In the Flesh: The Fellowship of the Ring

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring on fantasy production design in every medium from film to gr

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring on fantasy production design in every medium from film to tabletop game books to cosplay to graphic novels. Go into any hobby store in the country, crack open any miniatures game or fantasy comic, and you’re going to find those iconic lines and textures reproduced again and again. It’s not just fantasy, either. There are no crawlers in The Descent without Gollum (Andy Serkis) or Moria’s pallid, scuttling orcs. There’s no Lannister foot soldier armor on Game of Thrones without the distinctive Uruk Hai kits mass-produced in Orthanc in Fellowship and The Two Towers, no balors or bloodthirsters without the dreaded Balrog. The Nazgûl echo through everything from Bloodborne to The Wheel of Time, itself in the process of large-scale adaptation. What so many of these imitators miss, though, is the emotional resonance Jackson, his art directors, and the team at WETA manage to impart to their creations. What would Gollum be if his body language wasn’t so abject and craven? Would the famous cave troll fight sequence pack as stiff a punch without the creature’s mournful groans of confusion as it succumbs to its injuries?

The creatures in Fellowship of the Ring, in short, are part of the world around them, but also in tension with that world. Jackson leaves much unsaid about the orcs and other species shaped by Sauron for the purpose of world domination, but we understand their abject existences through their bedraggled gear and lack of hygiene, just as we understand the abjection of the cave troll by the chain around its neck and its anger and confusion at being dragged into armed conflict. Perhaps nowhere is this design ethos clearer than in Jackson’s approach to the Nazgûl, who appear as they truly are in only a single scene in the entire trilogy. When Frodo (Elijah Wood) puts on the Ring at Weathertop, he glimpses Sauron’s chiefest servants in the spirit realm, stripped of their faceless menace and rendered instead as the walking embalmed, withered and deformed, their eyes black slits in gnarled, mask-like faces. They are Bilbo’s (Ian Holm) “butter scraped over too much bread” — Bilbo himself is rendered briefly ghoulish by his longing for the Ring in a scene heavily reminiscent of Jackson’s gorehound roots in low-budget horror — , men who have outlived themselves and now wander in an endless, monotonous nightmare of creeping servitude.

It’s a choice which sets The Fellowship of the Ring apart from its many, many imitators. To portray the Ringwraiths not as an unstoppable menace but as pathetic victims of their own greed and lust for power both heightens the stakes of the framing conflict and deepens the viewers’ emotional response to the sight of the wraiths thereafter. We know what will happen to Frodo if he fails, and we know that the terrors chasing our heroes are themselves in agony. From the Robert E. Howard-esque Watcher in the Water, redolent of the cosmic horror of Lovecraft and Chambers, to the more Classical and Biblical design of the mighty Balrog with its jet engine roar, every choice behind the aesthetics of Fellowship’s creatures hints at a bigger, stranger world all around the wonders we’ve chanced to see. Even more than this, the film respects WETA’s creations on a technical and dramatic level. They emote, anchor scenes, drive the story, and provoke genuine responses from our point of view characters, a basic level of competence in screenwriting you don’t often see in effects-driven fantasy film. That respect is what’s kept WETA and Jackson’s work alive for over twenty years while the vast majority of its successors, including Amazon’s The Rings of Power, have failed to create so much as a dent in the popular imagination. No mean feat.