http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/?030106crci_cinema Review of The Two Towers:
[Gollum] gives the movie a chance for psychological inquiry—the one thing it doesn’t require. “The Lord of the Rings” is an epic, and one of the defining restrictions—not to say pleasures—of epic is that it both predate and outwit psychology. Motives, good and ill, may be thwarted or confounded, but you don’t read Tolkien for the niceties of tangled minds; you read him for pace and wonder, and the virtues of Jackson’s trilogy, thus far, have been pace and astonishment, which is almost the same thing.
Is Tolkien read “for the niceties of tangled minds”? I haven’t read him, but readers of the trilogy have told me that this is one aspect of the books missing from the movies—in book form The Fellowship of the Ring is not one great big chase scene, for example. I am quite content for the movies to be (merely) thrilling, though.
(By the way, I do enjoy Anthony Lane’s movie reviews, but his writing does remind me of Strunk and White’s advice to look out for words (or phrases) that “at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.”) 00:47