Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the
Rings trilogy, was born in New Zealand in 1961,
on Halloween. When Jackson was eight years old, his parents bought
an 8mm camera, and in just a few years he
was making short movies with his friends. He often used innovative
special effects techniques for his very low-budget films, paving
the way for his work with special effects later on in his filmmaking
career. He began making his first feature film, the low-budget Bad
Taste (1987), when he was twenty-two,
and it became a cult classic. Eventually, he made a name for himself
as a director of gory horror movies, including Meet the
Feebles (1989) and Dead
Alive (1992), then branched out
a bit with Heavenly Creatures (1994),
a film based on a real-life murder perpetrated by two young girls
in New Zealand.
Jackson had been a longtime fan of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings, and he first approached Miramax with
the idea of making two films based on the novels. Despite the studio’s
initial support of the project, the budget proved too daunting for
them, and Jackson brought his idea to New Line Cinema in 1998.
Jackson’s plan to film the movies in New Zealand and employ his
own special effects studios pleased New Line, and they increased
the project to three films. In an unprecedented move, they agreed
to let Jackson direct all three films at one time. His budget was
$270 million, and filming took nearly fourteen
months.
In 2004, The Return of
the King (2003), the third film
in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, won the Oscar
for Best Picture. The award was hardly a surprise. The first two
films in the series, The Fellowship of the Ring and The
Two Towers, had both been nominated but lost, and the trilogy
seemed to be due an award. Few critics, however, considered the
third film better than the first two, and, like its predecessors,
the film was praised but not celebrated. However, the fact that The
Return of the King concluded the trilogy seemed to make
it more worthy of an Oscar than the previous two installments had
been. Unlike the films that make up other famous trilogies, such as The
Godfather, Star Wars, and Indiana
Jones, the films in The Lord of the Rings are
not complete in and of themselves. The Fellowship of the
Ring might as well have a To Be Continued . . . sign before
the credits, and The Two Towers actually has neither
a real beginning nor a real end. Even The Return of the
King, though it indeed has an ending, starts in media res,
and anyone who has not seen the first two films will be a bit lost.
The Best Picture award is, in effect, a single award for the entire
trilogy, which itself might be more accurately described as one
very long movie than as three separate films.
The trilogy’s unity is perhaps its most distinguishing
characteristic. Its consistency is largely due to the circumstances
of its production. For two years, from 1999 to 2001,
Jackson filmed in New Zealand, creating the footage used in all
three films. Though the movies were edited and released separately,
the fact that the entire trilogy’s footage was filmed at one time
and in one place goes a long way toward explaining the unity of
the entire trilogy. The congruity of the trilogy can also be ascribed
to the fact that the films closely follow Tolkien’s novels. Movies,
which are collaborative, tend to be influenced by many different
people—writers, directors, producers, cinematographers, and actors—while
books tend to represent the vision of one writer. Because the films
stay close to the novels, they benefit from the consistency of Tolkien’s
vision.
While critics generally praised the films, few considered
them to be anything more than very well-done big-budget extravaganzas, but
the films’ popularity has made them very influential in the filmmaking
world. For example, The Lord of the Rings trilogy
has influenced the length of motion pictures. Each of the three
films is approximately three hours long, and the entire trilogy
lasts well over nine hours. For many years the standard Hollywood
film length was an hour and a half. The average feature film had
already begun to grow before the release of The Lord of
the Rings, but the trilogy’s success partly explains the
increasing number of two-and-a-half to three-hour movies, as well
as multifilm epics, such as Quentin Tarantino’s two-part Kill
Bill.
The trilogy also helped to reintroduce a forgotten genre:
the war epic. For many years, most war films concerned the Vietnam
War, and these films invariably approached the war with cynicism
and aimed to present a balanced picture that documented the human suffering
on both sides. Even war films, such as Glory and Saving Private
Ryan, which seem to celebrate the heroism and sacrifice
of common soldiers fighting just wars, never hide the fact that
war is hell. Even if a war is just, these films suggest, it is still
pure hell for the soldiers fighting it. The Lord of the
Rings trilogy, however, seems to have helped reintroduce
the notion of war as an aspect of coming of age, one way that a
man can mature and make his name.
Neither Tolkien nor Jackson intended their work to be
classified as “fantasy,” and instead viewed their work as a form
of history-making. Many aspects of Jackson’s films, however, are
indeed fantastical and follow a line of other films that portray
worlds far different from the one we know. Movies have always taken
place in both recognizable and alternative worlds, and for many
years, the dominant genre in this alternate tradition was science
fiction. Films like The Terminator portray futures
in which cyborgs walk the earth and space travel is common. Science
fiction eventually produced cyberpunk, a subgenre that includes
such films as The Matrix, in which the virtual
world of the computer becomes the new frontier. Fantasy, like science
fiction and cyberpunk, portrays worlds that differ radically from
both the present and the past, but the alternate world in works
of fantasy is not defined by technology. Science fiction and cyberpunk
most often concern an imagined future, while fantasy generally concerns
an alternative past. Middle-earth, the setting of The Lord
of the Rings, resembles a legendary, rather than historical,
conception of the Middle Ages, where warriors wear shining armor
and ride off to battle on horseback. Moreover, Middle-earth is a
world of mystery, populated by elves, dwarves, magicians, and evil
spirits, a fantastic land in keeping with the religiosity of the
Middle Ages. Science fiction and cyberpunk are rooted in both the
modern and the futuristic worlds, and to some extent, The Lord
of the Rings signals a return to more conservative Hollywood films,
a step back from the technology-centric, socially critical movies
that have been the norm for the better part of the past thirty years.
