Scenic and technically wonderful

People in the Lord Of The Rings have more hair than they do in Afghanistan. Or so it seems.

The stuff sprouts Bin Laden-like down the chests of Good Wizard Ian McKellen and once-good Wizard gone-to-the-bad Christopher Lee. It hangs cutely into the eyes of Elijah Wood's dishy little Hobbit Frodo Baggins. It drops like twin torrents of gold either side of Elf Queen Cate Blanchett's bosom. Good God, it even grows in clumps on the feet of Middleearth's cuddly Little People.

Glueing on the follicles for Peter Jackson's film must itself have been an epic feat. Is it any wonder that after three hours of it, I felt my own hair was in need of shearing, and had possibly turned even whiter than it is.

After small sales began in 1954, JRR Tolkien's counter-culture classic took off in 1965 on a cloud of pot smoke from a hippy generation that wanted to drop out into their little private worlds. Nothing I now proceed to say about the film made from its first part will deter those now ageing (and possibly less hairy) hippies from cosying-up again with the four hobbits, two human warriors, an elf, a dwarf and a benign old gaffer of a wizard called Gandalf in their journey past innumerable monsters to hurl a ring of malign power into the fiery crater of Mount Doom - a finale, incidentally, we won't be seeing until the film's last part gets to us in 2003. I can wait.

Peter Jackson's three-part work is a visually impressive achievement, but utterly, utterly, uninvolving.

Like many A-list film makers today, Jackson appears not to go to see other people's movies. Had he done so, he'd have realised that plenty of recent fantasy epics are every bit as stupendous looking - or as pretentious - as his own.

The Lord Of The Rings, subtitled the Fellowship Of The Ring, is at its best in its scene-setting opening sequence in the happy land called the Shire. There small, peace-loving hobbits like Frodo's cousin Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) live in cottages apparently furnished by the Hovis Company and seemingly hollowed-out of green golf course bunkers.

It will delight people who hanker to head for a hole in the ground and return to a Middle England of "roomy fires, malt beer and meat on the bone", a sort of John Major paradise. Here the film has wit and humour: Bilbo's birthday display of magical fireworks is as good as anything Hogwarts could stage. But only here does the film remotely touch Harry Potter's pitch of precise and prolific invention.

The mood darkens, the language grows ever more ornate and oracular, as Frodo and Co start their cross-country quest. The film turns into an all-terrain vehicle traversing rivers, caves, mountains, marshlands and snowfields for battles with elves, trolls, armies of Orcs, Ringwraiths and tentacular things that reach out of lakes and grab them.

The trouble is, much the same sort of battle-scene repeats itself every 20 minutes or so; only the environments and the monsters inhabiting them are changed. Technically wonderful? Yes, but oh so monotonous!

The best of the action is a bout of will-power wrestling between wizards Gandalf and Saruman: the relish of it resides in seeing distinguished thespians Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee lay each other flat on their backs or catapult each other hundreds of feet into the air.

Also well done - or as well done as they were in Planet Of The Apes and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - are the big opening battle sequences on the plains of Mordor, which establish the Ring's evil powers, and Frodo's lethal duel with a clumping, club-wielding digitalised Cave Troll in the Mines of Moria.