Monsters & Mullets: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

This essay topped out at nearly 5700 words, so I’ll be splitting it across two weeks. Today: the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring.

In tackling Conan the Barbarian, I argued that no fantasy film would rise to the same level of passion, of artistry, of thoughtful creation and superb execution, for another twenty years, when Peter Jackson and his team brought The Lord of the Rings to cinemas. Although it wasn’t the first time Tolkien had come to screens – there’s the 1977 animated Rankin & Bass Hobbit, and Ralph Bakshi’s ambitious disaster, the 1978 Lord of the Rings. When Bakshi ran out of time and money he ended the film at the battle of Helm’s Deep. Rankin & Bass tried to bring some of their Hobbit magic back to fill in the final piece of the puzzle with 1980’s Return of the King, but it would be hard to argue that their Return is much more than a dead-end curiosity, mostly known today for that anthem of shoulder-slumping job dissatisfaction, ‘Where There’s a Whip There’s a Way.’ 

A quick recap of the trilogy’s origin story: Jackson, his wife and his writing partner spent years in pre-production, breaking down the plots and mapping out how the three films would work independently of each other as well as how they’d function as a complete trilogy. Sets were built early and left to weather for months, even years, before filming ever began. The movies were filmed back to back, over the course of more than a year, while Jackson also essentially built New Zealand’s small (but mighty) special effects and props company, Weta Workshop, into the powerhouse of special and practical effects it is today. Every detail of the films is meticulously planned and executed, from the hand-embroidered stitching on the characters’ costumes to the soot-stains on Bilbo’s ceilings. The world is huge, comprehensive and compelling. The acting is by and large superb, and the cinematography great, even occasionally outright brilliant. The three films are, in short, a triumph of filmmaking.

There’s a strong argument to be made that Fellowship is the best of the three. Two Towers has that epic battle, of course, but it also has three of its characters endlessly running across rolling hills, three of its characters marching begrudgingly through grey and depressing landscape, and three of its characters arguing with a giant tree. It’s a good reminder that there’s a powerful narrative reason why the rule ‘never split the party’ exists. And Return of the King is five billion years long. Fellowship, however, has a bit of everything: a status quo is established and then destabilised, characters are thrust into an uneasy alliance out of which develops true friendship, there’s sacrifice and sorrow, a superb battle, a bit of humour, excellent chemistry and some proper character development. The tonal shift between the beginning and the end of the film is significant without being jarring. All in all, it works not just as an entry point into the cinematic LotR universe, but as a very satisfying stand-alone film.

And Jackson’s absolute delight in bringing his world to life is evident in every single frame of the film. He lets the camera linger lovingly on tiny details, like birds’ nests and scraps of paper, and glories in playing with scale as his camera swoops through space. In one of the best and most haunting scenes of the entire series, the party paddles down the river Anduin, past the enormous grey feet of the Argonath, colossal sculptures of two long-dead soldiers. As Howard Shore’s haunting Ring Theme rises, Jackson pulls the camera back, up and away, until our heroes are dwarfed by the statues they’re floating past, and then further up still, whirling around the faces of the sculptures themselves. It’s a moment of intense power and staggering beauty, serving as a reminder of the relative size of the nine people at the heart of the story compared to the scale of the war they’re fighting. And it serves as a beautiful counterpoint to an earlier bird’s-eye scene, the moment Jackson’s camera follows a flock of crows through the bowels of the mines at Isengard.

The few seconds we spend at the Argonath comprise just one of hundreds of breathtaking scenes from the three films. None of which is to say that the three movies are perfect; not by a long shot. The practical effects have aged well, but the digital effects are more than a little creaky, 20 years on. Jackson occasionally overdoes it behind the camera, indulging himself in angles that feel contrived and at odds with the cinematography of the rest of the movies. There are no women of any note beyond Galadriel, Eowyn and Arwen, and no people of colour represented at all – indeed, there’s a troubling argument to be made about the representation of the Uruk-hai and the symbolism of Sauroman’s white hand… but we’ll get there later. And while Fellowship tells its story efficiently and well, in part because Jackson cut the extraneous bits (side-eye Tom Bombadil), he would not always show the same restraint in the next two instalments.

Nevertheless, Fellowship – and the series as a whole – remains perhaps the high-water mark in cinematic fantasy; arguably its achievements would not be met again until HBO brought A Game of Thrones to the small screen ten years after Fellowship debuted in cinemas.

We begin with the requisite fantasy-film opening: a portentous voice-over filling us in on some backstory, and the forging of a… well, in this case it’s a ring. We get the scoop on Sauron and the race of men, and as I always do when I rewatch this film, I wonder at the fact that everyone in Middle Earth is basically using the same technology and wearing the same kinds of clothes 2000 years apart. We move on to the Shire, where Bilbo is prepping for his 111th birthday party. Frodo meets up with Gandalf as the latter rides into Hobbiton, and then Bilbo and Gandalf have a lovely reunion and spend a little quality time catching up before the party kicks off. Ian McKellen and Ian Holm play this scene absolutely beautifully, with warmth positively radiating off the screen as they gently one-up each other while blowing smoke-rings.

We meet Merry, Pippin and Sam during the party: Merry and Pip are stealing firecrackers and causing trouble, while Sam is mooning over Rosie Cotton. Side-note; she has, I believe, a single line in the entire film, which is delivered in the background of a scene. Bilbo gives a hilariously insulting speech to his guests, slips on the ring, and vanishes. You don’t cast Ian Holm, who so often plays villains, in role like Bilbo Baggins if you’re not looking to shade in the light with a little darkness, and with his speech we see our first glimpse of the influence the ring has had upon Bilbo. Yes, he’s a warm and loving fellow, but there’s something troublingly dismissive in his speech to his friends, family and neighbours. We’ll see the same darkness twice more as his internal battle with the ring plays out across his face. It’s a masterful piece of casting, and of acting.

Gandalf catches up with Bilbo before he departs for Rivendell and convinces him to leave the ring behind; Frodo finds it later and hides it away as Gandalf rides off to figure out, once and for all, what its deal is. A great deal of time must pass because, even though Gandalf is on horseback, we’ll soon learn just how long it takes to get from the Shire to Minas Tirith. In the book, seventeen years pass. Anyway, Gandalf’s researches warn him that Bilbo’s little party-trick ring might boast a nasty provenance. Gandalf returns to Bag End and throws the ring into the fire, and sure enough: the news ain’t good.

Elijah Wood really commits to pronouncing Tolkien’s words correctly, she says sniffily; all SAWERon and GANdalfff. I don’t know if it’s because of his accent or what, but sometimes he speaks agonizingly slowly. Anyway, Gandalf is all ‘yeah, that’s the ring’ and Frodo rightly points out that no one knows he has it, so it’s safe. Alas, Gollum ruins the party again. He’s admitted under torture that the ring is in the Shire and held by a Baggins, so the Nazguls are on their way. Frodo tries to give it to Gandalf and then, sorrowfully, realizes he has to take it out of the Shire to keep everyone else safe. He and Gandalf make plans to meet at the Prancing Pony in Bree, on the edge of the Shire, and then Gandalf finds Sam FLAT-OUT EVESDROPPING outside (to ‘protect’ Frodo) and makes him go along too. Because of all his practical experience adventuring.

Yes, I know, Gandalf ‘sees something’ in Sam. But Sam’s character is so heavily informed by Tolkien’s classism that I can’t help being a bit cynical about him.

Gandalf, in true Gandalf style, scares the shit out of everyone then leaves them to go do their thing alone. Unlike in The Hobbit, however, this time Gandalf really is off doing something important – discussing the whole ring-thing with Saruman. If only Saruman weren’t, you know, played by Christopher Lee and/also unrepentantly turned to evil. Anyway, to judge by Gandalf’s mud-covered cloak and Saruman’s lair, wizards are very, very untidy folk. Gandalf discovers that Saruman has decided to side with Sauron; they fight; Gandalf loses and is imprisoned at the top of Saruman’s tower because Saruman is kinda extra.

Frodo and Sam, meanwhile, are hiking through a corn field on their way to Rivendell only to have Merry and Pippin literally throw themselves into the plot while stealing vegetables. As the other three argue about mushrooms or something (hobbits!) Frodo gets a bad feeling and makes everyone hide; Jackson’s background in horror really comes into play in this scene, which begins with a famous Hitchcock dolly zoom (and some creepy sound effects) and continues beautifully: the slightly reduced film speed, giving the Nazgul an unearthly gait; the eerie silence; the closeup of the slime dribbling down the nazgul’s steed’s legs; the moment when the camera is entirely still, mimicking its frozen protagonists, the only movement the wriggling spiders and insects that crawl across the hobbits. It’s great filmmaking.

Sam throws the bag of mushrooms off to the side and they scramble away as the Nazgul is distracted; unfortunately, he’s got some friends, and they’re all out looking for the hobbits. The hobbits make it to Bree and the Prancing Pony following a fairly harrowing chase, but naturally Merry and Pippin get up to their old tricks and instantly out Frodo, who – in what will become his signature move – falls over. And the rings falls onto his finger. He vanishes. The entire pub is shocked, but no one more so than the hooded figure in the corner; no, it’s not fantasy novel cover #2 come to life, but Aragorn, still going by his nom de aventure Strider, who yanks the hobbits into a room and gives them a well-deserved lecture about not being total idiots.

The Nazgul make it to Bree in the middle of the night (RIP, gatesman)x````````. But they’re not the cleverest ghostly witch-kings around, as they’re gulled by the pillows the hobbits have lumped under the covers in their room and screech in dismay when they realize they’ve just murdered a bunch of mattresses.

Aragorn and the hobbits take off towards Rivendell on foot; Merry and Pippin enliven the hike with pertinent questions about food, and Aragorn beans Pip in the head with an apple. Good stuff. Food will get them into trouble, however, when they reach Weathertop, a decaying fortress on a lonely hill; Frodo falls asleep and the other hobbits, who don’t seem to have the slightest instinct for self-preservation, light a fire and get into a noisy discussion about breakfast. Frodo wakes up and responds, in another signature move, by totally overreacting, attracting the attention of the Nazgul. Despite Aragorn’s best efforts, Frodo gets a proper stab in the chest and, in his third signature move, is immediately basically on death’s door.

The other four race to get him to Rivendell but they’re not moving fast enough and Frodo’s in a bad way. Fortunately, Arwen appears just as Aragorn’s chewing up a weed and tamping it into Frodo’s wound, like thanks, Aragorn, and races off with Frodo to try to get him to Elrond as quickly as possible. What follows is some fantastic riding, as she’s chased by the nine Nazgul, and then an awesome scene as she calls an entire river down upon them. Liv Tyler certainly looks the part of an elf princess, but she’s not the world’s greatest actress, and her delivery of ‘what’s this; a ranger, caught off his guard’ will never not bug me. Also, this is the only pure moment of badassery she’s permitted; she’ll spend the rest of the series alternately gazing, moping and, like, dying, I guess? Her arc in Return is baffling.

Anyway, in between all this Gandalf and Sauroman fight some more, Gandalf talks some poor, hardworking moth into getting the eagles for him, and the eagles rescue Gandalf. I hope someone gave that moth a very nice sweater to eat afterward. (Yes I know it’s not that kind of moth; don’t @ me.)

Frodo wakes up in Rivendell, which kind of looks like what would happen if William Morris moved to Santa Fe and got really into throwing his own pottery. That’s not meant as an insult; this film’s depiction of Rivendell is stunningly beautiful, a perpetual flutter of autumn leaves drifting around on gentle breeze as an unseen elvish chorus sings wordlessly in the background.  I mean, it’d drive me crazy, but in the world the film presents, we’re supposed to understand it as, basically, the height of sophisticated grace.

The team is reunited, including Gandalf, (THANK YOU, MOTH), and then Elrond calls a (secret, apparently?) council and a bunch of elves, dwarves and humans all sit around arguing about what to do about the ring. Gimli, bless him, does exactly what I’d do in a similar situation, and goes at it with his axe. Legolas tries to look… invested, I guess. Orlando Bloom is so pretty, but he’s such a blank. Aragorn dons his best Reluctant Hero glower. And Boromir gets a calculating look in his eye and makes, for the first but not the last time, a fairly compelling argument: if this is such a powerful weapon, why shouldn’t the good guys use it?

Look, we know that the good guys can’t use this weapon without themselves becoming evil, because the ring is really really bad. But Boromir’s position is perfectly reasonable if you don’t know anything about it other than that it’s incredibly powerful.

Anyway, Frodo watches the proceedings sorrowfully, Elijah Wood’s huge and ridiculously expressive eyes selling the hell out of his performance. Finally, as everyone’s at each other’s throats over who should carry the ring to Mt Doom, Frodo steps forward and says he’ll do it. Cut to Gandalf, and Ian McKellen’s face is a masterclass in acting as about 7,000 emotions cross it in just a few seconds. And then Sam, who’s FUCKING EAVESDROPPING AGAIN, WTF, bursts out of the bushes and insists on going along, and then Merry and Pip appear and also volunteer themselves. Aragorn, Boromir, Gimli and Legolas all offer their various weapons and aid, and Elrond proclaims them the fellowship of the ring. Family portrait time!

Many critics over the years have drawn parallels between the ring and the proliferation of nuclear weapons during the period that Tolkien was writing, and they’re not wrong. Boromir’s argument that the good guys should use the ring rather than destroy it is a practical – and superficially reasonable – suggestion, and one that humankind has often used as a justification for the use of weapons up to and including nuclear bombs for basically as long as we’ve been out there killing each other. If we have their weapon, we could destroy it so that no one can use it… or we could use it on them. They certainly wouldn’t hesitate to use it on us, goes one argument. Boromir’s a practical soul; he sees a threat on the horizon and is willing to use whatever means necessary to neutralize it. But in the moral universe of Middle Earth, this makes Boromir not a reasonable arbiter of the middle way, but a morally ambiguous character who might need very little in the way of a nudge to send him straight over the line into evil. The others of the fellowship are far more aware of the cost of using such a weapon, knowing that doing so would send them down a long, dark path, one from which there’s no return. And that’s the true power of the ring: not its power over the other rings, but rather its promise of power. What would you do to hold the key that opens all doors, to wield the sword that cuts through anything? In our world, an object itself is neutral; the good or evil it enacts are the act of the hand that holds it. You’re a good person, so if you use this object for good, what’s the harm? In a way, The Lord of the Rings is asking exactly the same question that Conan the Barbarian asks: what is the nature of power, and how it’s used? But where Conan falls strictly on Boromir’s side of the argument (power is derived from individual will), Tolkien takes a step back, and has his characters of moral authority consider the question from a much wider perspective. What effect does one person trying to use this object - for good or for evil, for acts of selfish fulfilment or of social improvement - have upon all people? Will using it make the world a worse place, no matter who uses it or how?

Importantly, Tolkien’s perspective is one that requires the existence of good and evil as independent agents in the war for control of his world. In The Lord of the Rings, the ring is not a neutral object; it is an agent of evil, with a will of its own; a will far more powerful than that of any hand that wears it. And only hobbits the only creatures in the entire world who are more or less immune to it because they are unequivocally good. So while Boromir’s argument might be persuasive in a morally relativistic universe such as our own, in Tolkien’s world it’s the first step down the path of darkness. The ethical universe in which Middle Earth exists requires that evil things be not repurposed but destroyed. The ring is a virus which infects all with whom it comes into contact – even the unimpeachable Frodo and Bilbo.

We’ll return to The Fellowship of the Ring next time, when we begin our walk into Mordor.

Until then,

Anne

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