Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Purists? - Page 6
© Michael Martinez
Orlando Bloom is a bit underused in the movie, which is fair enough. The Legolas-Gimli relationship doesn't really start to mesh until the middle of the story. But there is a wonderful, classic moment where Legolas reacts to John Rhys-Davies' Gimli in such a way that the audience could not help but laugh in both full appreciation of the subtle gesture and in anticipation of what must surely lie ahead.
I am glad to say that they did not overutilize the special effects team in giving Legolas his superb skill with the bow. He is fast, he is deadly, he is believable. You just don't get to see that in a movie Elf. At least, not in any movie Elf I can remember. My only disappointment with Legolas came when someone else delivered a very important Legolas line. I don't understand why they did that, but it didn't ruin the movie for me. In fact, it helped to build the other character a little. But I couldn't avoid thinking the writers had missed an important point regarding Legolas and something else, a point Tolkien covered in one of his letters.
John Rhys-Davies has always been one of my favorite actors. He is such a pleasure to watch on-screen, and after hearing what tribulations he went through during the filming of these movies, I can only respect him more for delivering a fine performance. I don't think Gimli was really that over-the-top in Tolkien's mind, but Gimli had the unfortunate (or fortunate) responsibility for laying down some backstory. He plays into several common fan expectations, which will smooth some ruffled feathers, I think, but it may add further fuel to the purists' bonfire of the profanities.
Merry and Pippin don't really play important roles in most of the movie, but their final scene is very moving. Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd work well together and I look forward to their storyline in The Two Towers.
Sean Bean's Boromir, like Viggo's Aragorn, was short-changed due to compression. I think in this case the writing team understood very clearly they were having to make a hard compromise, and to compensate they altered the storyline once again to give Sean an opportunity to squeeze Boromir's conflicting priorities and emotions into a very well-written scene. In fact, he had two well-written scenes. But he still needed more screen time to really do Boromir as well as anyone could demand.
When Boromir's moment of glory came, however, the audience was truly moved. Damn, that was some fine acting. The scene could have been more faithful to the book, and in my opinion it would have been stronger, but Sean and Viggo took what they had and just blew the audience away. It's not often I've seen a theater filled with people cheering as if their home team had just scored a major goal on the field. In fact, I've never seen that kind of reaction in a cinema audience. People were sreaming, clapping, cheering.
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