Almost by chance I saw The Lord of the Rings : The Fellowshop of the Ring for the first time yesterday. Again it's another film that is difficult to review as there is so much hype, baggage, comment and analysis of this film that I have been exposed to since it was released in December 2001. And those bloody books - I have a memory of reading them in my teenage years, but I really don't know if I finished the three tomes or not. I have a vivid memory of skipping pages and pages of Hobbit verse, and an interminable trek across a snowy mountain pass that appeared to be as arduous to read as it would have been to physically make. Of the BBC documentary at the time of release, I have a very vivid memory of someone fully dressed as a Hobbit singing an elven lament over the grave of JRRT, amid a cadre of what one could just about get away with calling dropouts and inadequates. Actually no, I can't get away with that. Let's just say they are the sort of people I don't find have a terribly great sense of humour and would dread sitting next to at a wedding reception.

The film inevitably suffers in my mind in relation to one of my all time favourite movies, Excalibur. The Boorman creation just seems to have infinitely more soul than the LOTR cycle. The story of Arthur really touches me deeply - something to do with race memory? Dunno - but a tale that has been told for centuries has far more weight than something invented in the 1930's it seems to me. As Boorman says in the Region 1 DVD commentary, it's a tale that bears repeated viewing and for me incites awe, if not shock, at each viewing. Also the reflection of the human condition is far more deep in the Arthurian legend. In LOTR it's just a ring that creates a desire to own it and makes one's evil intentions come to the surface. With Excalibur we see a perfect society created then disintegrate through boredom and envy, followed by years of penury and in the end a kind of resurrection or atonement. Very affecting stuff. LOTR is just a ring that's very dangerous and desirous. The conciet of the story of LOTR is interesting - an attempt to get rid of something that proves difficult, but it doesn't have much deeper meaning for me.

LOTR suffers a little from CGI overload. I got tired of all the swooping camerawork panning over one castle after another. And all the battles seemed the same. Hoardes of prosthetics and CGIs. I'm a bit tired by this, even though it was generally well done. The landscape of New Zealand also looked great, though again it fails to inspire me - as does the landscape of the USA. Somehow I don't find this untouched grandiose wilderness very moving - it fails to connect to me the same way and English landscape does, such as North Yorkshire, or even the fantasic Irish landscapes of Excalibur. For me the landscape Excalibur looked more wonderful than the hyper-real NZ of LOTR. I did enjoy the more "real" sets though. Rivendell was somewhere I really wanted to stay. And the elves were wonderful. I really thought Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett were the best things about the movie. The men were all a bit dull, though from the Fellowship the interplay between Sean Bean and Viggo Mortensen was a delight. Of the two wizards I found Sir Ian's Gandalf a bit too affected. Chistopher Lee's Sauromon was fantastic in the confrontation scene, but was really not given anything interesting to do in the later stages as he assembled the Orc army.

I have to say I suffered really badly from seeing the French and Saunders skit of LOTR before the film itself. This produced giggling at rather inappropriate moments!

Then there's the music. I thought the choral stuff was good, I don't mind Enya too much, and I'll have to listen out for Elizabeth Frazer next time I see the film. But the orchestral stuff was pretty derivative and not a patch on Excalibur. Really, for me Excalibur is the acme of a marriage between music and film. The Wagner never ceases to catch my emotions and transport me to the world of Camelot. As soon as the prelude from Parsifal builds over the title sequence I am totally enraptured. And the Liebestod backing the doomed affair of Guinevere and Lancelot really blows me away, even now as I write and remember. In the commentary Boorman talks about seeing the ring cycle at Bayreuth before making the film - I'm so glad he did.

There was really a shocking amount of badly done ADR dubbing in the film, especially in the opening scenes. I thought bad lip-synch was a relic of the past. Ironically the poor synching of Merlin in Excalibur seems to enhance the otherworldlyness of Nicol Williamson's performance.

As for topical references, it all looked a little bit like Gulf War II - small band of good guys get to waste large numbers of faceless bad guys. It's a poor reflection on Western culture that there is this video-game mentality. The enemy is faceless and we know nothing of their lives. They are reduced to cyphers. This is as much true for an army of Iraqis as it is for an army of Orcs. Very bad state of affairs but we are so used to it it hardly merits a mention.

To accentuate the positive, I really think LOTR was a much much better film than the dire Harry Potter and the Philosopher's (Sorcerer's for mentally challenged Yanks) Stone that came out at the same time. Unfortunately I chose to see the latter in the cinema when it came out. With Lord of the Rings : The Fellowship of the Ring, I was swept along with the action by the halfway point, and overall I'm glad I saw the film. But it is not a great movie. Just good.