The Lord of the Rings: a fifteen year retrospective
Over the Thanksgiving break I re-watched THE LORD OF THE RINGS movie trilogy for the first time since like 2008 or so, I think.
You know how sometimes you watch a movie from twenty years ago and it doesn’t hold up well? Or that the special effects or clothes looked dated? I’m pleased to say that is not true of THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It holds up very well. I think the emphasis on practical effects really paid off over the long run, and the CGI was used well enough that it doesn’t look out of place or dated. For that matter, the designs of all the sets and armor and weapons and costumes are amazing. The armor of every Elven warrior in every computer game produced in the last fifteen years kind of looks like the Elven armor from the movie, and if you look for stock photos of people holding swords, they are every often holding replicas of Aragon’s sword Anduril. (Which makes it impossible to use the image for a book cover, but never mind that.) The Siege of Gondor and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and the fight with Shelob are all amazing.
It’s not perfect, of course – but a movie is only an adaptation of the book. Film isn’t a medium that really lends itself to subtlety, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS books have a lot of subtleties that don’t translate well to film. Like, the full explanation of why Aragorn has the right to the throne of Gondor would take several thousand words, and would be very difficult to portray in a movie. Tolkien himself considered the book unfilmable. A good example of lost subtlety is Denethor. In the book, he’s a tragic figure who nevertheless retains a nobility and courage to his actions to the very end, even when his mind is poisoned by despair. In the movie, he’s just a jerk.
But the key to adapting a book is to retain the essence of the story while fitting it into the time constraints of a film. I think THE LORD OF THE RINGS film does that mostly successfully. (THE HOBBIT movies, alas, make for good WARCRAFT films, but they sort of lost the essence of THE HOBBIT.)
Fifteen years later, I also think there is one thing that moves the movie into the realm of a classic.
Specifically, how the Ring is portrayed.
The scariest thing in the movie is not Sauron or the Nazgul or the various monsters (not even Shelob!) – it’s the Ring itself. Specifically, how the Ring fries the mind and corrupts the heart of nearly anyone it encounters. Poor Frodo makes it to almost the end before the Ring corrupts him. The scene where Smeagol takes the Ring and it slowly transforms him into Gollum is chilling.
And what’s scary about that transformation is not how supernatural or strange it is, but how common and mundane. It’s incredibly common. There are all kinds of things that fry the mind and corrupt the heart – money, alcohol, drugs, porn, politics, careers, social status, and countless other things. Rings of Power aren’t rare, there are millions of them, and the first hit is always free. Author Tom Shippey in his book J.R.R. TOLKIEN: AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY (which is excellent and you really should read), talks about the idea of the Ringwraiths as people eaten up and twisted by by their Rings of Power until they became wraiths. Alas, I’m sure we all know someone in Real Life who has been eaten up and twisted by something, the same way Gollum was eaten up and twisted by the Ring.
That speaks to something universal in the human condition, I think. So because of that, I think both the book version and the movie adaptation of THE LORD OF THE RINGS will be remembered for a long time.
-JM