Peter Jackson's fast-food-friendly travesty of Tolkien's immortal The Lord of the Rings – the first installment, The Fellowship of the Onion Rings, is now available, with The Two Tacos and The Return of the Burger King under the heat lamps until Christmas '02 and Christmas '03, respectively – has done the improbable on several levels. Most notably, it has forced me, out of a duty to warn people, actually to pen one last review for this site.

The Jackson film is Wagnerian in the bad sense (not that I think there's a good sense in which to be Wagnerian): it merits the recycling of Rossini's jabs about that other 'Ring' cycle:

It has beautiful moments and god-awful quarter hours; and

It's the sort of thing you sit down to at 6:00 PM, and you look at your watch three hours later and it's 6:20.

Actually, I don't know that comparing the Jackson film to Wagner is sufficiently insulting (though it ought be). Perhaps this will convey it better: it is fitting that the score should contain two tracks by the repellent, the unspeakable Enya, because the Jackson film is the visual equivalent of one of her charts: vapid, derivative, static, interminable, repetitive, vaguely Celto-NooAgey, and flaccid.

A respected colleague of mine – Curtis Edmonds, late of this site – has actually said, as has our very own AggieBrett, that the Jackson film is, while an imperfect translation of the work to the screen medium, nonetheless as good as the movies can do in such translation. This may be true. If so, it's alarming as hell.

Just as most opera can enhance a mere sob story but trivializes true literature (Wagner dumbing-down and shrieking-up the Eddas and the Sagas), film also, after a certain level is attained by the source material, makes banal all that it touches. Doing a workmanlike job of filming an off-the-rack rom-com is nothing unusual. Rare is the film-maker who can handle greatness in his material without merely soiling it.

Peter Jackson is not thus rare.

But let's leave aside, for a moment, the Jacksonian inability to handle the source material (after all, Cecil B. made a hash of the entire Bible: only Bach and Handel ever did right by that script; and Merchant-Ivory ruined a whole bunch of Forster). Let's look at the film qua film.

Character Is Destiny?

We can start with our more-or-less protagonist, Frodo Baggins, played by Elijah Wood. This is Mr Wood's best performance to date (not that his CV is all that extensive, mind), in that he perfectly captures what Mr Jackson wants. Unfortunately, Mr Jackson's public expressions of what he wanted in the character are tellingly wrong-headed. Some hero. The Halfling Twink (there are a few uncomfortable early moments when disbelief ceases to suspend, and one sees not Gandalf concerned over great events, but Ian McKellen giving the lad Elijah a curious, avid look or two [great, just what we need: Hobbit slashfic]) – at any rate, the Jackson film's Frodo, the Halfling Twink, is an 'innocent' caught up in great events, unwillingly and unwittingly, in the Jackson film's vision. The character is in fact cardboard. Nothing in this Frodo suggests depth or an inner life.

On the contrary. What Mr Jackson wanted of Mr Wood, and got, was a creature without conflict or moral depth. This puling whiner cannot contain the potential Ringbearer whose deeds will be lauded on the Field of Cormallen; neither can this character rise to the temptations of power, the dark urge to seize the Ring itself. Frodo, as a character, is supposed to be capable of heroic virtue – and, equally, of possibly becoming a Ringwraith, if not a challenger to Dark Lordship. The most the Jackson film's Frodo could manage would be Ringwimp.

Equally uninspiring is Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn. Look, there are as many ways to read the Ring saga as there are readers: my own take (the only correct one, of course, and still, as of this writing, posted here), which implicates the same mental furniture Tollers himself possessed (Classical education and the Great War), or as a Greenpeace tract (foolish but common, as readings go), or, what the hell and why not, as a theocratic fantasy in which the Elves are Roman Catholics, the 'good' Men of Gondor and Rohan are, with the Hobbits, Anglican, and the Dwarves are the Jews of Middle-Earth, all joining forces to prompt a Stuart Restoration. What cannot work, however, is a Zen reading.

All of Aragorn's conflicts in the Jackson film are internal and psychological, obsessing over his worthiness to be king. The rewriting and mishandling of the Bree sequence, the Weathertop / Ford of Bruinen sequences, and especially the Argonath / Amon Hen / 'Breaking of the Fellowship' sequence, with the Boromir's Death-and-Rhine-Journey (sorry, more Wagner), absolve Aragorn in advance of all moral struggles and choices.

The result for characterization is dire. If we have in the Jackson film a Frodo of whom Gandalf, in Rivendell, could never have said, 'you pulled through … [only] because you resisted to the end,' we equally have in the Jackson film an Aragorn incapable of bending 'even the shades of men to his will.'

In fact, the Jackson film is a great steaming midden of mischaracterization: Elrond as an Elvish bigot, Arwen as a warrior princess, and Pippin Took and Merry Brandybuck as stock sidekicks. This last may be partly the result of casting: having filled the roles with a Scot and an Irishman, the Jackson film falls back on the tired English device, apparently shared in the Antipodes, of making the characters into Campbell-and-Forgan, Macmorris-and-Jamie.

But can anyone see in these bumbling, sub-Oxonian Drones Clubbers the scions of the Thane of the Shire and the Master of Buckland? Future knights of Gondor and the Mark of Rohan? I thought not.

As Boromir, too, Sean Bean does a fine reprise of … Richard Sharpe. And I here pause to note another odd casting factor. The Jackson film, although determinedly PC in making Arwen Evenstar a feminist warrior, departs from the source material in seeing Elves and Numenoreans as Nietzsche's blond beasts, Aryan specimens over whom Leni Riefensthal would have drooled, from Bean's Boromir to Orlando Bloom's Legolas to Cate Blanchett's Galadriel to Hugo Weaving's Elrond. Hugo Weaving is a fine actor, but one suspects that it was his eyebrows that got him the part of Elrond Half-Elven, as the Jackson film seems infected by the Spock Syndrome when it comes to pointy ears and supercilious expressions. (I suppose it's as well that the Jackson film cuts Elrond's sons, Elladan and Elrohir, or we might have been stuck – On the Line and the 'Pop Odyssey' tour permitting – with Lance Bass and Wade Robson in the cast, too.)

This may seem picayune to some, this annoyance with departures from the source material. It can be argued that film, as a medium, demands such elisions and re-imaginings. But Mr Jackson and his people have preened publicly at great length and forcibly about their attention to detail, down to the very pottery. Having set themselves such a standard to be judged by, they have invoked the judgment they are getting.

Dramatic Conflict? We Got Conflict. Lookit the Swordfights

The deficiencies of the Jackson film in characterization do not affect only characterization itself. The essence of drama is conflict, and as we have seen, the cardboard cutouts of Mr Jackson's direction and choosing are neither conflicted in themselves nor capable of conflict with others. This is worsened by the screen treatment's rewriting of the plot.

It may be unavoidable to have lost some, at least, of the Old Forest scenes and Bombadil, to have mangled most of the Bree sequence, to have cut so much of the Council at Rivendell, to have abandoned the tension that comes from elements in which Nature, far from being pastoral and arcadian (the Greenpeace reading again), may be independently hostile without reference to Sauron and his works. (Old Man Willow, the mountain Caradhras, and indeed the Balrog all come to mind.)

It may have been unavoidable, but I doubt it.

One reason Frodo, in the Jackson film, remains a cipher, a nonentity, such that the dramatic force of the tale is all but lost, is that we have been deprived of his real baptism of fire, his first great courageous act. The entire scene in the Barrow-downs is gone.

Part of the reason there's no depth to Sam, Meriadoc, and Peregrine is that they have merely bumbled into coming along for the ride, rather than determining what Frodo was about to do in leaving the Shire and forcing themselves to go along. In certain respects, Tolkien's work is very much a war novel, a novel of the Great War, the First World War, and the same emotions of small-unit cohesion that drove the admirable adaptation of Band of Brothers were available to the Jackson film, and simply jettisoned.

Obviously, one could not, at the time of filming, have imagined that asymmetrical warfare would become the buzzword of the Western world by the time the Jackson film was released. But the cuts in the Rivendell conference scenes de-emphasize a matter vital to the drama: the sheer hopelessness, the (mortally-speaking) folly, of sending the Fellowship into Mordor. They also deprive Legolas and Gimli of all context.

Cinema (I reiterate) can, on occasion, take marginal sourceworks and make them glorious: 'Everybody Comes to Rick's' was a flop, and a certain Pierre Boulle novel was hardly Great Lit: yet Casablanca and the David Lean - Alec Guiness triumph Bridge On the River Kwai are true classics of film. Sometimes, if very rarely, a superb source can even be made a superb piece of cinema without marring things and mucking them up: HBO's take on Steve Ambrose's Band of Brothers, notably.

But what makes these classics classics is conflict: the same tried and true principles of dramatic conflict Aristotle hammered home millennia ago. A Casablanca in which Rick, Ilsa, Victor Laszlo, and Captain Reynault were as flat, affect-less, and unconflicted, as static, as the Jackson's film's versions of its characters are, would be a forgotten flop.

The backstory and some truly vital scenes that are, simply, requisite, indispensable, to creating conflict, are, in the Jackson film, missing. And for what?

This is why I dissent from the easy view that important narrative elements had to be compromised. Look, folks, I know what goes into writing a screenplay, okay? And what has happened here is clear and depressing. Important plot points and characterization have been jettisoned in order to free up run-time for SFX and swordfights.

If this is an unavoidable consequence of cinema's 'playing to its strengths,' we are again confronted with the argument that some works are, then, simply not meant to be filmed.

Essentially all the missing pieces – not of a 'puzzle,' here, but the missing pieces of the engine that ought drive the story, but is silent and cold instead – could have been included. The price would have been a reduction in the cheesy SFX that last far too long anyway on Weathertop, at the Ford, and in Galadriel's renunciation scene where she refuses the Ring; and a reduction in totally unnecessary show-stopper sound-and-light setpieces.

There is something fatally wrong with a vision of this material that involves wasting yards of film on a wizardly confrontation in Orthanc (Isengard to you) that is wholly effects-driven. Apparently Mr Jackson has mistaken one Christopher Frank Carandini Lee for Jet Li. It's painful to watch.

Equally interminable, and equally a waste of time that could have been devoted to essential narrative elements, are the Saruman as an anti-Green, Nasty Old Industrialist transformation-of-Isengard scenes, the Survival Anglia-style spawning of orcs and Uruk-hai, and the Last Stand of George Armstrong Boromir.

The Waste Land

The Jackson film would be less troubling had it not had such potential. Almost all the acting is good or better, even in the smallest roles, though Cate Blanchett chews some scenery as per usual and Boyd-and-Monaghan are doing a music-hall turn most of the time. Though Liv Tyler is not playing a role readily recognizable as that of the true Undomiel, she does a creditable job. Ian Holm is of course superb, though the Jackson film's Bilbo might as well have been a CGI with voice-overs phoned in by Bob Hoskins. Ian McKellen plays Gandalf, largely correctly, as a bearded, donnish Tolkien-clone (Gandalf has always seemed to me somewhat autobiographical on JRRT's part). Even where casting is eccentric, the actors do their best to give Mr Jackson what he sought.

And that is precisely the problem.

The Jackson film goes to great lengths to create a texture.

Item: New Zealand does yeoman work as a stand-in for the Midlands, the West Country, the Fens, North Wales, the Rhine and the 1916 Western Front, the Alps, and all of Middle-Earth (Warwickshire on acid): a hypersaturated sensual imagery that is very impressive on first glance.

Item: The score – that is, the cinematic score, less the two original (!) vocal tracks – is inoffensive, if banal. Like the Jackson film as a whole, it lacks the depth and vision that even Tolkien's doggerel possess, and sets none of the poems or songs (which, likewise, appear nowhere else in the film). And as noted, it is infected by the Enya curse, alas.

Item: The cinematography is eye-popping. On that head, at least, I can applaud the Jackson film without reservation or cavil.

Item: The set design is a coherent and thoroughly visioned whole. Again, there is much here to applaud.

And that, as I say, is the problem. Here is a film the makers of which shout to the skies, 'See what attention to detail we've given! Buttons, toggles, pottery – even if you never see it on screen, it's all there, made from scratch!' And yet the Jackson film leaves out every element, or very nearly every element, of the source material that gives the tale heft and purpose and drive and conflict and gravitas.

This is failing to see Fangorn Forest for the trees.

The Great Darkness

What went wrong? Why is the Jackson film a debacle and a travesty?

I have mentioned before that while most of the film's effects are breath-taking, those that involve Frodo's (gutless, cringing, passive) confrontations with evil, and that that involves the Temptation of Galadriel, are painfully flat, stale, and unprofitable.

Tolkien's is a moral vision, his tale a moral tale. Therein lies perhaps the nub of the problem. Anyone familiar with the Peter Jackson of Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, Braindead, The Frighteners, and Heavenly Creatures should have realized: the man has no moral compass whatever. He suffers from a deficient sense of evil, except as a cosmetic, FX-laden trope of film-making.

Some thirty years ago, Tolkien's masterwork was taken up by and coopted by a certain set of people. People who, did they but know it, despised everything John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (and his work) stood for, and stood for all that he (rightly) despised. These are the people who brought you vegetarian hobbit bistros, 'Frodo Lives!' bumper stickers, and all the rest. It is tempting to see in the Jackson film their final triumph.

But while the Jackson film is, in its effect, something of which Saruman or Sauron – what am I saying? Morgoth himself – could be proud, I incline to think that it is not malice but negligence, a concentration on piddling details to the exclusion of vision, that is at work here … coupled with a seduction by technology that is diametrically at odds with the one, Green moral so many people do see in the books.

Whatever the cause, though, the Jackson film is a failure, made more bitter by the potential it squanders. I cannot warn against it strongly enough.



Recommended: No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12