What's Good

Mostly the scenery, in the end, though not all...

• Bree. The first view the hobbits ever have of Big People and their big houses is a daunting sight, and the film made that viscerally obvious--the only moment that the film arguably shows better than the book does. I am speaking mostly of the initial shot, the houses, though the rather improbable and overdone crowding in the streets works fine to further the point. After twenty minutes of looking at the Shire, the tall square houses of a medieval town looked wonderfully threatening.
• The Shire. Particularly Bag End, particularly its interior. Nice work. There's a wonderful coziness here, just the right atmosphere. Also I enjoyed the hazy late-summer fields and woods, also perfect.
• The first tower of Barad-Dur we see is uncannily close to what I imagined Sam sighting from a distance when the smoke clears for a moment at the end of the book. Not true of the fortress above, set into a mountainside, but that's a perfectly credible interpretation anyway. Orodruin, also, looks magnificent.
• Weathertop looks interesting from a distance, not at all what I'd imagined but workable, and looks just about as it ought to on top.
• Isengard looks quite good, very plausible, though I'd never quite imagined it to be full of volcanic rents so much as a lot of hidden mechanized openings and chimneys.
• The flood of the Bruinen--apocryphal though its author is--looks wonderful.
• Moria looks great in general--particularly the landing at three doors where Gandalf must think a while. The Chamber of Mazarbul also looks quite good, notwithstanding the events there.
• The rock of Tol Brandir rivals Bree for my favorite view in the movie. Really gorgeous, and perfect for the part--I've no idea whether they painted it or built it or actually found it in New Zealand somewhere.

Also good is some of the casting:

• Sean Bean. I think that's his name--the fellow who plays Boromir. (I always think of him as Colonel Sharpe.) This guy always does a good job, and here he's given us a Boromir with a little bit of genuine depth. He even managed to extract some complexity from the paper-thin "we have no king, we need no king" speech in the council. And his badly rewritten death scene comes off convincingly. Sean Bean has triumphed. Few in this cast have won such a victory. They could have taken the trouble to darken his hair, though.
• Sean Astin, I think, is the name of the actor playing Sam. He's working his heart out, and giving us a good, faithful interpretation of Sam. We'll see--or you'll see, if I don't bother with the sequels in the end--whether he manages to bring off his interactions with Gollum convincingly, because that's where it gets trickier. Sam is pretty much sympathetic round the clock, except for his needless and counterproductive hostility to Gollum; will Astin be able to deliver that complexity?
• Bilbo is quite well done. No complaints there. His role is as plagued with compressed moments and overdone expository substitute lines as anyone's, but the guy who plays him, whatever his name is, is nicely cast and gives us a lively old scholar/adventurer, a bustling and slightly grandiose personality, awfully well pleased with himself. A good bit of work.
• Liv Tyler. Ha! Didn't think I'd say that, did you? But my problem with Liv in this film is that she should barely be here, and in fact she should be doing virtually none of what she's shown doing--suddenly she is a warrior and a sorcerer all at once. However, all that said and done, Liv brings off her mongrel role well enough. She usually does good work, you know. And her face is more elvish-looking than any other in the movie, for what that's worth. Of course, she could have turned down the paycheck to protest the presence of the role... but the chief weight of that sin is not hers personally.

You might note the absence on this list of Sir Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, and Elijah Wood. It's very sad. All three of these folks were wonderfully well cast (apart from Wood's inappropriate youth) and each was encouraging news at first. But their roles are all interpreted miserably--a skittish and uncertain Gandalf, a cold and belligerent Galadriel, a clueless and panicky Frodo--and the actors seem powerless to save them. Sean Bean, though, overcame just such a handicap; it seems clear from the Narsil episode that Jackson thinks of Boromir as simply a boorish knucklehead, which is a gross reduction of the character. Bean did what he could to give Boromir a little more development, but the above three--much as I adore McKellen and Blanchett, much as I had hopes for Wood and see him as promising--didn't go to bat for their characters in the same way.

An assorted few more elements were handled quite nicely:

• The appearance of the world when Frodo is wearing the Ring. I was afraid they'd miss that relatively subtle point in the book. Particularly at Weathertop, when the Nazgul are briefly seen within their own world. Very nice.
• Speaking of which, the Black Riders looked pretty good in general, though with maybe a little more flappy-cloak behavior than I'd like. Still, from the first online preview I was afraid they'd be ghosting about like nine Grim Reapers, and instead they seem to be buckled up in leather and metal as seems more fitting.
• The whispering of the name of anybody given an opportunity to grasp the Ring is a little corny, but probably a good thing under the circumstances; it does at least convey that the Ring is an active player in this game, with its own agenda.
• Animation and effects are all good; Gollum looks pretty good, particularly the shot of him in his cave, with a lank remnant of hair on his head, a twisted and degenerated hobbit (not that they explain this) rather than some sorcerously created frog-creature. Not my idea of the troll, but workable. Balrog looks quite good, though as is too often true with animation, he doesn't look like he actually has any mass. Still, looks good.
• Gandalf's fireworks are painstakingly accurate--despite the unlikely episode about Merry and Pippin firing off the Smaug rocket. The party in general is faithfully done.

So, you can't say I didn't try to see both sides.

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