Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Purists? - Page 5
© Michael Martinez
On the other hand, we are treated to almost the full spectacle of the Black Riders that Tolkien shows us in the book. I can't think of anything wrong with the scenes themselves, and it's not worth nitpicking on costume designs, since no two people would come up with the same costumes. But the emphasis on Black Riders in the first half of the movie and the light treatment regarding Aragorn in the second half of the movie leaves me with a sense that balance is not quite right.
The Fellowship of the Ring tells us two stories. One story is about a Hobbit named Frodo who finds himself saddled with a frightful responsibility. The other story is about a mysterious man who offers to help Frodo, and who undertakes his own doubtful journey even as Frodo marches closer to Mordor.
Tolkien's Aragorn doesn't need to be shoe-horned into anyone's society. He has his own clear place in the world, and the reader is carefully given only enough hints about Aragorn's place to understand that, when Gandalf sacrifices himself, Aragorn is capable of assuming the leadership of the company but his leadership offers no guarantees.
I missed the doubt. Viggo is well-capable of portraying an uncertain Aragorn, and he does in fact do that -- but the uncertainty has been relocated to a different part of the story. I was suprised to see that.
To be honest, there were quite a few surprises in the movie. And the only way to pull off those surprises, really, was to alter the story. One can enjoy the moment of recognition when a character speaks a line from another part of the story, or one can lament the departure from Tolkien. Whether switching the dialogue around was cinematically necessary or responsible is an opinion which can wait for another day.
The Fellowship of the Ring sets the stage for the next movie in the classic, accepted mode for opening acts: it raises questions about what is going to happen to certain characters. Because Peter Jackson's Aragorn doesn't follow J.R.R. Tolkien's Aragorn exactly, the audience is left wondering about where or whether all of Tolkien's Aragorn pieces will fit into Peter Jackson's puzzle.
This was probably the best decision they could have made. Frodo is almost identical to the literary Frodo. Elijah Wood has the thankless task of keeping up with the audience's expectations. The only place where he may fail to deliver the goods is in portraying Frodo as a 50-year-old Hobbit in a young Hobbit's body. It's hard to say. The movie is so fast-paced that we just don't get to see enough of Frodo's bewilderment as things proceed from bad to disastrous for him. So there is really no way that the first movie in the trilogy could anchor audience questions on Frodo.
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