| I have two different major gripes. First, the power of the ring is not put into a proper context and, second, the film's exposition ruined the role of Gandalf and undermined the otherworldliness of Galadriel. Let's put the ring into context. Imagine you were walking along and you came across an ordinary looking smartphone. Amazingly it works and you can make calls on it. Anywhere in the world. For free! That's not bad. But it turns out this phone has a dangerous superpower. For, you see, Stalin developed missile guidance before the Americans and leaked the details. But there's a back door and this phone you hold in your hand is the key to it all. With the right knowledge, this phone could launch any missile from any country at any time. The phone has a primitive AI which attempts to phone home every now and then but no-one has answered it for years. And here's the kicker: Stalin is still alive! Barely. Now just a disembodied brain in a vat hidden somewhere deep in Russia. And he wants his device back now that there's a massive arsenal for him to command. Every agency in the world wants to get their hands on this thing. But you've got to somehow get it into the Kremlin so it can be plugged in to some ancient terminal and deactivated. But you’re not alone. Oh yes, you’ll have some help from a few random individuals who represent various interests, have a few fighting moves and are pretty good at keeping you hidden but without having any authority to make stuff happen for you on your journey. So that's the position the Fellowship find themselves in. Does the film manage to convey any of this? No. Moving on, the way the information is surrendered to the reader in the books is much more gradual than the film. In the books, Gandalf is the reader's and the hobbits' touchstone. When he's away the reader has no clue what's happening and it's not until the hobbits get to Rivendell -- after many close shaves -- that the full details are finally revealed. Not so in the film: Galadriel narrates the whole thing before the opening credits! This ruins the film twice over: Gandalf becomes redundant, reduced to opening the door to Moria and taking on the balrog. Thanks to the magic of cinema, the director teleports us everywhere so that we can witness Gandalf battling Saruman. Gandalf battling the necromancer. Gandalf battling the balrog. Instead of us learning all this from Gandalf himself after he reappears suddenly later on. And Galadriel, the mightiest elf in middle earth, has had her grand entrance already: right at the start, as a voice over. For me, the hobbit who undergoes the biggest Hero's Journey is Pippin. He starts out as a carefree young hobbit and comes back to lead the Shire in the uprising against Saruman. Again, the film chose to ignore this pretty decent character arc in favour of a bunch of CGI effects. Visually, the films are great. It's a shame the screenplay is utter drivel. |