In the present, the group passes through many trials, each with its own fantastic setting. There are apocalyptic, flame-seared flashbacks, and, even if we can't sort out all the references and echoes, we may be impressed by the doomy weight of civilizations rising and falling-the epic span of Tolkien's myth. Quite a lot of screen time is needed to get all the plot information out of the wizardly beards and into our ears, in part because the movie wants to tell us what happened centuries ago and how it affects the present. Frodo must suffer, "die," be reborn, then tempted, and all the rest. Like many epics, the movie is about the testing of a young man. He sets off on this unusual quest-going toward evil rather than away from it-accompanied by a band of irregulars, including the wizard Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen), two noble human warriors (Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean), an intemperate, black-bearded dwarf (John Rhys-Davies), and a variety of nattering hobbits. What to do? With a little help, Frodo realizes that the only salvation lies in conveying the ring to the flaming Mount Doom, in Mordor, where it was forged, and melting it into nothingness. Sauron has at his disposal an army of orcs-misshapen beasts with mucky gray faces-and he wants to seize the ring so that he can destroy Middle-earth, including the green land of the Shire, where the hobbits live. The sliver, in fact, is the eye of the vile Sauron, Lord of Mordor. Wood has troubled blue eyes, and every time his Frodo gets into a jam and puts the ring on his finger he sees what looks like a fiery sliver of earth bearing down on him, and he experiences an unspeakable dread. Reduced to its main lines, the movie is about the young hobbit Frodo (Elijah Wood), who has been entrusted with the ring that rules all, a ring so dangerous that it corrupts everyone who comes near it. The New Zealander director Peter Jackson ("Heavenly Creatures"), who also wrote the screenplay with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, works with enough dramatic tension and pictorial grandeur to sustain us through long periods of complicated exposition and prolonged bouts of swordplay. Once it gets going (the preliminaries are exhausting), and you get used to its peculiar idiom, "The Lord of the Rings" is consistently beautiful and often exciting-despite some dead passages here and there, it's surely the best big-budget fantasy movie in years. It hears its master's call."īut, having stated the terms of my resistance, I have to admit that I capitulated soon enough. Since this is only the first of three Tolkien battle epics, you'd better get used to your children walking into the living room and saying, "The ring has awakened. I've had to feign interest when my boys began collecting the indecipherable Magic cards, which feature wild things and sorcerers and such sub-Tolkien remarks as "The hunted can become the fiercest hunter." "Eee-vill" is also a regular feature in the agitated-electron world of video games, in which fantasy collapses into perpetual combat. Kids may not be reading Tolkien as much as they once did, but in recent years his influence has soaked into teen culture. As you can see, I resisted this thing a little bit. There are hardly any women on the screen, and when my mind slipped away from the picture, as it did now and then, I had visions of Carol Burnett, who used to do great movie parodies, flying about in a wizard's cap and choking on her chin feathers. The movie is almost three hours long, and it repeats itself more often than a talkative cabbie driving out to the nether regions of Middle-Brooklyn. There are, perhaps, one too many blackened caverns, and there's definitely too much chanting by a male chorus on the soundtrack. In "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," elongated wizards chew on fleecy white beards and say things like "Eee-vill is stirring in Mordor." The diminutive hobbits, innocent creatures of Middle-earth, are scampering and puckish-they tumble a lot and wear cute little hoods.
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