Return to sender
Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King concludes what may be the single most massive production shoot in recent cinema, a $900-million, four-to-five-years-in-the-making, nine-hour-plus adaptation of the works of one shy Oxford don. With all those numbers, all the love and excitement generated by fans, all the hosannas heaped at its massive perfumed feet, one might feel churlish pointing out dents in the gleaming suit of armor. Still--
1) The hand-to-hand combat: from Fellowship through Two Towers to this, Jackson handles large battles well enough, with gliding camera to suggest the sweep and scale of different conflicts. It's when he moves up close that he runs into trouble, with handheld cameras that stagger and footage that looks like it was trimmed by lawn mower (Dead Alive, anyone?). Easy to suggest wartime chaos; the challenge is to evoke confusion yet keep the action lucid.
2) The special effects: Jackson has probably done more with CGI--broken more ground, integrated more digital footage, revealed more of the beauty and possibility-- than any other filmmaker alive, and still his effects feel unsatisfactory. The ouliphants, the batwinged lizards, the giant trolls feel weightless-- don't know what's missing, some visual or aural cue, maybe the lack of ponderous rhythm to announce their passage. The giant spider looks the most convincing because Jackson keeps the arachnid mostly out of sight and in the dark; apparently the director hasn't fully forgotten his horror-movie roots.
Then there's Viggo Mortensen's phantom army, which look like refugees from the Haunted Mansion theme park ride. Watching Disney invade a serious fantasy epic is fun in a Monty Python way but throws you out of the story; that, I suspect, wasn't the impression Jackson was after.
3) Liv Tyler as Arwen: bloodless, charmless, lifeless where Miranda Otto's Eowyn is fiery and passionate--you wonder what Aragorn was thinking.
4) Condensation from six to three-plus hours: an enormous task, and I suppose done as well as it possibly could, but seams still show. Elijah Wood's Frodo is taken to a castle full of Orcs; when Sean Astin's Sam charges in everyone is dead. Whole characters are unjustly cast aside or forgotten: Treebeard has a mere cameo; Christopher Lee's Saruman, so formidable in the previous installment, is dispatched with a mere aside (they should have had more of him, less of Arwen); Bernard Hill's Theoden suffers an ignoble end-- worse than a painful death, the scene's editing is incoherent. Most of this I am told will be fixed in the DVD extended version, but I can only judge what I have before me.
Then there are the hobbits. Billy Boyd as Pippin and Dominic Monaghan as Merry have their sodden tendencies, but the worst offenders are Elijah Wood and Sean Astin as Frodo and Sam-- I remember them being more resilient in the books but onscreen they're a pair of wet rags, dripping endlessly with grief.
Already mentioned my other reservations when writing about The Two Towers: the paucity of women roles; the lack of psychological depth (good is good, evil is evil); the straightforwardness of Jackson's adaptation; the weak notion of evil (Sauron is a ball of methane burning at the end of a pipe). Tolkien seems too nice a person for any real understanding; Jackson (Dead Alive, Bad Taste, Heavenly Creatures) could have supplied that understanding, but opts instead to transcribe the novels faithfully to the big screen-- it's this worshipful respect, this sense you get that Jackson is handling 'great literature' that finally sinks this already massive undertaking.
O Return has its moments--a chain of bonfires light up along a mountain ridge; the aforementioned spider in her lair; Gollum's self-administered talk therapy; Ian Mckellen's always welcome Gandalf (in my opinion the real hero of the series)--but on the whole I ended up preferring The Two Towers.
Jackson plans to adapt Tolkien's The Hobbit next, a mere snack compared to this three-course meal; he also plans to remake King Kong which interests me more--hopefully, the cheeky filmmaker of Dead Alive and romanticist of Heavenly Creatures will be in charge there.
Meantime, the Lord of the Rings are over; sat through all nine hours like a good boy and while I can't say I wasn't entertained (sometimes unintentionally) I wasn't profoundly rocked either. Can we put the whole damned thing aside and get on with our lives now?
First published in Businessworld, 1/9/04
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