Denis Dutton: Spectacular it may be, but LOTR lacks lasting value

COMMENT

Here in the land of tall-poppy cutters, it takes no imagination to find reasons to resent the loftiest of our latest crop, Peter Jackson. Let me, therefore, declare straight off that I have limitless respect for Jackson's managerial capacities and showman's instincts. I admire him as much as I'd admire any local entrepreneur who cracked, say, the international tomato sauce market.

Jackson has beaten Hollywood's moguls at their own game, given hundreds of inventive New Zealanders worthwhile, lucrative work and enhanced tourism into the bargain. Bring back knighthoods, I say, and give him one.

So when I add that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is, as a work of cinematic art, ham-fisted, shallow, bombastic and laughably overrated, don't get me wrong. I'm not criticising Jackson but the degraded state of popular movies.

Jackson's epic represents the victory of special effects over dramatic art.

Of course, special effects have been with cinema since the beginning. Georges Melies' droll 1902 A Trip to the Moon, the first sci-fi movie, contained enchanting trick photography. Audiences were astonished by the 1932 King Kong and gawked at the dinosaurs (live lizards) that Victor Mature battled in the 1940 One Million BC.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey showed special-effects models can be beautiful, and computer-generated effects entered film in a big way with the first Star Wars movie, accelerating with Jurassic Park and The Matrix.

The amazement special effects induces tends to be shortlived. Filmgoers grow tired of kinds of effect, and then want more. The space travel shots of Star Wars now seem trite, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park look creaky and artificial.

Audience habituation means that producers are stuck in the upward spiral of an endless special-effects arms race, with demands for bigger explosions, uglier villains, more frenzied, realistic violence, louder noises and ever-expanding battle scenes. A computer-generated crowd, according to the Hollywood rule, must not be smaller than the crowds in last month's releases.

The Rings trilogy is an unremarkable, boys' own, action-adventure movie. Take away the frenetic effects and there is not enough on screen to keep even a subnormal human mind alive. The narrative drags for long stretches, in part from the decision - applauded by Tolkien obsessives - to follow the books fairly closely rather than construct a dramatically integrated trilogy that could stand on its own. Special effects are these films' raison d'etre.

Acting? Elijah Wood plays Frodo with a repertoire of two wide-eyed expressions - his shocked-happy face and his shocked-hurt face. Wood also rolls up his eyeballs nicely when falling unconscious. Women, as we'd expect from a geek epic, hardly exist - they are merely an annoyance. As Clive James remarked: "Middle-earth is a place where even Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler come to be boring."

But the good, stout men of this movie are not much better, strutting around sententiously as they intone Tolkien's pseudo-Shakespearean inversions ("This way lies danger," and so on). Their occasional meditative soliloquies may be Tolkien's words but they end up sounding like Hallmark cards: "You can't go back. Some wounds don't heal." (This in a movie where people fall off wind-swept cliffs or down bottomless pits, always to return in the pink of good health.)

Not even the super-ugly Orcs, with their cruel laughter and bad teeth, engage much interest because they fail to suggest a convincing sense of evil. The computer can replicate them by the zillions but if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all.

Inevitably, the heroes are accompanied by short, amusing sidekicks who talk funny. You know a film has problems when its most singularly effective actor is the invisible voice-over and body-model for a psychotic, computer-generated Hobbit.

Next month we'll get yet another Hollywood remake of Homer's Iliad. Being Homer, and not Tolkien, Troy may at least have believable women to set off against Brad Pitt as Achilles. But expect the computer-generated bone-crunching, flesh-slicing battle scenes to exceed in quantity of pixel-soldiers and pints of fake blood those in either Gladiator or Jackson's Rings.

That's what the special-effects race is all about. And that's why the upward spiral of special effects has yielded a downward spiral in the story-telling quality of big-budget movies.

Talking about the theatre of his own time, Aristotle listed the elements of good drama. The least important, he argued, was "spectacle" - the staging, fancy costumes and special stage effects the Greeks used in their theatres. Most crucial for intense dramatic experience was an effective plot and interesting characters.

Except for the technology escalation, not much has changed in 2500 years. Ignore Aristotle, push spectacle to the top of the list, and you end up with such over-computerised, incoherent drivel as the recent versions of Hulk or Charlie's Angels.

Films promise so much. Yet what have they delivered? Between 1939 and 1942, barely a decade after the advent of sound, Hollywood could produce Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, His Girl Friday, Casablanca, Fantasia and The Maltese Falcon. Ask yourself, how much better have movies got since then?

The Wizard of Oz, like the Rings, is a fantasy-adventure plotted around a quest. It has Munchkins instead of Hobbits, an evil witch who lives in a castle, and even humanoid trees. Its 1939 special effects are not there to astonish so much as to push the action along.

The Wizard of Oz possesses an eternal freshness; its witty, beautifully paced tale told with singing and dancing actors of phenomenal talent - Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr. Who can remember anything out of Howard Shore's vapid, overblown score for Lord of the Rings? Who can forget Harold Arlen's for The Wizard of Oz?

Add it all up - acting talent, script, pacing, humour - and you have in The Wizard of Oz an essential feature completely lacking in The Lord of the Rings - charm. Most importantly, the 1939 film presents the audience with the vulnerabilities and idiosyncratic interior lives of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. They are as much fantasy characters as any elf in Tolkien but they are at the same time deeply human personalities.

Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West expresses a sense of authentic menace that Jackson's flaming, computer-generated evil-eye cannot begin to match. Among the Rings characters, only Gollum comes even close to having an intriguing internal life.

Jackson's trilogy is charmlessly external - nine hours and 11 minutes of tedious narrative, relieved only by stunning scenes of New Zealand and episodes of slam-bang hyper-violence. Yes, there are some diverting moments: I'd single out the oliphaunts and the mountaintop fire signals in the last instalment. But of development by arresting characters there is none whatsoever.

Nor is there any real suspense. I have never looked at my watch as often during a movie as in The Return of the King. Toward the end, I found myself desperately cheering on the giant spider in the hope of getting out of the theatre early. Eat Frodo, eat him.

Peter Jackson's natural affinity is for gothic horror, and along with that spider, the submerged corpses of the Dead Marshes in the second film and the foray into the underworld in the third are among the more effective episodes in these movies.

King Kong, which Jackson is working on now, is, however, neither a horror story nor a blow-'em-away special-effects vehicle. There is a pathos in King Kong's beauty-and-beast tale that is beyond the standard-issue geek imagination.

If the obsession with expensive technology and shallow effects is to ruin Hollywood film as an art form, by all means let the deed be carried out by talented New Zealanders. The visual effects, costumes, and make-up Oscars for The Lord of the Rings are richly deserved. But beyond that, and all the lovely money, are these films of any lasting value? Let's get a grip.

* Denis Dutton teaches philosophy at Canterbury University. His parents met when working at Paramount Studios, and he grew up in North Hollywood.

Herald Feature: Lord of the Rings