I remind them that it is a trilogy, and there’s much more to be seen. Then I realized that if Peter Jackson ends “The Two Towers” the way the book itself ends, some people are REALLY going to be pissed off.
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