I have read LOTR and related works including The Hobbit and The Silmarllion at least six times over the past 30 years and consider the series of stories to be one of the great works in English. I attended the first screening of the "Fellowship" movie here in Nelson, New Zealand, very near the sites of some of the key scenes in the movie. I had high expectations and they were not, overall, disappointed. There were some breath-taking moments, such as the Council of Elrond and the realisations of Lothlorien and Gondor. Nevertheless there were things in the movies that I did not like. Cate Blanchard's Galadriel was not the Elf Queen that I had in my mind's eye and I thought she overacted the part. The Balrog was impressive but too much like something out of Doom - Weta missed their chance there. In the book, the Balrog actually had hair and it was that which caught fire - just saying. But what I really thought let the movie trilogy down was the lack of respect for Tolkien's original motivation, which was to create the milieu for the Elvish and other languages - to create real alternative cultures. The film created the external appearance of those cultures, but we were hardly shown their depth. One of the main ways in which this could have been dealt with in the films was to let more of Tolkien's music and poetry appear. LOTR is much, much more than just a fantasy war story, which is why it is immortal and why so many imitators fall short. The other disappointment was the way in which the Return of the King ends without showing how the Hobbits had "grown up" - it completely ignored the Cleansing of the Shire. All this would have made the project longer and I'm probably being overly picky, but I think it's food for thought. |
