Frodo lives!

Almost everyone has an opinion about LOTR, so I might as well weigh in. Some films are important, not because they're great movies, but because their popularity says something about the state of the general culture. The LOTR trilogy will likely attain at least the same iconic status in the general culture as Star Trek and Star Wars. Tolkien already enjoyed a cult following, and the cinematic popularization of his literary magnum opus will only serve to expand and enhance that profile. Finally, many members of the Christian community across a wide confessional spectrum have embraced both the books and movies as an artistic touchstone of the Christian worldview.

Jackson's adaptation is remarkably successful in winning both critical and popular acclaim. Many movies score big at the box office, but are panned by the critics. Yet the LOTR is about as popular with the critics as it is with the general public.

There is a dispute over which is the best of the three. In my opinion, The Fellowship of the Ring is the best, because it has a lean and clean storyline. Once the fellowship disbands, we lose some of the narrative cohesion. This, of course, is true of most movies, but most movies don't begin with this unifying principle, so its loss is more keenly felt.

To be sure, it is more than possible to make a virtue of parallel storylines. The Odyssey is the paradigm-case. However, Homer was working backwards from multiple points of separation to a steady convergence. So his technique had its own elegant progression. But the scene changes in the Two Towers and Return of the King are an exercise in patchwork quilting. What this means, though, is that the parts are greater than the whole.

The three installments share common virtues. Like Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater," you have a perfect marriage of nature and technology, as the FX blends in seamlessly with the stunning New Zealand landscape.

Visuals are not enough to make a great movie, but they're enough, or almost enough, to make a great movie-viewing experience; for film, although a multiple artistic medium, is distinctively visual, and the visual dimension is what first catches your eye (pardon the pun). David Lean got a lot of mileage out of sheer, sensuous visuals.

Aside from the large-scale effects, there are also some arresting shots on a more intimate scale, such as the sight of elves crossing the bridge by lamplight, or Gandalf whistling for his steed, or the lighting of the fire-beacons cross the mountain range.

The orcs are suitably beastly, and the scene of haunted swamplands is like something out of Dante.

In addition, the movie is a showcase of fine acting—dominated as it is by actors who honed their craft on the English stage.

One advantage of the transfer from word to image is that most of Tolkien's Prince Valiant diction is mercifully cut out. Conversely, Twin Towers has a generous sampling of Elvish, which falls more graceful on the ear than his lead-footed English prose or poetry.

To some extent, though, these very virtues can turn into vices. There is a feeling of dupli-cation as we go from the Twin Towers to the Return of the King. More of the same, only bigger and badder. More battles, more monsters, more to-ing and fro-ing.

To be subjected to American actors like Elijah Wood faking an Oxbridge accent is a grating detail. I'm not quite sure why Jackson insisted on this. It is to impose stylistic uniformity? It is because an English accent sounds classier? Is it because Tolkien was an Englishmen? But Middle Earth is not modern England.

Gandalf is expertly acted, but in Twin Towers and Return of the King he has no particular use for his wizardry. For the most part he's just another generic warrior, using his magic staff as a blunt instrument. This a waste of thespian talent, for McKellen is a seasoned Shakespearean actor who knows every trick in the book.

Aragorn is played by a wonderfully sympathetic actor with an iconically Christ-like look. What with his gladiatorial exploits in the first installment, Aragorn had already established himself as a great warrior. But once his military credentials are a matter of public record, where do you go from there? The Two Towers and Return of the King pile up ever more medals in his war chest, but they don't advance our understanding of the character. One wonders what such an actor could do with a real role that gave full play to his expressive range.

Many reviewers find Elijah Wood ideal for the part. But given that the hobbits typify English countryfolk—sturdy peasants and sensible gentlemen farmers, it's hard to visualize Elijah Wood, what with his cherubic face, porcelain complexion, Joan Crawford eyes, and girlish demeanor, as someone who ever spent much time in a barnyard. He looks more like a kid who never ventured outside a shopping mall.

And the way Wood and Astin gaze into each other's eyes is less like a normal pair of buddy boys and more like boyfriend/girlfriend. I wonder if this is a play to the current queer/transgender fad.

Things are even worse in the Return of the King. I've not seen so much blubber since Moby-Dick. The Hobbits constantly dissolve into tears like little girls weeping over a dead kitten. This seems to be yet another example of imposing an androgynous agenda on the characters and audience alike.

Weaving, with his Mandarin aspect, has naturally elfish, not to say impish looks, but I find him rather stiff and studied. Indeed, the elves in general have a Vulcan like austerity and severity.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Galadriel. She seems a bit unhinged to me—more witchy than bewitching; but, then, my personal acquaintance with elves is admittedly limited, so what do I know? She doesn't strike me as pretty enough for the part. Blanchett is not a classic beauty, yet the role is clearly intended to represent a feminine ideal. And in that respect she doesn't rise to our expectations.

Here I think Jackson was confronted with a compromise. He needed an actress young enough to portray an ageless elf, but with enough gravitas to portray a queen. Still, Blanchett's nasal faux-Shakespearean accent doesn't quite do it for me.

This is also a bit of a problem for Arwen--one part Amazon to two parts princess. Liv Tyler is better looking than Blanchett, but in Hollywood, good-looking women are a dime a dozen. Hollywood as spoiled us for nothing less than perfection. A woman who would be the prom queen or even a fashion mode is just another pretty face up on the screen. It takes something truly outstanding to stand out from among the competition.

Likewise, Tyler doesn't seem quite womanly enough to be a natural match for Aragorn. More like a daughter than a wife.

Another problem, for me at least, is that Arwen and Galadriel are Aryan ice-princesses. The casting is authentic to Tolkien's Nordic sensibilities. But I would prefer a breath of Mediterranean warmth to thaw the ice-water running through their veins. Indeed, this applies to the landscape as well.

On the other hand, she's much too lady-like to be a convincing Amazon, even though she's made to mix it up with the male combatants. Jackson tries to expand the role of women into superheroines (Arwen, the Shieldmaiden of Rohan). But the effort is just that—effortful. It also violates the nature of a period piece. The problem is twofold: (i) LOTR is situated in a warrior culture, and a warrior culture selects for masculine virtues; (ii) LOTR belongs to the quest genre, and this, again, selects for male camaraderie and gallantry.

It is possible for women to occupy a central role in a medieval epic. Sigrid Unset has shown the way. And that might translate well into a mini-series. But it doesn't work as well for an action flick--where brute force is a survival advantage. You end up with mannish female leads and effeminate male leads.

Even Aragon is indecisive compared with the women. Is this just the old theme of the reluctant warrior? Or is it yet another nod to feminism--softening the man to strengthen the woman?

One of the standing ironies of women's liberation is that we no longer have actresses like Crawford, Heburn, Davis, and Stanwyck or West who have the stage-presence to command the screen. The women are getting smaller at the very time they are taking on male roles. How do we account for this? I'd suggest two reasons:

First of all, the Hollywood queens of the thirties and forties, precisely because they had to make it in a man's world, rose to the top through sheer force of personality. They were able to project it on screen because they were able to project it off-screen.

Second, teenage girls have far more buying-power than in the past. Movie studios target this demographic group. As a consequence, we have a shifted from the womanly female lead to a female lead who is, by turns, mannish, girlish--or even sluttish. This is equally true on TV (Dark Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mutant X, Space Above and Beyond) and music videos (Britney Spears). In this company, an actress with Sophia Loren's full, womanly largesse is an embarrassment of riches. Even the sex symbols are no longer the product of natural endowment and sexual maturation, but amount to an anorexic adolescent with silicon implants.

And it is not limited to the choice of an actress. To take one recent example, the Trojan War was cast with Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom in the lead roles. Now, it's easy to poke fun at old action stars like Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Charlton Heston, but they brought a natural manliness and unmistakable maturity to their tough guy roles that make their contemporary counterparts looks like High school freshmen in Malibu. They may not have been great actors, but then, they were not starring in great movies. And they could fill out the parts a lot better than the current crop.

Our aspirations are rewarded, not in the flesh-and-bone of real people, but in the computer generated fantasies of Rivendell, Lothlorien, Parth Galen, and Minas Tirinth--like a dream come true; for the power of computer animation lies in giving palpable form to our wildest flights of imagination.

As to Gollum, well, a little Gollum goes a long way. This is a potentially tragic and even sympathetic figure, but the acting is a parody of Peter Lorre in his waning days—or Yoda gone over to the dark side. And he's is almost every scene. There's no escaping him. I suppose one belated advantage is that it gives the audience a chance to cheer when he goes over the edge of Mt. Doom. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

Wormtongue is another juicy villain—played to the hilt in the scenery-chewing tradition of great villains. Speaking of which, Christopher Lee, reprising his part, is a magnificent ham, perfectly cast in the role of the wicked wizard. He brings to his role the same relish as Ricardo Montalban as Khan. But by the same token, it raises the question of tone. How seriously are we supposed to take the story?

Indeed, the tonal shifts are jarring. The towering trolls, dragons, and heffalumps are like stuffed animals plucked from a child's playbox. This would suggest that the picture is a kiddy flick. But then you have the love scenes between Aragorn and Arwen, which suggests that it's really pitched for grown-ups.

Worse yet is when Legolas and his dwarfish comrade-in-arms are joking over who dis-patched more orcs. This is right after a massive battle in which many of archer's elfish cobelligerents were slaughtered. The juvenile humor undercuts naturally moving moments like the death of Theoden.

Indeed, it's all too obvious that these cutesy scenes are sandwiched in-between the battle scenes to afford comic relief. This takes the patronizing view that an average moviegoer can't stand too much heroism. But, in fairness, this is not all the director's fault. Tolkien himself had a heavy-handed sense of humor.

I suppose we could call this a movie for children of all ages, as the saying goes. And the tonal shifts might be defended on the grounds that great art can play on different levels, to different members of the audience. Maybe so, but there are more skillful ways of doing this. In Dante you have a spare, transparent storyline with an inexhaustible subtext.

I also think it's questionable artistic judgment for Jackson to preview Mt. Doom. Much of the appeal of a movie like this lies in the momentum of mounting curiosity as we wonder what lies behind the next door. By showing us the destination at the very outset, the des-tination is inevitability something of an anticlimax when we finally arrive. A certain sense of let-down is unavoidable in this sort of film, but it should at least reflect the natural release of tension after the suspenseful build-up.

There are also times when Jackson is unable to rise above his raw material. Sauron's evil eye is a clinker on the printed page, and the film medium has a way of magnifying the flaws of the original.

Another practical problem is that the average moviegoer is fairly shockproof. We've been plastered with so many horror films that the conventions of the genre leave us unmoved. It takes something really unexpected to send a shiver up our spine. LOTR is rarely able to pierce our thick-skinned scar-tissue.

The Twin Towers lacks the narrative cohesion of the Fellowship, becoming quite frag-mented, with a surfeit of subplots. One consequence is that it loses the natural rhythm of a road trip and gets bogged down in detours.

Again, this is not necessarily a fault of the director, for Jackson is at the mercy of his material. Tolkien's plot is a ramshackle affair. And Jackson tried to tighten it up as best he could, but he can't give a lean, linear form to a fundamentally shapeless storyline.

The soundtrack is no match for the visuals. It needs a lush, sweeping, folk musical score along the lines of Vaughan Williams to do it full justice. Of course, Vaughan Williams is dead, but selections or adaptations of his music could have been worked into the score. What we get instead is a very thin and repetitive series of leitmotivs.

The special effects are stunning. Computer generated FX is something of a trade-off. On the one hand, it's now possible to stage displays that Cecil B. DeMille could only dream of. On the other hand, the viewer is a tad too aware that such unrealistic effects are…well…unreal. The distinctive power of the cinematic medium lies in its illusion of reality, and too much FX strains the willing suspension of belief.

Along the same lines, the viewer is regularly exposed to the spectator of Aragorn or Legolas outnumbered 20-1 in hand-to-hand combat. Now it only stands to reason, with so many swords and spears and arrows on every side, that at some point their luck would run out. The fact that they always come out on top against overwhelming odds strains credulity. And this comes on top of all the close calls and narrow escapes for Frodo and Samwise.

Now, if LOTR has a sturdy doctrine of divine providence, then this would be made more plausible. But that brings us to the controversial issue of the work's worldview. Many Christian readers and viewers insist that the work in someway assumes or illustrates a profoundly Christian worldview.

In order to address this question, we have to separate the film from the book. In the most persuasive discussion I've read on this subject, Anna Mathie suggests that the Christian complexion of the book lies not in theology, but ethics, as the cardinal virtues are trans-muted into the theological virtues. http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0401/reviews/mathie.html

There's a sense in which this does carry over to the screen adaptation. In that respect, LOTR moves in the chivalric tradition of The Song of Roland rather than the epic tradition of the Iliad.

But from a Christian standpoint, there are some really obvious things amiss. There are no houses of worship. The heroes never pray, not even on the eve of battle. In this respect it departs from the chivalric tradition.

At one point, Gandalf hints at the afterlife, but the conception is generic rather than Christian.

I'm of two minds as to whether I should comment on some glaring incongruities in the film. How come Frodo and Samwise are not incinerated by the heat of Mt. Doom? How can ghosts do battle with flesh-and-blood?

Maybe questions like these take the movie too seriously. But that depends on whether we rank this as great movie-making.

Jackson wraps up the epic by having the good guys literally sail into the sunset. At one level, it is tempting to wince at the shopworn cliché. Yet there is a reason for cliches. They tap into something deep. This is a master metaphor, and although it seems too good to be true in the real world, yet in the world of Middle Earth, it has the ring of truth. Or does it?

There's something monumentally silly about the underlying material. This is essentially a bedtime story run amok. It is story with high moral purpose, but that runs the risk of un-intended comedy if the execution undercuts the aim. LOTR is better the less you think about it. Is this a kiddy-flick with delusions of grandeur, or the reverse? On the scale of epic morality plays, I prefer Heston doing battle with the Moors in El Cid--not counting the lus-cious Sophia Loren as his love interest!