Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Ralph Bakshi
• Written by Peter S. Beagle and Chris Conkling, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Starring
  • Christopher Guard
  • William Squire
  • Michael Scholes
  • John Hurt

[Note: This review assumes at least a passing familiarity with the original novel. But then, so does the movie.]

I’d hate to be Peter Jackson these days. Tolkien fans the world over are on pins and needles with anticipation, awaiting his big-screen adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring this December. It’s the most-anticipated movie since Star Wars: Episode 1 — and that comparison is enough to strike fear in the hearts of men. (And women. Don’t forget the women.) I’ve always been an admirer of Jackson, and I repeatedly tell people that if anyone can make a respectable film version of The Lord of the Rings, it’s Peter Jackson. But even I immediately point out how big the “if” in that sentence is: roughly the size of a gas giant. Ol’ Pete can probably hear the mantra-like muttering clear over there in New Zealand: “Please don’t screw it up, please don’t screw it up, please don’t screw it up…”

Gee, let me guess — which one in the brave but childlike protagonist, and which one is the comedic sidekick?

Jackson has a safety net, though. No matter how anticlimactic his adaptation of the trilogy may turn out to be, at least it won’t be as ill-conceived and unsatisfying as the 1978 animated version helmed by Ralph Bakshi.

Granted, if one were going to bring Tolkien to life in the days before the present CGI-aided technical acumen, animation was the only way to go. (Rankin/Bass had the same idea, and released their TV-movie cartoon version of The Hobbit the same year.) Yet you’d like to think that even Ralph Bakshi, who had made his living by animation for over a decade, would have been overwhelmed at the prospect of bringing one of the best-loved books of the 20th century to the screen. And you would have thought that even Bakshi would have known better than to do a half-assed job at it.

Most of the movie is rotoscoped, i.e., real actor are filmed and then animated over. Supposedly, this would give the film a more realistic feel — it would, that is, if the animation weren’t so spotty, using about half the frames you’d see in a Disney film. (Fast-forwarding and rewinding gives an illusion of fluidity that only highlights the jerky animation.) For some scenes, the animation is actually foregone, such as in the introduction, which attempts to relate the history of the Ring (i.e., Why You Should Care) in about two minutes: the action is in silhouette, black against red, as the Ring is created, fought over, lost, found, lost, and found again by Bilbo.

“So — you see my hair-fu is mightier than yours!”

The pace doesn’t let up — it can’t, there’s too much story to tell — as we go to Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party, where he speaks two lines and disappears. Then Gandalf (voiced by William Squire) confronts him and keeps him from taking the Ring with him. Then Bilbo leaves. Then seventeen years pass (in a flickering screen effect that probably caused scores of seizures in the original theatrical release — and you thought The Blair Witch Project was bad for your health!), and Gandalf comes back to see Frodo (voiced by Christopher Guard).

If the pace weren’t bad enough, this scene highlights one of the other major recurring flaws here: a dissociation of setups and payoffs. Gandalf throws the Ring into the fire, then recounts its history, including the “One Ring to rule them all” couplet. He does not read this off the Ring; he recites it while striding around the room, gesticulating wildly. Which makes the heating of the Ring kind of pointless. (This is actually the second such scene; the first was when Bilbo called the Ring his “Precious,” but since Gollum’s own reference to the Ring hasn’t been established, the unfamiliar viewer would have no idea why Gandalf reacted with such horror).

Gandalf and Frodo go walking, and Gandalf commissions Frodo to go on his quest to destroy the Ring. Gandalf then pulls Sam (voiced by Michael Scholes) out of the bushes, where he had no business being. And just to establish that whole setup/payoff discontinuity, Sam begs to go with Frodo, since they were talking of elves, and Sam dearly wants to see elves — even though there was no mention of elves in the preceding conversation.

Translation: “This door to remain unlocked during business hours.”

And so it goes, at a breakneck pace like some ill-written Cliff Notes version of the novel, so quickly that pacing and drama are both casualties of the race to get to a stopping point by the end credits: Sam and Frodo and Merry and Pippin (even more indistinguishable than normal) set out and avoid a Dark Rider and get to Bree and Frodo sings and disappears and they meet Strider and escape the riders and head for Weathertop and get attacked and Frodo gets stabbed and make it almost to Rivendell and get attacked again and the Riders get washed out and they have the council at Rivendell and make up the Fellowship and don’t make it across the mountains and go through Moria and Gandalf meets the Balrog and the others go to Lorien and… If you’ve ever wanted to know what it would be like to speed-read the novel, this is where you can find out.

I truly pity anyone who was first exposed to the trilogy through this film, because the characterizations (such as they are) are not the ones I’d want pinned permanently to my imagination. They include:

• Frodo, whose big eyes and cheeks suggest that, while humans descended from early primates, hobbits descended from chipmunks;
• Sam, with the huge nose and jowls of the born comedic sidekick, who walks (as all the hobbits do) as if he were wearing shoeboxes on his feet;
• Gandalf, the hyperactive gesticulating wizard;
• Merry and Pippin, the Middle-Earth version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern;
• Aragorn (voiced by John Hurt), the apparently Native American Ranger with a broken nose (if I wanted to credit the powers-that-be, I’d say that Aragorn’s Indian-like appearance is actually a radical interpretation of who exactly the “Men of the West” were);
• Elrond, the unassuming half-elven middle manager;
• Legolas (Anthony Daniels!), the hypocephalic elf;
• Gimli, the counterintuitively tall dwarf;
• Boromir the Viking;
• Saruman, the pointy-fingered lionine wizard, almost buried beneath his own hair (who is inexplicably referred to as “Aruman” about half the time);
• Gollum, the creature with the impeccably British diction;
• Treebeard, who looks like he should be throwing apples at Dorothy and the Scarecrow.

The (giggle) Balrog, fearsome (snort) and terrible demon (guffaw).

Special mention need by made of both the Ringwraiths and the Orcs, both of whom are rendered with not-so-much rotoscoping. Rather, costumed individuals were shot in high-contrast black-and-white (i.e., looking like a photocopy), then hand-tinted, and some details were animated on top (such as glowing eyes). The Wraiths are actually suitably alien-looking, especially when Frodo sees them with the Ring on. The Orcs, on the other hand, are almost comical. The masks the actors wore apparently came in two varieties: one that looked like paper-mache gorillas, and the other that looked like evil version of the Pod People from The Dark Crystal. And given the divergent means of rendering, battles between our fully-animated characters and their non-animated assailants are especially unconvincing (and attempts to either give the Orcs extra animation for those scenes, or to under-rotoscope the main characters, just plain don’t help).

The movie wears out its welcome long before it ends, largely because it’s over two hours long. Why? Well, Tolkien wasn’t kind enough to really include any good stopping places (if you recall, The Fellowship of the Ring ended with Frodo and Sam going off on their own in a boat, while Orcs attacked the rest of the Fellowship). Thus, the only real place to roll credits, short of making the entire trilogy as one film, is at the Battle of Helm’s Deep. So we get a lengthy battle at that point, and it’s actually a semi-effective sequence, though Gandalf’s sudden appearance at its end to save the day makes very little sense as presented. Plus, there’s the fact that, at this late point, we simply don’t care anymore; we’re ready to cheer the credits.

And while that battle is a good stopping point for one of the threads of the novel, it leaves everyone else in the lurch. Frodo and Sam are given no resolution; when the movie ends, they’re still out wandering in the swamp with Gollum. Merry and Pippin, meanwhile, have just met Treebeard, and go off into the forest with him and out of the story altogether.

Two-hundred fifty-six channels, and not a damned thing on.

The icing on the cake? All of this is overlaid with a score so merrily martial that it sounds like the theme to Hogan’s Heroes.

It’s no wonder that no one’s tried since to film The Lord of the Rings since (okay, there was the Rankin/Bass version of The Return of the King in 1980, but they already had set their own precedent). The good news is that it’s finally possible, on a technical level, to do it right.

Don’t screw it up, Pete.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 60, plus however many Orcs bought it at the end of the Battle of Helm’s Deep
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 3
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0