Review: The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003).

Where does one start when putting Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings – a movie which has, in less than a decade, become almost unanimously hailed the world over as one of the most ambitious projects and one of THE definitive achievements in the entire long history of motion pictures – under the spotlight? Just as one cannot do justice to J. R. R. Tolkien’s staggering and immortal literary fantasy masterpiece in merely a few words, thus is also the case for Jackson’s unprecedented film adaptation. Because, with this operatic, timeless story of good triumphing over evil – with themes of love, sacrifice, redemption, mythology and corruption of power thrown in for good measure – Tolkien and Jackson each pulled off an extremely rare achievement in their respective mediums: they “built a church.” Furthermore Jackson single-handedly introduced virtually an entire generation – myself included – to the life’s work of Professor Tolkien. It is not impossible to do the film justice, but extremely few have fully done that, so I’ll do my best.
But before I attempt to navigate just how Jackson, who has referred to the making of The Lord of the Rings as “like laying down the train-tracks while the train was moving forward,” was so successful, I want to get something less important out of the way, and forgive me while I reminisce briefly.
I was fortunate enough to first see The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen during its opening weekend in Australia in 2001 when I was 13, the perfect age for it. While I still to this day consider seeing Star Wars on the big screen at the age of nine when it was re-released in 1997 to be my fondest movie-going memory, that film only gets it over Fellowship in a photo-finish, and since the two are apples and oranges in terms of genre I still thought Fellowship was completely unlike anything I’d seen before. Witnessing the Fellowship crossing the Bridge of Khazad-dum followed by the showdown between Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the Balrog was, and continues to be, the most awe-inspiring thing I’d seen since… well, the Death Star blowing up (and all those scenes still make my eyes light up like a pinball machine). And as soon as the lights in the cinema went up after the credits began to roll, virtually every person in the audience rose to their feet and started clapping and cheering. In all my movie-going experiences, that’s the only time I’ve been part of an audience that honoured a movie with a standing ovation at the end (perhaps with Star Wars in ’97 and The Two Towers and The Return of the King most of the audience knew what they were in for). Furthermore, and no doubt by some total fluke, Fellowship was released at just the PERFECT time. Of course, we all know and wish we could forget what happened in September of 2001 and it was not the movie’s huge worldwide box office taking but rather, the hugely positive and lasting impact it had, and continues to have, on so many people which proves that movies like Fellowship, when they’re done right and released at the right time, give people hope and inspiration. When we get those feelings from a film, as we do with real-life experiences, the film becomes a miracle. Feelings of hope and inspiration elicited from a movie are feelings that no one, neither the director nor the attendant behind the cinema concession stand, can give you, and nobody and nothing can ever take it away.
Okay, that’s that. Now for some deconstruction.
First, to the visual side of The Lord of the Rings. Visually, it is indeed ravishing in every sense of the word. Its scale and technological wonders make it heaven on your eyes, and in every frame there are so many beautiful things to look at that with every viewing you notice something there that you simply never noticed before (something that defines any true classic). The design is so richly detailed and by turns shimmeringly beautiful and powerfully arresting that you feel like you can just reach into the screen and touch the rainforest treetops of Rivendell or Lothlórien, or smell the gritty underbelly of the almost dystopic caverns of Isengard. Much of this is due to the many spectacular New Zealand locations on which the movie was filmed – indeed, Jackson’s choices of locations were so beneficial overall to New Zealand’s tourism industry that then-New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark stated, “Peter Jackson has done more for New Zealand’s tourism industry than any man since Captain Cook!”
Still on the visual aspect of The Lord of the Rings, overshadowing the sets and costumes are the indisputably awe-inspiring special effects. They have the same effect as the sets and costumes, however they overpower other technical aspects of the production when we learn there was much more at stake with the special effects. And the special effects are, it must be said, nothing less than special. In fact, what am I saying? To merely write them off as “special” is both an understatement and an injustice. It’s almost as if Peter Jackson has made a 3-D movie that you don’t need to watch while wearing those stupid glasses, to get the adrenaline rush that 3-D brings. The dragon firework; Frodo’s blurred and almost otherworldly vision when he puts on the One Ring; the dormant demon erupting out of Cate Blanchett’s Queen Galadriel when she sees the Ring; the river flooding Isengard to the ground; Mount Doom blowing its top and the tower of Orthanc collapsing to the ground, causing an earthquake after the destruction of the Ring; and the afore-mentioned showdown on the Bridge of Khazad-dum to name but a few. All become indelibly etched in your memory forever. And then there’s Gollum (played to sheer perfection by Andy Serkis), the first completely lifelike (if that’s the right adjective to use in relation to a non-human character) computer-generated character ever commited to celluloid. Gollum was the main reason as to just why the realism of the visuals in The Lord of the Rings was so critical to the outcome, especially in The Two Towers and The Return of the King, because he is the character through which the story’s moral of how power corrupts is delivered. Visually, The Lord of the Rings is, to put it lightly, a dream come true.

Another visual plus is Andrew Lesnie’s exhilarating cinematography – indeed, the effectiveness of the picturesque New Zealand locations in the overall look of the movie has a great deal to do with his camera and he deserved every gram of the Academy Award he won for Fellowship. Two photographic shots in the entire piece that never fail to leave me awestruck are the tracking shot of the butterfly hovering along the caverns of Isengard, then up and over the tower of Orthanc (despite that shot being mostly computer-generated) and the haunting mise-en-scene (following Arwen’s (Liv Tyler) vision of Aragorn’s (Viggo Mortensen) passing) of leaves floating over Aragorn’s casket to show the withering passage of time. Sublime.
Yet despite the size of what they have to compete with, the entire cast never misses a beat. Elijah Wood goes through the motions as Frodo for most of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, before Frodo goes renegade in the second half of The Return of the King, with Wood nailing a depiction of dependence and attachment to the Ring that is critical for the story’s message of corruption of power to come through. Andy Serkis chews up and spits Gollum back out with such ease that it seems Gollum was the role he was born to play. The same can be said for Ian McKellen, who had never even heard of Tolkien’s novel when Peter Jackson and co-screenwriter/producer Fran Walsh offered him the part of über-wizard Gandalf. Viggo Mortensen gives the somewhat arrogant Aragorn a refreshing mix of anger and vulnerability, Miranda Otto transforms a stock damsel in distress into one of the best action heroines in recent cinema history, and as father and son John Noble and Sean Bean each portray complex, almost deranged men who have succumbed to their shared susceptibility to power and greed so brilliantly you could be forgiven for mistaking Noble and Bean for an actual father and son pair.
However, in my opinion the actor who pulls the rug out from underneath everybody else here is Sean Astin. And in just one short scene. The expression on Astin’s face after Wood’s Frodo sends his Sam home in The Return of the King simply makes you want to, for a very short while, choke Frodo to death. How the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences snubbed this heartbreaking performance – and about three other performances in King – and granted only one acting nomination for the entire trilogy (but no disrespect at all to Mr. McKellen) is anyone’s guess. But of course, the only negative all the actors in the trilogy will get is being forever thought of as their characters, even if half have already managed to escape the typecasting. In the eyes of fans everywhere, Wood IS Frodo, McKellen IS Gandalf (despite his career-best performance in Gods and Monsters) and Mortensen IS Aragorn and so on, just like Mark Hamill IS Luke Skywalker, Sean Connery IS James Bond (that one’s probably not a negative though) and Harrison Ford IS Han Solo and Indiana Jones.
Even after little more than eight years, the cultural impact of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings cannot and should not be underestimated. Jackson has made himself one of two prolific individuals – the other being J.K. Rowling – who have re-awoken children and teenagers of the twenty-first century to reading. After the release of just The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R. R. Tolkien’s works shot right back up to the top of bestseller lists worldwide. Jackson’s adaptations also slowly pulled the rug out from underneath the more-hyped Harry Potter movie adaptations, both critically and financially. The movie, along with J.K. Rowling’s Potter series and its own subsequent movie franchise for credit where it’s due, has given rise to endless merchandising and pieces of fan-fiction. But perhaps most of all to Jackson’s credit, he crafted a fantasy masterpiece so undeniably perfect, and with such passion and stubborn determination, that it eventually forced a bunch of fickle old men and women to get over their seventy-six year-long bias (even Steven Spielberg – who only shut the Academy up when he started to make serious films like the masterpieces Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan – and George Lucas can’t lay claim to that). To close, I can’t come up with a statement of my own with which I can do justice to Peter Jackson’s colossal adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in just one sentence, so as one critic wrote following The Return of the King’s December 2003 release, “Never has a filmmaker aimed higher, or achieved more.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.