First night for Lord of the Rings

By THOMAS SUTCLIFFE

"What about page 53?" a voice shouted, as the lights dimmed for the first British press screening of Lord of the Rings.

The little dig at the Tolkien purists who will be poised to descend gibbering on all textual deviation when the film opens to the public next week was a reminder that, for the devout, this is a moment of nervous apprehension.

For Tolkien sceptics, on the other hand, it’s likely to be an occasion when the besetting vices of cinematic adaptation – compression and paraphrase – come to look more like blessings.

Even at three hours long the first instalment of Peter Jackson’s trilogy is going to demand considerably less of your life than the original and the fact that it substitutes images for words guarantees to dissipate the gluey sonority of the author’s prose – an adhesive substance which has stopped many prospective readers in their tracks.

And, as a sequence of images, Lord of the Rings is undeniably dazzling. Among other things, Jackson’s $300m budget has brought him a whole landscape still fresh to the eye – his native New Zealand delivering locations which range from the Teletubbies cosiness of The Shire – with its windmills and subterranean cottages – to the forests and mountains of Middle-Earth.

It’s also bought him staggering amounts of processing-time, which he uses with a supernatural brio that gives a new meaning to that old cliché about computer wizardry.

Some of his effects are warming – like the perfect smoke clipper which Gandalf puffs out to sail through Bilbo’s modest smoke ring – but others aim to chill, and they do so with more than mere percussion.

In the scuttering swarm of orcs advancing on the heroes or the sudden swoop into a subterranean arms factory you see a genuine visual imagination at work – one that knows how to play with the lurch and flinch of an audience’s subconscious reactions.

The architecture of this film – barring the Celtic revival tweeness of the Elvish villages – has a Piranesi grandeur to it.

As fable, though, it’s likely to satisfy only those are easily satisfied – either children, or grown-ups who seek a refuge from the more ambiguous moral battles of real life.

The Lord of the Rings finds its true kinship, not with the great myths of history, but with the faded photocopies of recent years. There may even be younger viewers who will bring an anachronistic charge of plagiarism against Tolkein – recognising an Obi-Wan-Kenobi figure in Gandalf and an echo of the Force in the Ring’s availability to good or evil.

And anyone who wants a replay of the troll attack from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone will find one here – a good deal more bloody and terrifying, it’s true, but cut from the same graphic cloth.

That will hardly matter to those already charmed. The doggedly unenchanted, meanwhile, will have to while away their time reflecting on the curiously arbitrary nature of magical powers – at one moment terrifying insuperable and at the next strangely cloddish – or wondering how a supposedly anti-fascist fantasy should have ended up dressed in such Teutonic accessories.

You can’t help feeling Hitler would have adored this film – with its hideous untermenschen, its hobbits and its Aryan beauties. He would have recognised that elemental myth – like magic rings – don’t dictate how their power is to be exploited.

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