Rule them all

I’ve now watched The Fellowship of the Ring so many times it’s like a form of comfort food for me. Having a three-and-a-half hour version of your favorite movie comes in handy when your wife is out of town and you only get about 15 channels that aren’t Spanish or Home Shopping. Today I was watching it with the director & writer commentary track playing, and it’s still a tremendously entertaining film, in part because of the incredible level of detail and love (they wouldn’t have bothered with the former if they hadn’t had the latter) invested into every shot by the production team. A few brief musings three of my favorite moments in the film:

1) The post-Moria mourning scene. If I had to guess, I’d say it was this sequence that made moviegoers realize they weren’t just watching a great action film, but a great film, period. Most action movies gloss over the death of even the most important characters, content with someone shouting “Noooo!”, then having someone else pat them on the back, toss them a cold one, say “He was a good soldier,” and then it’s back to ass-kicking. Here we emerge from the incredibly intense and dark underground realm of Moria into an otherworldly, blindingly white hill, the sun blazing down. The diegetic sound is removed, leaving us instead with a single mournful boy-soprano voice singing a song of grief. The individual reactions to the fall of Gandalf by each member of the Fellowship are catalogued in uncomfortably intimite close-ups: Gimli the Dwarf enraged, struggling to return to the mines and slay the orcs who brought them to this sorry pass; Boromir of Gondor, holding Gimli back, his face showing that he knows only too well how futile the seeking of vengeance would be; Sam the Hobbit, collapsing to the ground in sorrow; Merry & Pippin, clinging to each other, seeming to wonder just how culpable their silly antics were in their friend’s death; Legolas the Elf, a look of stunned surprise on his face, one totally unaccustomed to seeing the death of a friend up close; Frodo, who in the words of director Peter Jackson has a look of grief on his face “so powerful that it should frighten the audience”; Aragorn the ranger, who allows himself only a moment of pure sorrow before reluctantly assuming the mantle of leadership placed upon him by his fallen friend. Boromir says of the hobbits, “Give them a moment, for pity’s sake,” but Aragorn insists on spurring them on, knowing that the orcs on their heels will show no pity should they catch up to the greiving fellowship. The performances are amazing, but the imagery alone–the white light, the barren hill–say almost all that needs to be said. This was when everything clicked for me, sitting there in the theater: “This isn’t just great–it’s a masterpiece.”

2) I first saw the Moria mines sequence in a press screening several months before the release of the film. That 15-20 minute chunk was released and shown at Cannes, and then at select locations for members of the media. I saw it in New York with a friend, and when we left–completely floored, of course–he said “This is the first movie that captures the sheer scale of good fantasy. Moria was exactly as big on the screen as it was in my head.” For me, the shot that established this scale once and for all was not the big reveal of the Great Hall, but the arrow’s-eye-view shot of the orc archer as he gets killed by Legolas. At this point, you’ve had some more or less vertical overhead shots that simply show the space immediately surrounding where our heroes are running down the ancient staircase in the Mines, or shots taken from right among them. Suddenly you’re strapped onto an arrow, flung hundreds of yards over an enormous chasm, and ram right into an orc’s forehead. We then switch to a shot from right behind the orc–or where he used to be, because he’s plummeting deep in to the chasm the arc of the arrow just described. Using strictly intrafilmic means–the arrow, the body of the orc–Jackson defines the space of the Mines breathtakingly. This shot sequence didn’t receive nearly the level of attention of the equally brilliant Orthanc “helicopter” shot, in which the camera panned over the gates of Isengard, past the fiery pits in which Saruman’s orcs were working, up the tower of Orthanc on the wings of Gandalf’s friend the moth, then rocketed back down the tower deep underground and stopped at an orc swordsmith’s anvil. It may not have been nearly as showy, but it was just as effective, and for me, perhaps even more impressive.

3) Another smart bit of film wonkery came at the very end of the scene on the snowy mountainside in which Boromir reluctantly returns the Ring to Frodo after the hobbit drops it. As Boromir turns his back from Frodo after handing it off and mussing his hair, his shield clanks against his back with a THUD. That simple foley-art sound effect force the audience to notice Boromir’s distinctive round shield–which we next notice near the very end of the film, when its simple presence near the base of a tree is used to indicate ominously that Boromir has gone off from the Fellowship to track down Frodo. One split-second sound effect does the work of probably thirty seconds exposition. Fantastic.