Peter Jackson's sorcery: 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy

Commonweal, Jan 30, 2004 by Richard Alleva

Themes (spoilers follow): The literary LOTR contains many themes but I venture that the leading one is the necessity to cling stubbornly and absolutely to virtue (no matter how modest) in the face of absolute evil. (This is what makes Tolkien basically conservative. Liberals don't believe in absolute evil.) The movie's climax is the same as the book's: Frodo's failure to throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom shows that he lacks absolute devotion to virtue, but this very human failure is rescued by Gollum's greedy intervention. Ironically, good comes out of evil; fate is stronger than character.

However, because the movie's script and Sean Astin's wonderfully unfissured performance spotlight Sam's absolute devotion to Frodo, the preclimactic scene in which Sam carries Frodo up Mount Doom conveys an emotional charge that the morally messy climax doesn't. So Sam emerges as the true hero of the film trilogy, and the most important virtue, it seems, is the capacity for friendship, not the more general devotion to abstract virtue.

Though the creator of Middle-earth feared and hated many aspects of technology, the technology of the movies has treated Tolkien with respect. Peter Jackson, master of technomagic and generalissimo of a thousand technicians and actors, has made of Tolkien's deliberately archaic epic a fresh, bracing revel.