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J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has been transferred to the movies before, with Rankin & Bass's The Hobbit (1978) and The Return of the King (1980), both made for TV, and Ralph Bashki's The Lord of the Rings (1979). But the concept of a live-action film version of the trilogy was never seriously considered until the advent of computer animation, and even the most casual Tolkien reader would be hard-pressed to argue that this was not a wise decision. Director Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners) presents special effects that are rivaled only by his sense of story and loyalty to the original books, and his film (for indeed, this is a film, not a mere movie) combines story, visual effects and breathtaking scenery to place us in Middle Earth for three hours or so, completely bound up with the fate of these characters.
The story is well-known enough to be almost deceptively simple: Frodo
Baggins (Elijah Wood), a hobbit of the Shire, is faced with a problem--his 
magic
ring given him by his uncle Bilbo (Ian Holm) happens to be the One Ring, forged
by the Dark Lord Sauron. As long as the Ring exists, Sauron is capable of
conquering the world, and if Sauron should ever get hold of the ring, Middle
Earth (Tolkien's depiction of Europe some six or seven thousand years ago) will
be lost. So Frodo has to get the hell out of the Shire, aided by his loyal
hobbit friends Sam (Sean Astin), Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic
Monaghan) and dump the ring into someone else's hands. This someone else turns
out to be him when, in the tradition of "Small people matter too," the
Wise and learned decide Frodo is to be the Ringbearer--the one to take the Ring
to Sauron's fortress in Mordor and destroy it "in the fire from which it
was wrought." So much for hocking it at the local pawn shop.
One of the more pressing problems with placing Tolkien's trilogy (and most importantly Fellowship, since it's the one that starts the whole thing off) has always been the inclusion of all necessary elements of Tolkien's world and all its history; The Lord of the Rings has roots that go back several millenia into Middle Earth's past, and careless decisions about what can be left out will result in a fragmented, often tangential film. Bashki resolved this problem by splitting the trilogy into two, and sticking to those elements of the story that had the most to do with action and the least to do with history. Rankin and Bass, when doing Return of the King, resolved this problem by simply ignoring everything that happened up to the final battles and presenting the story as a singular episode.
Peter Jackson, on the other hand, uses as much of the mythology as he possibly can to increase the pacing of the movie and keep the audience on their seats for as long as possible. We actually get to see the ages-old battle where Sauron loses the ring, and we see Sauron himself, the Devil of Middle-Earth who does most of his bad business behind the scenes. We see orc armies storming the world, and we see the inside of Sauron's fortress, something we can only imagine when reading Tolkien's books. Jackson is showing us more of Tolkien's fascinating world than we have seen before, and he manages to convey the depth and history behind the ring as well. In order to pull this off, however, he has indulged in several plot condensations: instead of the many days and nights of Frodo's agonizing journey to Rivendell, for example, we see an immediate flight from danger that seems to take no more than two or three days. Purists (and there are plenty of them) will undoubtedly take Jackson to task for such editorial swipes, but the outcome nevertheless reveals more of the scope and grandeur of Tolkien's Middle Earth than any other adaptation.
Jackson's casting choices are as near-perfect as can possibly be. Ian McKellan is perfect as the wizard Gandalf the Grey (no other descriptive term is better, or necessary), and Viggo Mortensen gives just the right sense of brooding royalty coupled with heroism for Aragorn, son of Arathorn, the exiled king last in line for the throne of Gondor. Wood delivers a somewhat two-dimensional Frodo Baggins, one who goes from scared and bewildered to simply bewildered for much of the movie, but this is more of a pacing problem than it is a reflection of Wood's acting talents: because Jackson does not have time to give us a proper sense of life in the Shire (as Tolkien does in the first two chapters of his book), Frodo is immediately thrust into a dangerous situation and is all but left wandering in a world of Big People with sharp swords and strange dialects. We do not see all that much in the way of bad guys' personalities outside Saruman's (Christopher Lee), a renegade wizard who goes toe-to-toe with Gandalf in the first senior citizen's mano y mano since the two old ladies in Willow. Sauron, though revealed in a couple flashbacks, usually only appears as a fiery Eye, and Gollum, the slippery frog-like creature from whom Bilbo originally stole the Ring, only appears as a fleeting CGI apparition. The real headlining bad guys are the Orcs: dirty, pig-like creatures smeared in mud and baring sharp, yellowed teeth. The makeup job here is superb, and at times, the very presence of the Orcs is enough to get us shuddering in our seats.
When not using New Zealand's old-world scenery (I'm told many of the locations for LotR were also used for Zena: Warrior Princess), the filmmakers have presented us with either incredible matte paintings or effective blue screen backgrounds to transplant us into a centuries-old cavern the size of Grand Central Station or an Elf house tucked away into a San Fernando-type valley. The only scene which was a bit shortcoming in this department was the hobbits' battle on Weathertop: the ground and surrounding sky is a little too artificial, and it's pretty obvious it's a movie set. But for those of you planning any caving expeditions any time soon, don't watch this movie before you go, or you'll be scanning the walls for "the older and fouler things in the deep places of the world."
In short, what we have here is a genuine back-to-the-basics fantasy epic. No stupid kids' characters; no hokey dialogue; no rambling, confused legends hastily stuffed into the backdrop of the story. This is the kind of film that might get adults like my own father to stop saying "That's just kids' stuff" and to start saying "Hey, that Orc looks like a mother-in-law I once knew" while settling down to watch. The Fellowship of the Ring has adventure, legend and intrigue, but just the right mix of the three to construct a story that mirrors almost any historical period we have ever known. In short, a message to George Lucas from Tso Long: "School's in session, sucker. Pack up the Ewoks and Gungans and dust off the drawing board."
-Long
Copyright 2002 Tso Long Productions ©