影评转贴：The one to rule them all（豪情敬请注意：）
Posted: 2003-12-14 16:29
Film Review: The one to rule them all
（The Sunday Times, by JOHN HARLOW）
Hail to the King. The third episode in Peter Jackson’s Ring cycle is a defining moment in cinema
The opening shot focuses on a blissful moon of a face, a bucolic figure enjoying his last happy moments as he hooks bait on a sunny afternoon. Moments later, brutal murder marks the loss of innocence in this Eden, as a once ordinary fisherman begins his moral and physical disintegration into the creature known as Gollum. This jarring kick-start to the most eagerly anticipated blockbuster of the season, The Return of the King, the final epic in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is all the more powerful for being played like commonplace domestic violence, more Agatha Christie than Middle-earth. The director, Peter Jackson, has again thrown us off balance.
Jackson, apparently a better class of megalomaniac than the average director, promised us the best for last, and he has delivered, bringing to a climax an already monumental work in a Shakespearian vision of battle, human corruption, madness, loss and joy. Forget the hairy feet and occasional bursts of Elvish ― this is an adult movie with grown-up themes, promoting old-fashioned virtues such as loyalty, respect and sacrifice, that also manages, after a year of disappoint ment in the multiplexes, to make adrenaline respectable again.
The Return of the King reduces the first six hours of the saga to a curtain-raiser for the main event, the one film that binds them all, in more than three hours of cinema unprecedented in its visual grandeur and savage power to thrill. In an Oscar season filled with war, from Crowe at sea and Kidman on Cold Mountain to Cruise looking good in samurai gear, it is Jackson’s battles, unrestrained by reality or even gravity, that you will remember. Yes, forgive my burbling, it’s that good.
Film geeks fret about the best year in cinema. Was it 1939, which gave us Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, or 1962, for Lawrence of Arabia? Stuff that game ― let’s roll all three Tolkien films together, as they were intended, and shout it from the popcorn stand that, at the 11th hour, we recognise 2003 as a glorious moment in celluloid history. And, let’s not be shy about it, it’s an achievement rooted in British, not US, culture. They just paid for it.
How has Jackson done it? First, he does not have to slow down for exposition. We know this is the mythical land of Middle-earth, where white hats have thrown down one tower of baddies, and two short heroes known as hobbits are trudging their weary way to a volcano to unforge a ring, a source of power for a second dark tower. We are easier with the characters, as Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn grows from boy scout into Henry V, and accept even Ian McKellen’s prosthetic nose (proven Oscar bait) amid the old-fashioned tricks of forced perspective that give us dwarfs talking to giants. If you are not at home here, ROTK is not the place to start.
Unlike the sad Matrix sequels, this fantastic finale does not merely repeat earlier tricks with a bigger budget. Here be creatures that have never been seen in cinema before. The battles are denser, the cities beautiful ― you can almost smell Minas Tirith, its greasily anxious people and spooked horses seething like a French medieval fortress. Most film-makers would be content with one new enemy such as the hissing subterranean denizen Shelob (Ridley Scott made his name with a single alien), but Jackson keeps cramming them into every corner of his widescreen canvas, at breakneck speed. So supremely confident is he now, he can cut-freeze a doomed cavalry charge in mid-gallop, refusing to show us the first world war carnage that follows the stupidity of Middle-earth’s all-too-human generals, and we do not care. We are hypnotised by Orlando Bloom’s elfin acrobatics, or enjoying the dwarf Gimli gleefully totting up his death toll.
Two other fresh flavours have been added in the remixes since last time around ― jokes and sex. Well, more jokes than sex, but a gallows humour has emerged among the fellowship as they face impossible odds. Gandalf now quips as he mows down his foes. Who does McKellen think he is, the governor of California? The sex is more about choices, painful and dark, but it raises temperatures unfelt outside the volcanic Mount Doom.
By the time we get to that roaring furnace, where a last choice must be made between good and self, we are battered and shaken. We really feel that last crawl with Frodo and Sam. A warning: some preview audiences stumbled out teary-eyed and dumbstruck; others spoke of having unnaturally vivid dreams afterwards. Can one overdose on this stuff?
The old weaknesses remain. The Lord of the Rings is about silly hippie fantasies such as magic rings and trolls, right? Okay, argue that away as analogy, but others remain irredeemable. There is nothing Jackson can do to un-Disney the ents, walking trees with Welsh accents. Some of the eagles could do with a lick of the magic paintbrush, too. But this is petty stuff, and fans will not give an orc.
More troublesome are hanging plot points ― not just missing chapters, such as The Scouring of the Shire, but whatever happened to Christopher Lee’s nasty wizard, Saruman, abandoned, blitzed and disgruntled, on his balcony at the end of The Two Towers? His fate was filmed, apparently, but for that we shall have to wait for the 4hr 15min special-edition DVD next Christmas. Will this saga never end?
That scene at the White Tower was supposed to open the third film, but Jackson felt it looked back too far, slowed the action. So he went even further back in the book, opening with Gollum’s discovery of the ring. It may not be logical, but it gives the British actor Andy Serkis a chance to show his real face ― well, real with extra-pointy ears. Last year, Serkis, like most other cast members, was robbed at the Oscars ceremony. He was locked out because ― as campaigners for more “highbrow” films, now barely remembered, said ― he was not really acting, he was digitised by computer. In reality, Serkis, who joined the cast for 15 days of voice-overs but stayed for 15 months, performed the schizophrenic halfling’s every move and expression. The only difference was that his face was altered by computer rather than latex. But he was thesping like mad, and in this final journey, Serkis is crucial in underpinning emotionally a vast experience in what, in clumsier hands, could have been Conan the Barbarian III.
The hobbits now rest: the Oscar battle for Middle- earth has begun. No more excuses, Academy voters, such as: “We are waiting to see how it turns out.” Let’s start with best film and director. As ticket-buyers, Hollywood, we who pay your wages demand nothing less. This is not Citizen Kane, nor did Jackson ever dream it to be. But for a whole new generation, this will be their Star Wars, their Gone with the Wind, their Wizard of Oz, all rolled into one. It will guarantee that they keep going to the multiplex in soul-seared hope for years to come. Yes, The Return of the King is truly that great.
SCORES OF THE RINGS
Cost of shooting the trilogy:&200m; print and advertising costs &80m; on-set coffee &50,000
Income so far: &1 billion+
Oscars so far: 6
Length of book: 1,200 pages
Length on screen: 9 hours 45 minutes
Film-rights fee for Tolkien estate: &104,602
Salary and profit share for Peter Jackson: &60m+
Bonuses: Wood &1.5m; McKellen &900,000
Injuries: Mortensen broke big toe, nearly drowned; Bloom fractured a rib; several concussions
New Zealand’s share: &110m economic boost, and “minister of the rings” appointed to promote tourism, but LOTR museum blocked by Tolkien’s family
Total crew: 23,000
Horses: 250, including five miniatures for hobbits
Rubber ears and feet: 1,600 pairs
Chain-mail links: 12m, cut from plastic pipe by armourers who wore away their fingerprints
Hero worship: all the key actors were tattooed in Elvish except John Rhys-Davies, who sent his stunt double in his place
Losers: David Bowie was considered for Elrond; Daniel Day-Lewis turned down Aragorn
Mementos: Wood took a ring, Cate Blanchett some bronzed ears, while the ever-munching Jackson was presented with a carrot
（The Sunday Times, by JOHN HARLOW）
Hail to the King. The third episode in Peter Jackson’s Ring cycle is a defining moment in cinema
The opening shot focuses on a blissful moon of a face, a bucolic figure enjoying his last happy moments as he hooks bait on a sunny afternoon. Moments later, brutal murder marks the loss of innocence in this Eden, as a once ordinary fisherman begins his moral and physical disintegration into the creature known as Gollum. This jarring kick-start to the most eagerly anticipated blockbuster of the season, The Return of the King, the final epic in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is all the more powerful for being played like commonplace domestic violence, more Agatha Christie than Middle-earth. The director, Peter Jackson, has again thrown us off balance.
Jackson, apparently a better class of megalomaniac than the average director, promised us the best for last, and he has delivered, bringing to a climax an already monumental work in a Shakespearian vision of battle, human corruption, madness, loss and joy. Forget the hairy feet and occasional bursts of Elvish ― this is an adult movie with grown-up themes, promoting old-fashioned virtues such as loyalty, respect and sacrifice, that also manages, after a year of disappoint ment in the multiplexes, to make adrenaline respectable again.
The Return of the King reduces the first six hours of the saga to a curtain-raiser for the main event, the one film that binds them all, in more than three hours of cinema unprecedented in its visual grandeur and savage power to thrill. In an Oscar season filled with war, from Crowe at sea and Kidman on Cold Mountain to Cruise looking good in samurai gear, it is Jackson’s battles, unrestrained by reality or even gravity, that you will remember. Yes, forgive my burbling, it’s that good.
Film geeks fret about the best year in cinema. Was it 1939, which gave us Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, or 1962, for Lawrence of Arabia? Stuff that game ― let’s roll all three Tolkien films together, as they were intended, and shout it from the popcorn stand that, at the 11th hour, we recognise 2003 as a glorious moment in celluloid history. And, let’s not be shy about it, it’s an achievement rooted in British, not US, culture. They just paid for it.
How has Jackson done it? First, he does not have to slow down for exposition. We know this is the mythical land of Middle-earth, where white hats have thrown down one tower of baddies, and two short heroes known as hobbits are trudging their weary way to a volcano to unforge a ring, a source of power for a second dark tower. We are easier with the characters, as Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn grows from boy scout into Henry V, and accept even Ian McKellen’s prosthetic nose (proven Oscar bait) amid the old-fashioned tricks of forced perspective that give us dwarfs talking to giants. If you are not at home here, ROTK is not the place to start.
Unlike the sad Matrix sequels, this fantastic finale does not merely repeat earlier tricks with a bigger budget. Here be creatures that have never been seen in cinema before. The battles are denser, the cities beautiful ― you can almost smell Minas Tirith, its greasily anxious people and spooked horses seething like a French medieval fortress. Most film-makers would be content with one new enemy such as the hissing subterranean denizen Shelob (Ridley Scott made his name with a single alien), but Jackson keeps cramming them into every corner of his widescreen canvas, at breakneck speed. So supremely confident is he now, he can cut-freeze a doomed cavalry charge in mid-gallop, refusing to show us the first world war carnage that follows the stupidity of Middle-earth’s all-too-human generals, and we do not care. We are hypnotised by Orlando Bloom’s elfin acrobatics, or enjoying the dwarf Gimli gleefully totting up his death toll.
Two other fresh flavours have been added in the remixes since last time around ― jokes and sex. Well, more jokes than sex, but a gallows humour has emerged among the fellowship as they face impossible odds. Gandalf now quips as he mows down his foes. Who does McKellen think he is, the governor of California? The sex is more about choices, painful and dark, but it raises temperatures unfelt outside the volcanic Mount Doom.
By the time we get to that roaring furnace, where a last choice must be made between good and self, we are battered and shaken. We really feel that last crawl with Frodo and Sam. A warning: some preview audiences stumbled out teary-eyed and dumbstruck; others spoke of having unnaturally vivid dreams afterwards. Can one overdose on this stuff?
The old weaknesses remain. The Lord of the Rings is about silly hippie fantasies such as magic rings and trolls, right? Okay, argue that away as analogy, but others remain irredeemable. There is nothing Jackson can do to un-Disney the ents, walking trees with Welsh accents. Some of the eagles could do with a lick of the magic paintbrush, too. But this is petty stuff, and fans will not give an orc.
More troublesome are hanging plot points ― not just missing chapters, such as The Scouring of the Shire, but whatever happened to Christopher Lee’s nasty wizard, Saruman, abandoned, blitzed and disgruntled, on his balcony at the end of The Two Towers? His fate was filmed, apparently, but for that we shall have to wait for the 4hr 15min special-edition DVD next Christmas. Will this saga never end?
That scene at the White Tower was supposed to open the third film, but Jackson felt it looked back too far, slowed the action. So he went even further back in the book, opening with Gollum’s discovery of the ring. It may not be logical, but it gives the British actor Andy Serkis a chance to show his real face ― well, real with extra-pointy ears. Last year, Serkis, like most other cast members, was robbed at the Oscars ceremony. He was locked out because ― as campaigners for more “highbrow” films, now barely remembered, said ― he was not really acting, he was digitised by computer. In reality, Serkis, who joined the cast for 15 days of voice-overs but stayed for 15 months, performed the schizophrenic halfling’s every move and expression. The only difference was that his face was altered by computer rather than latex. But he was thesping like mad, and in this final journey, Serkis is crucial in underpinning emotionally a vast experience in what, in clumsier hands, could have been Conan the Barbarian III.
The hobbits now rest: the Oscar battle for Middle- earth has begun. No more excuses, Academy voters, such as: “We are waiting to see how it turns out.” Let’s start with best film and director. As ticket-buyers, Hollywood, we who pay your wages demand nothing less. This is not Citizen Kane, nor did Jackson ever dream it to be. But for a whole new generation, this will be their Star Wars, their Gone with the Wind, their Wizard of Oz, all rolled into one. It will guarantee that they keep going to the multiplex in soul-seared hope for years to come. Yes, The Return of the King is truly that great.
SCORES OF THE RINGS
Cost of shooting the trilogy:&200m; print and advertising costs &80m; on-set coffee &50,000
Income so far: &1 billion+
Oscars so far: 6
Length of book: 1,200 pages
Length on screen: 9 hours 45 minutes
Film-rights fee for Tolkien estate: &104,602
Salary and profit share for Peter Jackson: &60m+
Bonuses: Wood &1.5m; McKellen &900,000
Injuries: Mortensen broke big toe, nearly drowned; Bloom fractured a rib; several concussions
New Zealand’s share: &110m economic boost, and “minister of the rings” appointed to promote tourism, but LOTR museum blocked by Tolkien’s family
Total crew: 23,000
Horses: 250, including five miniatures for hobbits
Rubber ears and feet: 1,600 pairs
Chain-mail links: 12m, cut from plastic pipe by armourers who wore away their fingerprints
Hero worship: all the key actors were tattooed in Elvish except John Rhys-Davies, who sent his stunt double in his place
Losers: David Bowie was considered for Elrond; Daniel Day-Lewis turned down Aragorn
Mementos: Wood took a ring, Cate Blanchett some bronzed ears, while the ever-munching Jackson was presented with a carrot
现在我也正混乱着呢，3个半小时下来好多都记不真切了。总的印象是真的很精彩，比前2部更注重人与人之间的冲突与感情，因此我也流了不少眼泪，没出息得很。 
HOBBITS里面最趣致的是PIPPIN. 
还有两国的普通战士，明知对手强大到远远超出自己的对抗范围，还是义无反顾地向前。马国的国王和公主显示出真正的勇气，与NASGUL对阵那场惊心动魄，杀戮魔王首帅的是女子！EOWYN把头盔揭下来时我简直要鼓掌了。这几段是我最感动的。那段千里传烽火的也很精采啊，气势宏大。
两个有纯真心思和无上勇气的凡人, 真般配啊.
难为他几百岁了狡猾凶恶之余还有幼童的心态，有几句台词笑得我：When did I ever do anything to master? 伤心无辜得要命。唱个歌都是童谣式的，很多语气也孩童化：Get up sleepies! No time to waste, silly! 
