The Gallery of Low Points

A list of the most painfully amateurish moments in Jackson's Fellowship. This is not about stuff like continuity errors and other editing bloopers, though the movie is oddly rife with them. These are pretty much exclusively sins of the screenwriting and the direction. These are the things that make this, more than just a bad adaptation, simply a dumb movie.

In the order in which they occur to me:

• Instances of stupid combat, as mentioned elsewhere. Aragorn lightly brushes several Black Riders with a torch and sets them blazing--that doesn't happen. The shield thing that the Uruk-Hai does to him is really poor movie fighting, palpably impossible stuff. Hobbits riding the troll's head and getting away with it is inexplicable. Legolas kills somebody with a hand-held arrow, held like a chisel--really improbable.
• That awful toppling-stone scene on the Pointless Stair in Moria. Terrible grasp of physics. Listen, when a hunk of masonry that large tips enough that you can feel it, it isn't going to rock back and forth; it's already decidedly on its way over. And the people on it should be gripped by instant total panic, and will either jump or slip and fall, no other options. Then: it actually knocks smack into the lower section where the rest of the Fellowship is standing? Maybe Frodo and Aragorn survive, if they jump just right, but all the others should be sent flying. Haven't these people ever played billiards? What are they thinking?
• Gimli's performance in the council at Rivendell. Not only does he humiliate himself with his failed effort to destroy the Ring--without consulting with anyone at all about it (what if a thing like that could pinpoint its location for Sauron? Does he have any idea?)--thirty seconds later, he loudly pledges his axe to the quest. This same page argues that he actually grabs his dad's axe and that's what he's brandishing. That may explain why the axe is intact, but not why his dignity is. Wouldn't you feel just a little sheepish bragging about your axe seconds after shattering it? Enough to keep your voice down a little, or something?
• As much as that, the appalling formulaic dialogue of "you shall have my sword!" "--and my bow!" "--and my axe!" is miserable work, the kind of pattern-fulfilment that appeals to children of ten. If even one person were just to shrug and say "okay, me too," you might have hope that the sum dialogue could seem believeable.
• Gimli is a total loss, the sort of character filmakers insist on throwing into adventure stories for reasons that escape me entirely. Why must one companion always be a bellowing moron? Where does that trope come from? Given that Jackson felt the need to have an idiot along, it's not surprising he chose Gimli, as Gimli is pugnacious, hairy, and short. (People are always ready to believe that short people are stupid.) But to reduce Gimli to this is to lose one of our more subtle characters--an artisan, a daydreamer, a reverent lover of beauty. This isn't to say he's not rough-hewn, but that he's interesting, precisely because of that complexity. Certainly it is unwarranted and oddly deliberate to read him as a buffoon. And all apart from that, it's boring to play him that way. It's boring to play anybody that way. If any real people had to spend so much time with such an oaf, they'd probably pelt him with verbal abuse from sunup to sundown until he learned to keep his mouth shut.
• There's really very little suspense. There's only one good moment of hiding from a Black Rider before Bree; there are no instances of seeing or hearing or hearing about them beforehand. There's hardly any discomfort in the common room in the Pony before leaving. Since (according to Saruman, anyway) Gandalf already knows about the Balrog, there can be no hints of the presence of something dangerous before it appears. Since Galadriel tells us Boromir is dangerous, his struggle can have no further buildup--we know he's failing. Since Aragorn chats with Frodo before they part ways, there's no puzzling out where he went. Exposition is constantly offered on a platter, so there's never any wondering. A symptom of trying to follow a convoluted plot in too short a time.
• What suspense there is too often rests on campy direction: Tyler, having just vanquished the Nazgul with the river and practically at her father's door, stops to look worried about Frodo's ailment instead of hustling home to someone who can do something about it. Frodo makes faces in slow motion when the troll pins him, in an effort to make the audience think he might be dead, and then he springs lightly up and shows them his mail coat, smiling. The riddle of the door is presented and then immediately solved without really suggesting that it was a translation issue; there's no twist. Gandalf wails no whenever anybody asks whether they should try Moria instead of the mountain, but Jackson seems to expect that the suspense will be generated by Gandalf's refusal alone, since he's cut the personal testimony of both Gandalf and Aragorn, who know from experience that Moria is terrible.
• Badly done internal conflicts--which is to say, internal conflicts made external. Sam and Frodo have a short conversation at Rivendell and decide to return to the Shire, not because we remotely think they will (as if we'd be sitting here watching a movie about them if they just went home?) but to explain to us that they are peaceful people and don't actually lust for adventure. But it doesn't work to explain that by stating it baldly this way; it doesn't make us feel homesick for them. Now, it doesn't actually take a lot of screen time to express a squishy feeling like homesickness--Frodo could tell almost anyone an anecdote from the Shire to show us that's where his mind is, or could turn his head away, as if looking off in the distance, when someone suggests he go further from home. Or they could just have their conversation, but instead of saying "let's go home," they might talk about something they look forward to doing when they get there--having a beer at the Dragon or just a proper meal or seeing Rosie or any old thing. Something to show that they're thinking about the Shire concretely, not just mouthing its name. It doesn't take long to film that--it just takes a little longer to write it, because the writer has to stay in the chair a while and think of something good instead of this kind of Kabuki semaphore.
• Stupid sorcery. Making people fly around the room is just a special-effects excuse, and it's sadly unimaginative for wizards hundreds of years old. Can't they try to bind each other, blind each other, enthrall, transform, paralyze or slow each other, something less physical than bang-pow?
• Stupid monsters. Just from other movies, I'm dead tired of monstrous guys whose lips are permanently curled so as to allow absolutely no range of facial expressions, brutes who can only say "graar." Wouldn't a subtle, crafty monster be scarier? Orcs may be congenitally evil but that shouldn't preclude a complex agenda and some decision-making on their part.
• Pointlessly angry characters. Why is Elrond spouting racist vitriol? It has nothing to do with the plot, except to try and encapsulate the whole of racial tension in the book, badly. Why is Galadriel snarling at the fellowship? Why is Haldir sneering? Why is the council full of shouting people? What, is this supposed to make us feel like there's conflict? Well, I suppose it does at that...
• Grandiose boasting. Always a pitfall of adventure stories. Do we need Legolas to shout at the council about how cool Aragorn is? We've seen a hundred movies. We know an adventuresome stud when we see one; all the cues were there long before, and by the time Legolas makes his kid-with-a-crush display, we've already seen the man beat up a handful of deathless weirdos. You can take your time telling us about his lineage; we're more than ready to believe you. Guys like that are always the king in movies.
• A couple of rustic farm boys are so unimpressed, not only by combat but by combat with freaks, as to leap suicidally onto the head of an apparently unstoppable juggernaut. Not only are they without their basic instincts, they're strangely desensitized to violence, particularly Merry who actually takes a moment to express his enjoyment of his first-ever mortal combat with unheard-of monsters. What kind of a world do these goons live in? You'd think they'd have fallen into a quarry or something years ago, if this is their idea of a good time.
• The moment when Isildur, lying on the ground with his dead dad and clutching a broken sword, suddenly cuts Sauron's fingers off is just not credible. Why the hell has Sauron paused over him for so long? Wasn't he smashing sixty men at a stroke a second ago?
• Is Liv Tyler brandishing a sword because she plans to use it, or becase she wants the Nazgul to think she's going to use it, or because she needs it to cast her spell? Or is it because Frodo brandished one in the book?

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