Movies

I've never seen … The Lord of the Rings


One thing I’ve learned is that it’s unusual for a guy like me –who grew up lonely and uncool – to have never had a fantasy or sci-fi phase. I never played Dungeons & Dragons. I never read a Harry Potter book. And no, I never got into Tolkien. When I was a kid, I always thought that stuff was for nerds, and I was determined not to be one. I still had a rich fantasy life, but it mostly involved girls and guitars. So I never read any of The Lord of the Rings books, and I never regretted it.

When the movies came around, I was in my early 20s, finishing college, and spending a lot of time in bars. I was still too cool for fantasy, even as these movies moved fantasy firmly into the mainstream by racking up a billion dollars in ticket sales and over a dozen Academy Awards. A decade or so later, I stopped pretending to be cool. I became a film critic. I probably should have gotten around to watching the trilogy by now just as a matter of due diligence, but they were always low on my ever-expanding list of films to catch up on. For all their success and influence, they haven’t lingered in the public consciousness very much. These films aren’t talked about in my circles, and having disliked much of director Peter Jackson’s subsequent work, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on much. They just weren’t for me, I told myself, and that was okay.

I chose to watch the trilogy for this column mostly as a personal challenge and decided to watch them all in a single weekend. Three hours in, I was regretting the decision. The Fellowship of the Ring is an absolute slog, a humourless, poorly paced prologue that goes on forever. I felt no attachment to the story, perhaps since the vast majority of my brain power was used to simply hold my place amid a cascade of unfamiliar names. Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Arwen. At least one character is named Sam, but even that is short for something weird: Samwise. I really could have also used a Jim or a Bruce. Absolutely everything has a different name in this world. Even the bread is called “lembas” bread. Couldn’t it have just been plain bread? Couldn’t one thing just be what it is? It almost seems designed not to work on the first viewing, but to encourage repeat viewings and further research; steps that at this point I found it very unlikely I would take.

Sean Astin as Sam and Elijah Wood as Frodo
Unabashed platonic male love … Sean Astin as Sam and Elijah Wood as Frodo. Photograph: Pierre Vinet/AP

It’s a film that favours world-building over character, philosophy, or even an original story. For most of Fellowship, I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching a knock-off of the first Star Wars movie, with Gandalf in the Obi-Wan role and Frodo as Luke. Gandalf even dies at a similar point in the story. At first, Aragorn seems set up to be our Han Solo, but he’s just as self-serious as the rest of them. Han was a crucial character in the original Star Wars trilogy because he consistently undercut the high-mindedness with wit and sarcasm. It was as if a guy in the back of the theatre cracking jokes had been transported into the film. There’s no one like that in Fellowship, and it was a real sticking point for me.

Still, I imagine that’s exactly why many people love it. It’s a story of good versus evil that never winks at the audience, not even for a second. Tolkien famously rejected allegorical interpretations of his work, but it’s hard not to consider the meaning of this trilogy in the context of 9/11. The first film was released in the US in December 2001, a time when Americans were most definitely not interested in making light and were contemplating the nature of good and evil in profound ways. Even though it ends in victory, the trilogy is imbued with a sense of overwhelming loss. “What can men do against such reckless hate?” says one character, which might as well be the motto for this entire century. It’s all much darker, gorier, and bloodier than I expected. It deals more heavily with true despair. There is body horror. I’m talking about the films.

The second instalment is even called, coincidentally, The Two Towers, and although I laboured through its first hour much as I did with Fellowship, something soon changed. I got hooked. The filmmakers seemed to have learned from the mistakes of the first movie. Gimli, a dwarf character, is used for comic relief, getting off a few zingers, mostly at his own expense (“We dwarves are natural sprinters!”), to break the tension. The human element is foregrounded, with a small but meaningful subplot about a single mother separated by war from her two children. It also introduces in earnest the character of Gollum, a motion-capture creation played by Andy Serkis as a modern-day (I mean, ancient) Jekyll and Hyde. Easily the best creation in the entire trilogy, Gollum is absolutely captivating, an addict constantly at war with himself and who meets an end both tragic and entirely deserved.

And then I liked The Return of the King best of all. It feels the most like a modern blockbuster, with beats that are warmly familiar but deeply felt. It went much heavier on the quips. I counted three in a single 10-minute period (“I am no man!” “That only counts as one!” “Not if I stick you first!”). Aragorn’s version of a St Crispin’s Day speech is well-written and passionately delivered. It richly develops the relationship between Sam and Frodo, one of the most unabashedly tender displays of platonic male love I’ve ever seen in a film. And every time I lose my place in the story, Jackson whips out a cool creature or object that I’d never even imagined, let alone seen before. A giant spider with a sword sticking out of its belly? Sure! Elephant soldiers 20 storeys high? Yes, please! A battering ram with a wolf face that breathes fire? Why not?

By the time Return of the King settled into its series of endings (which I think might still be ongoing), I found myself comparing the trilogy to some of the great achievements of craft and imagination in film history, like Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here, Jackson had taken a once-thought unfilmable series of books, in which nearly every object, costume, and structure is entirely invented, and put it on screen in a way that feels believable, cohesive, and eventually, rich with human experience. If you love cinema, it’s impossible not to have some level of appreciation for it. As for me, I found more than that. My heart swelled in the final scenes, and I even shed a couple of tears, one for the collective heroes of Middle-earth and the other for that poor, uncool young man who needlessly deprived himself for two decades of a cinematic gem.



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