Pippin's LOTR Review

[pippin_999]

    I happily award this picture all four stars and full marks for 
magical movie-making. It was amazing to see the breadth and 
splendor of Middle-earth unfolding on the screen. The Shire and 
Moria were especially convincing...they really did look just as I 
had imagined them, only more so. The four Hobbits were 
perfectly realized, fuzzy feet and all.  Though I have read and 
reread LOTR countless times since the age of fourteen, and can 
still recite large chunks of it from memory, I felt the cuts and 
changes left the spirit of the books intact. Tolkien's love of nature 
and his fear and suspicion of the machine came through in the 
wide shots of the Misty Mountains and the Great River, and the 
powerful depiction of the wasting of Isengard. 
     I got a kick out of the two Bakshi tribute scenes  I spotted. On 
the other hand the cave troll in Moria looked entirely too much 
like the Rancor from RotJ, and the fight went on so long that I 
had time to wonder if anybody was going to chuck a skull at it, 
Luke Skywalker style, or stick something up its nose. The Balrog 
was mighty impressive, so I suppose I can forgive the fact that it 
looked like a refugee from Doom. And I could have done without 
"Let's hunt some Orc!" though to be fair, the original line 'Forth 
the three hunters!" is as bad as its campy replacement. I can 
tolerate it in the book, on the screen it would have been abysmal.  
I also wasn't impressed by the duel between Saruman and 
Gandalf, another innovation from the book. Those are all nits: the 
only thing that really jarred was the dialogue coaching. Pippin's 
characterization was great, but his accent was all over the place. 
On the other hand, Gandalf was perfect, conveying both the 
mystery and the humility of this character in every scene.
    I was glad that Arwen was rescued from  the appendix (F, was 
it?) , and given something to do.   Making her stronger makes up 
for kinder, gentler scruffier Strider, I guess. Vigo was way cool, 
but not a bit like the Aragorn in my head. Anyway, his character 
development was so obscure in the original that giving him a 
different one didn't bother me too much.
	  I don't think  FotR will prove to be  as significant as  Star Wars 
ANH.  No one would ever have been willing to invest three 
hundred million dollars to make a Tolkien movie if George Lucas 
hadn't had the courage to make SW for a tenth of that. And 
George finessed The Servant Problem  by making his faithful 
retainers/batsmen into Droids, while Sam's servant status 
remains a problem, at least for a filmmaker with a twentyfirst 
century sensibility.
	As a problem in adaptation, I think LOTR begins with a leg up 
over its rival HP. Tolkien's imagination was more cinematic than 
Rowling's. Tolkien gives you huge vistas and set piece battles. 
JKR's is a far more intimate kind of story telling. Also, Tolkien 
has, in the fifty years of its existence, muscled its way into the 
literary canon and chained itself to the shelf. I read no opinion 
pieces murmuring with alarm that the Hollywood version of 
LOTR might displace the novel in the imagination of the public 
as "the" version of the tale. That gave the filmmakers more 
freedom to re-imagine the story for the screen instead of just 
translating it.
	   I   don't think it is fair  to say that HP was made with less love. 
The love that went into HP is "the love gift of a fairy tale". It is a 
film that adults made for their children who love HP. When those 
children grow up, and have children and grandchildren of their 
own,  they will be able to bring their life-long imaginings  and 
their grown up talents and abilities to the story. Then we will get 
a new HP movie, and I hope, a better one.   I, barring wizardly 
extensions in life span, will probably not be there to see it. It is 
hard for the young to hear that mere years make such a 
difference, but they do. That is one of the things that the wise 
wizards of LOTR, HP and SW have to teach us.

Pippin