January 27 1999

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings books are a filmmaker's fantasy.

The trilogy's influence on the fantasy genre is unparalled -- as is its popularity. More than 50 million copies have been sold in 25 languages since Tolkien, an Oxford professor of English literature, introduced Middle Earth in the mid-1950s. In a 1997 survey of more than 25,000 British readers, it was even named the "#1 Book of the Century."

But if Tolkien's masterpiece of good, evil, and magic represents one of the most potentially rewarding adaptations a filmmaker could undertake, it's also one of the most daunting. And if New Line Cinema and director Peter Jackson -- who will film live-action versions of the series later this year -- aren't careful, the very good Rings books could join a long line of very bad science-fiction movies.

On paper, the movies appear promising. Jackson, a New Zealander probably best known for the Michael J. Fox flop The Frighteners, but whose credits also include the Oscar-nominated Heavenly Creatures and three of the most inventive, funny, and gory cult films ever made -- Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Braindead (aka Dead Alive) -- sold New Line on a $130 million-plus budget for three separate movies. Casting isn't finished, but the films will be executive-produced by Berkeley's Saul Zaentz, the legendary Hollywood insider who produced The English Patient, Amadeus, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Zaentz bought rights to the books from Tolkien and produced the 1978 animated version directed by Ralph Bakshi.

Shooting on all three films is set to begin this summer in New Zealand, with the first episode scheduled for a Christmas 2000 release. Jackson and Zaentz, however, have already succeeded in one sense: The sheer size of The Lord of the Rings story means that trying to compress the books into one film -- as Bakshi's animated version did -- or even two films is bound to fail. But according to Jackson, that's exactly what Miramax -- the movies' original backer -- wanted to do.

It's hard to imagine the Rings series successfully condensed into only a few hours. Tolkien invented an entire language and multiple races with extraordinarily detailed histories, and keeping audience members who don't know the books from becoming confused will still be Jackson's most difficult task.

Other science-fiction films, when faced with the same dilemma, have turned believable fantasy worlds into confusing or simplistic environments, or resorted to the clumsy shortcut of voiceover narration. That's one of the most common laments about cinematic science fiction; another is that film fantasies, both original screenplays and literary adaptations, are years behind SF books in the complexity and freshness of their ideas. Still another is Hollywood's continuing degeneration into special effects-driven action.

On the film-geek Web site Ain't It Cool News, Jackson acknowledged the history he's up against: "I don't think that fantasy has been well served by cinema," he said. "Either the style has been wrong, or often the scripts have been terrible. [But] starting out with strong scripts (and we are obviously dealing with great material) will put us ahead of a lot of other fantasy films."

Perhaps the closest parallel to adapting The Lord of the Rings is the 1984 movie version of Dune. Frank Herbert's classic novel also presents an epic sprawling world with complex political structures and history, and it's also greatly admired by SF fans. But the film failed dismally at the box office, and those who hadn't read the book found it confusing. And with good reason: Dune is an interesting film for fans of the novel, but its scope was simply too large for a single movie.

Jackson, of course, has the obvious advantage of spreading Tolkien's world across three films. He also plans to add clarity and new direction to the genre by giving his films a more authentic, rather than otherworldly, feel. "It might be clearer if I described it as an historical film," he said on Ain't It Cool. " It should have the historical authority of Braveheart, rather than the meaningless fantasy mumbo-jumbo of Willow."

But Jackson also says the Rings films will be special-effects spectaculars; on Ain't It Cool, he praised computer software called Massive "that has been developed over the last two years expressly to achieve huge battle scenes for The Lord of the Rings. Massive allows us to have 200,000 computer generated (CG) extras that we don't animate, but they use a complex form of Artificial Intelligence to fight each other. You basically press a button, sit back and watch these huge battles unfold before your eyes. It's amazing and a little frightening as it ushers in a new era in CG effects."

In Hollywood science fiction, special effects have usually meant extended fight and chase scenes in place of interesting plots. One prime example is 1995's Species, which borrows an idea from Fred Hoyle's A for Andromeda about aliens transmitting instructions across space, and renders it as nudity and chases through cities and sewers.

Add to that failure bland storylines, full of logical holes and dull characters, and you've got Roland Emmerich's and Dean Devlin's unholy triad of Independence Day, Godzilla, and Stargate. Then lump in the herd mentality of last year's big-budget asteroid films, Deep Impact and Asteroid -- although the former does effectively portray its characters' reactions to their coming destruction -- and 1995's "hacker" films, Johnny Mnemonic, The Net, Hackers, Strange Days, and Virtuosity, all of which add a new twist: They're guilty of believing that the way computers actually work is too complex for mass audiences.

It's important to note that some of the differences between film and print exist for obvious reasons, and that many of cinematic science fiction's failings are more about medium than genre. More information can be conveyed by a book, and if it's complex, readers can go back and read it again. A book can appeal to a niche audience willing to wade through complex issues, while a studio film has to be seen by millions to make a profit and so has to find the lowest common denominator. As Gordon Van Gelder, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, puts it, "[T]he problem is a fundamental difference in media. Film SF relies on various elements of spectacle, visually, and those extravaganzas will just never match the pleasures of the imagination."

But it's still incredible just how much Hollywood can dumb down an imaginitive science-fiction book. The anthology The Reel Stuff, edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, highlights 11 SF stories that have been filmed with largely unflattering results; the worst examples among them are Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety" which became the awful Screamers, and George R. R. Martin's classic "Sandkings," whose cruel and perverse -- but compelling -- protagonist becomes nothing more than a stereotypical mad scientist in the TV-movie version.

Filmed science fiction also faces a problem foreign to other genres: As science-fiction writer Greg Egan explains, "[S]cientific ideas are the most powerful and relevant intellectual concepts for dealing with human experience. The questions which most interest me involve the nature of humanity, of consciousness, and of reality, and any fiction which seriously discusses these issues is, almost inevitably, science fiction, because these issues are scientific issues."

Printed SF has excelled time and again in portraying the highest ideals of humanity. But there are few films that can match this claim. The Fifth Element was advertised as the most intelligent science-fiction movie since Blade Runner, and the film is visually impressive and fun. But intelligent? No. Consider also the entertaining but silly films that have filled multiplexes in recent years, including Men in Black, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, and Mars Attacks! And then there are the films with interesting premises and ideas that ultimately fail in their execution: Demolition Man utilizes ideas from both Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, but is spoiled by its focus on gimmicky action scenes and Sylvester Stallone's typically lackluster performance.

Some films, however, manage to show some smarts even while falling prey to Hollywood's fetish for cheap thrills: The X-Files offers an elaborate background of intrigue and conspiracy, even if it leads to little more than slasher-style chase scenes with creatures reminiscent of the Alien films. The Alien films themselves, meanwhile, as well as the Terminator movies, blend intelligent ideas with a focus on action.

A handful of other movies have mapped a direction Jackson and company would be wise to follow with The Lord of the Rings movies.

The most commercially successful SF films of all time, of course, are the Star Wars movies. They work in large part because they draw heavily on Joseph Campbell's simple-yet-complex ideas of the "hero's journey," and place familiar but still hugely symbolic fantasy themes -- wizards, warriors, princesses, magic, and sword fights -- in space. Star Wars' storyline also stretched seamlessly -- at least until this summer-- over three movies, a model that should serve as an example for the Lord of the Rings films.

The most critically successful science-fiction films of all time are 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Both films achieve that rare science-fiction ideal: They examine the idea of what it means to be human. Blade Runner, in particular, presents a futuristic world packed with detail and symbols; in contrast to most SF films, it's understated and ambiguous. And in its superior "director's cut," it loses the hastily-added voiceovers that marred the original.

Director Ridley Scott once made a telling observation: "Blade Runner works on a level which I haven't seen much -- or ever -- in a mainstream film," he said. "It works like a book. Like a very dark novel. Which I like. It's definitely a film that's designed not to have the usual crush-wallop-bang! impact."

Other intelligent and low-key SF films of recent years, meanwhile -- The Truman Show (which, although it wasn't marketed as a SF film, owes plenty, like Blade Runner, to a Philip K. Dick story, in this case "Time Out of Joint"), Brazil, 12 Monkeys, Gattaca, and the underrated Contact -- succeed because, whether they're based on books or not, they have all the nuance, depth, and range of good science-fiction literature.