Arwen Evenstar, elven warrior of Rivendell, snatches a dying hobbit from his foes and outraces the fell steeds of the dark lord to bear her frail burden to safety.
With the wraith-riders routed by her magical arts, doughty Arwen (Liv Tyler) bends over the listless Frodo and bequeaths him a boon beyond measure: Immortality, her place on the ship that eventually will bear her kin across the great sea of Middle Earth.
Welcome to the new old world of Lord of the Rings, at least as imagined by director Peter Jackson in the three-hour film, The Fellowship of the Ring by New Line Cinema that opened Wednesday.
As any devotee of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy epic will know soon enough, Jackson's vision of Middle Earth is not the same as Tolkien's. In the first volume of the trilogy, Arwen is depicted in only six paragraphs -- "such loveliness in living thing Frodo had never seen before" -- and as an serene maiden, not a grim princess.
To squeeze the 423-page first volume into a three-hour movie, Jackson ruthlessly pruned chapters from the book and rearranged the narrative's flow. (November's Harry Potter film, on the other hand, was a far more faithful adaptation to its source.)
Jackson discarded prominent characters such as the faun-like Tom Bombadil, who shows up in three book chapters. Other scenes are added, like when the obstreperous dwarf Gimli attempts to hack apart the great ring with his trusty ax. (It didn't work.)
Deletions are to be expected. Retelling the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, in its entirety would take thrice the screen time and try the stamina of even the most puissant elf-lord.
Thus there are two different questions: Does Jackson's effort remain reasonably true to Tolkien's richly imagined universe? And will filmgoers not inculcated with the lore of Middle Earth enjoy it anyway?
The answers, happily, are "probably" and "definitely."
Jackson has more or less successfully extracted the highlights of Tolkien's book and transformed a sometimes-wandering tale into a convincing movie version. He's managed to preserve key dialogue in Tolkien's own words, and other alterations inject vital background that the book delivers in small doses over thousands of pages.
Audiences will thrill to Frodo's trek from the verdant fields of his home in the Shire, through dark peril to the vale of Rivendell, and the formation of the fellowship of the ring.
Frodo is, of course, the accidental bearer of the powerful and dangerous One Ring of Sauron, who happens to be the physical embodiment of evil in Middle Earth. Sauron's minions, the ringwraiths, hope to return the treasure to their master -- who, if he regains it, will utterly destroy all that is good in the land.
A great portion of Sauron's power has passed into the One Ring, and he cannot be vanquished until Frodo casts it into the fiery bowels of Mount Doom. As Tolkien put it: "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them / One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them / In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie."
Elijah Wood plays Frodo, lending a winsome, endearing grace that promises to mature well during the next two volumes of the book. (But Wood's lithe frame is rather unrealistic: Weren't hobbits supposed to be pudgy little creatures, noshing on at least six meals a day?)
Joining Frodo are companions including Gandalf the wizard (Ian McKellen), king-to-be Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Boromir (Sean Bean), grumpy Gimli the dwarf (John Rhys-Davies) and the elf-archer Legolas (Orlando Bloom).
One at a time, his companions become tempted by the lure of the One Ring. If they were to seize it, could they not throw down Sauron and rid the countryside from the plague of orcs and goblins grown in the vats of an evil wizard allied with Sauron?
Lord of the Rings has always seemed to be the perfect book for a movie adaptation, featuring elves, dwarves, wizards, swords, magic, princesses and kings. If some of this sounds trite, it's only because more recent fantasy authors like Raymond E. Feist, Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind have mined Tolkien's work so extensively.
But in truth, this fantasy classic is an imperfect fit for any screen, large or small. The book is too complex, the world too intricate, and the background too intensive for an abbreviation to remain true to the original.
Even wizard's magic is hardly deserving of a Hollywood effects studio: With rare exceptions, like Gandalf's tussle with a creature from the underworld, it's typically understated and woven into the fabric of the land.
One Tolkien fan site, created before the movie was envisioned, put it this way: "The arguments are that Tolkien's work is too personal to be publicly interpreted by others, that visualizing it would destroy the pictures that everyone who has read and loved the books possesses..."
In other words, sometimes it's best to buy the book.
Movies should be rated by how much the experience is worth. Lord of the Rings is worth $8.50 -- and double that if you're a Tolkien aficionado.
