Peter Jackson's sorcery: 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy

Peter Jackson's three-part film of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) may or may not please votaries of J. R. R. Tolkien's prose epic, but it is a godsend to anyone like me. I love the book's "northness," its landscape of towering forests and monster-housing caves, and the creatures that inhabit that landscape; my problem is with the prose that conveys this world. Though Tolkien could write well--witness the charming prose of The Hobbit and the incisiveness of his scholarly essays--LOTR the novel contains too many sentences like this one: "The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms." The author certainly can't be accused of mixing his metaphors but this is too much of a wet thing. LOTR is lengthy, and a lengthy book needs fresher language than Tolkien could provide.

In the film adaptation, of course, the prose is gone, and Middle-earth floods into movie theaters by way of gorgeous photography and the latest digital tricks. For some, the movie will seem a desecration precisely because it is so visually forceful. You thought you knew what the wizard Gandalf looked like as he took shape within your mind as you read? Well, gaze on Sir Ian McKellen for just five seconds and kiss your inner-eye wizard goodbye. This movie isn't merely an adaptation; it's a coup d'etat. It overthrows our reading responses with a giant's sneer and brushes aside our psychological collaboration with the author. So, caveat lector.

Rather than write a formal movie review, I'm just going to walk around the film trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) and point out interesting features, just as I would walk around a hydroelectric dam or a new skyscraper. Do these comparisons imply something inhuman, or at least grandiose about this movie? Perhaps, but like Gandalf, let us not be petty in the face of a monster.

Narrative: Tolkien's book wasn't just a literary endeavor but a huge verbal Lego project that he assembled in his study with the quiet fanaticism of a child putting together a toy monster or a train station. He gorged the reader on Middle-earth genealogy, flora and fauna, weather, culture, hobbit music, dwarf etiquette, elf ethics, giant cookery, etc., etc., and the whole project spilled over into Tolkien's Silmarillion, a prequel set in the same universe as LOTR. Fiction or mythic anthropology? Narrative propulsion was the goal for the moviemakers, not mythic saturation. I'm not surprised that Miranda Otto (who plays the human princess Eowyn) remarked, "I don't like to think of Rings as a fantasy, and, actually, Pete [Jackson] wanted to shoot it like a historical [piece]." Indeed, the whole thing comes across very much like one of those medieval adventure stories you saw in your youth--Prince Valiant, The Black Shield of Falworth--only much, much bigger and much, much better.

Long though the movie trilogy is (9.5 hours plus--not counting the extended DVD editions), Jackson has been able to compress Tolkien's material, simply by keeping track of who is doing what where. For instance, he realized that, though Tolkien placed the hobbits Frodo and Sam's fight with Shelob the giant spider many pages away from the siege of the citadel of men Minas Tirith, the two actions are actually happening at exactly the same time. So the director shifted Shelob ahead and cut back and forth between the spider fight and the siege, which not only saves time but maximizes action and suspense. This is Tolkien on a skateboard. Other rearrangements aren't just exciting but illuminating, as when, after getting used to the loathsomeness of the schizoid creature Gollum throughout The Two Towers, the audience then encounters the seemingly agreeable hobbit, Smeagol, and watches him transform into Gollum after possessing the ring of power in the flash-back that opens Return of the King.

Nonreaders of LOTR may occasionally be puzzled, however. As in the book (albeit one of its appendixes), Aragorn marries the elf princess Arwen, but does the human princess Eowyn get a consolation prize? During my first viewing of Return of the King, I blinked and missed the split-second shot of Eowyn and Prince Faramir standing together like a loving couple. I caught it the second time around, yes, but surely this is compression taken too far. And what is the meaning of the crystal ball-like object that the hobbit Pippin finds and that Gandalf treats with trepidation? I found the brief verbal explanation incomprehensible, but readers will know that several of these orbs are used by the arch-fiend Sauron both to spy and to impose false predictions upon gullible creatures such as the steward of the human kingdom of Gondor (the royal line of heirs has been broken--hence the need for the king to return), who comes across on screen as an unmotivated psychopath rather than a man deceived. This is a compression that distorts. Nevertheless, the scriptwriters, Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, must be praised for generally keeping a lengthy movie both richly textured and sleek.