Disappointing turn of the Ring

Starring: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Liv Tyler

IT WAS hard, watching the first two episodes of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, to match the scale and ambition of the film-making with the knowledge that the director’s first movie was Bad Taste, a monster mangler which inhabited the unhappy space between spoof and homage.

When it premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, the film occupied a late-night slot, on the understanding, no doubt, that a dozy audience is less able to distinguish between fun and folly. Apparently, Bad Taste has become a cult classic: a lucky fate for a picture that was so bad it wasn’t even bad.

Lord of the Rings was something else. The three films were made in a single effort, and the completion of the cycle has taken six years. It differs from other franchises in that the sequels were filmed at the same time as the earlier episodes, so it can’t be said that the approach of the director has been affected by the reaction to the film.

In which case, it’s disappointing to note that at certain points in The Return of the King - when the special effects run wild or the monsters roam too freely or the tone of brutish heroism is punctured by uneasy comedy - it is easy to reconnect the director with the first film on his CV.

Bad taste will out, and Jackson’s trilogy is transformed in its final part from something almost magical to a heavy-metal fantasy. True, it is an impressively realised heavy-metal fantasy, but it reeks, nevertheless, of magic mushrooms and Spandex.

In another sense, it is a tediously modern film, in that its story is divested of nuance, and played instead with the kinetic predictability of a video game in which the characters travel through various levels of torment only to face new and unimagined perils.

True, the mature director is better at doing horror, and has more control over his self-mocking tendencies, but there is a problem when the gears grind from knuckle-chewing violence to prom-night horror, if only because the horror is more effective.

The violence of the battle scenes is all about speed, sinew and gore. The horror - see the scene in which Frodo is tormented by a peeved spider - has a few moments of knuckle-biting fright to dilute the overriding sense of disbelief.

The story? Well, newcomers need not apply. Aficionados may wish to note the Fellowship’s journey is nearing its end.

The sky is darkening. The once-great kingdom of Gondor is faltering in the absence of its Moses-like king, Aragorn, and Gandalf, the white wizard, is desperately trying to persuade the forces of good, broken and demoralised as they are, to join a battle against the forces of evil, to allow Frodo, the saucer-eyed Hobbit, to return the ring to the fiery pits of Mordor and, in so doing, save the universe.

What this means is fighting. Lots of it. On horses, against beasts and mutants coming from land and air, under bombardment from giant cannons, endlessly and forever, against computer-generated armies, though Jackson’s efforts are never persuasive enough to dispel the suggestion that, by the end, happy days will be here again.

The best thing about The Return of the King is Ian McKellen, who lends Shakespearean gravitas to his portrayal of the weary wizard. He also displays some understanding of the absurdity of his position, puncturing the pomposity with a wry wiggle of an eyebrow, or a crinkling of the brow. It takes a fine actor to say "Show us the meaning of haste" to a horse, instead of "Giddy-up".

The plunging arrives soon enough, and it lasts for a very long time. There is much chopping of swords, much swooshing and squelching of winged beasts. The battle scenes make the Zulu dawns of the second Rings film look like Grange Hill, though this does not make them more meaningful. Indeed, there is so much fighting that it’s easy to forget what the point of the war was supposed to be. In the book, this is the destruction of the ring, a tacky piece of jewellery which seems to bring out the worst in men.

Tolkien was mixing ancient myth with a warning about the dehumanising power of ideology. For Jackson, the battle is as much about beauty and ugliness, and the overarching moral seems to be - to paraphrase Corporal Jones - "The Orcs don’t like it up ’em!" Oddly, though there are a couple of misty love scenes, and one bruising kiss, there is something peculiarly homoerotic in Jackson’s trilogy. Some of this can be put down to good old-fashioned fellowship between the pretty boys, but the relationship between the Hobbits, particularly fat Sam and saucer-eyed Frodo, is played like a teenage crush. "I can’t carry it for you," says fireman Sam to Frodo. "But I can carry you."

The Hobbits are the most adolescent of the creatures, and hence the most vulnerable, but Frodo finds himself on a relentless journey towards maturity, which takes him away from his true love. Near the end, when he goes to Another Place, Frodo observes: "Dear Sam, you need not always be torn in two." In the next scene, Sam is seen behaving in a ruggedly heterosexual manner.

What else? There is a Blairite speech by Aragorn, Liv Tyler has glycerine eyes, and Gollum, the malign ET with a Bobby Charlton hairdo, gives the most nuanced performance, despite being computer-generated. The walking trees, thank God, are missing in action.

And thus it was.

Three cheers: 'Greatest trilogy ever made'

Angie Brown

EVEN before the final part of The Lord of the Rings opens next week, critics are hailing the trilogy as the greatest three-part film series ever made and tipping its box-office success to surpass George Lucas’s first three Star Wars films.

Peter Jackson’s trilogy, which is expected to gross more than 1.5billion by the end of next year, has become a global phenomenon, racking up 19 Academy Award nominations and six Oscars.

An army of dedicated fans is planning to descend on the last instalment, The Return of the King, making it the most eagerly anticipated film in cinema history.

Experts believe the special effects and hi-tech wizardry used in the films have been the reason record crowds have been drawn to the adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s books.

Robert Mitchell, Screen International’s box-office analyst, said the first two films - The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers - took more than 1 billion worldwide. "The assumption is that the final part will do even better than the first two, because everyone wants to know how it ends," he said.

"The trilogy is a global phenomenon not only because the books were so successful, but the first film was made so well it has created an even bigger following."

The success has also caused a surge of tourists to visit New Zealand, where the films were shot.