I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
Absolutely why not remove all the mystery and the wonder from creative inspiration and reduce it to “Dude saw this, dude saw that, I guess that’s where fantasy comes from, who can really say *shrug*.” This literal-minded, magic-free semi-biopic of Hobbit and Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien is nothing more than a tedious box-ticking exercise in running down all the bits and pieces of his life that ended up in Middle-Earth, probably. It’s reductive and infuriating, and it no way captures what must have been the weirdness and the sheer bloody-mindedness of a man who spent his life inventing languages and crafting stories around them, just for fun. Who does that? Surely not the stolid, dull man we see in this stolid, dull film.
Tolkien opens with the 24-year-old Oxford student (Nicholas Hoult [Deadpool 2, Mad Max: Fury Road], who is starting to look very Cumberbatch-y) foundering in the trenches of the World War I Battle of the Somme. He’s an officer because (we presume?) he’s a bit posh, and he has a devoted grunt tommy (Craig Roberts: 22 Jump Street, Bad Neighbours) apparently slavishly devoted to him. (Who knows why? We never learn. It’s just the natural way of things when a lowly prole encounters his better, perhaps. *barf*) And, if you are any kind of Lord of the Rings fan, you instantly go, “Oh, that’s Sam.” That is, Samwise Gamgee, slavishly devoted servant to Frodo Baggins who ensures Frodo can destroy the evil One Ring and keep it out of the hands of Sauron, etc etc, in LOTR. Later — hardly a spoiler — we learn that this slavishly devoted grunt tommy is literally called Sam. The completely unexplicated yet implied-clichéd connection between Tolkien and his Sam hardly makes us feel better about the lovely fictional relationship between Frodo and his Sam, though it’s clearly meant to. It makes us feel a bit icky, in actual fact. Facepalms definitely ensue.
Facepalms have been happening all along, though, because director Dome Karukoski — who is Finnish, like the inspiration for Tolkien’s languages! (*facepalm*) — is all about underscoring every single aspect of Tolkien’s life that must have wormed its way into his invented world. (To be fair, there’s not much else in David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford’s [Pride] script, either.) Oh look! There’s the little cottage he lived in with his widowed mother (Laura Donnelly: The Program) in the English countryside, which is surely Bilbo Baggins’s Bag End in The Shire. Oh look how the horrific flamethrowers of the German soldiers in the WWI trenches become the scorching fiery breath of dragons! See! how a visit to the opera with his ladylove Edith (Lily Collins: The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Mirror Mirror) is all Wagner-ish and *nudge nudge* magic-ring-y. See! how terrifying horsemen of the Great War battlefields become the Black Riders who chase Frodo and Sam across a bleakening landscape.
If only there were the slightest bit of self-aware irony or self-deprecation or maybe — Eärendil forbid — a sense of humor in any of this! There’s space for a whole “He was forged in the fires of the terrors of a fancy Edwardian English boys’ school!” here. But bits like one of his school pals — they had a Fellowship, of course — muttering, in relation to Wagner, “It shouldn’t take six hours to tell a story about a magic ring” land like orcshit in Mordor. Joke’s on Tolkien’s school pals, though: Peter Jackson’s magic-ring movies now run to about 18 hours (not counting the “extended editions”). And brace yourself for Amazon’s upcoming Tolkien series, which threatens to add many more hours to the collective runtime. All of which is likely why we are now saddled with this dreary and unenlightening movie.
Late in the game Tolkien is playing, the always brilliant Derek Jacobi (Tomb Raider, Murder on the Orient Express) pops up as a genuinely oddball Oxford don who inspires the young scholar to follow his passion for languages, but it’s too little, too late: all the potential for exploring the necromancy of inspiration has already been squandered. Also fuck this movie for having Edith tell Tolkien something important about his work — about words and what makes them beautiful — that he seems to discount until Jacobi’s professor tells him the exact same thing. Maybe the real Tolkien did do that — because men — but the movie should at least have the balls to acknowledge that this is a problem.
I figure Bilbo Baggins would have something withering to say about all of this.
So, it’s basically “George Lucas in Love” (or Shakespeare in Love without the wit and verve). Bleh.
Except those have the self-awareness and the humor that is lacking here.
So it managed to scale the lofty heights of the Hobbit films? Cool. Seriously though, I got all the biographical information I’ll ever need from Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 Tolkien biography and his book about the Inklings, an all-male group of like-minded university dons, including C.S.Lewis, who wrote the type of fiction that we now call fantasy.
Lewis is completely ignored here: he does not appear at all. Which is another huge problem with this movie. Tolkien and Lewis inspired each other.
Wow, that’s particularly surprising. The fact that Tolkien and Lewis were pals is probably… if someone knows one fact about Tolkien’s life it’s probably that one.
Yeah, I was about to ask if Lewis shows up. That’s a big oversight.
I don’t think it’s an oversight. I think it was about avoiding all mention of religion.
Tolkien and CS Lewis did not meet until 1926. What years does the movie cover?
Beyond 1926, though not much. But the film is about what inspired *The Lord of the Rings* and *The Hobbit,* and Lewis was part of that.
The screenwriters should have been required to also connect the dots to Tolkien’s adorably bonkers letters from Father Christmas to his children.
There’s no way the same guy who wrote about Santa’s helper the North Polar Bear and his epic battle with hostile goblins could be this stolid and boring fellow.
It’s such a disappointment, this movie. :-(
“terrifying horsemen of the Great War battlefields become the Black Riders“
In WWI? Seriously? There were some people still on horses, sure, but most of them got pulverized by machine guns, especially on the Western Front. If this is historical, it’s something I’ve missed.
In fact, the whole idea that Middle Earth came directly from real experiences is pretty insulting, given how often Tolkien insisted his work was not an allegory for real world events.
Eight million horses were killed in WWI (https://www.britishpathe.com/gallery/war-animals/2). So there were a lot of horses around.
I don’t see that there’s any genuine problem with acknowledging that even the most outrageous fantasy or sci-fi does have *some* roots in an author’s own lived experience (even if the author denies it). But there’s almost nothing *but* that here.
having just seen the Tolkien exhibit (twice) at the Morgan, Tolkien seems just to have been inspired by *everything*… his mother and her love of language and artistic lettering, the early death of his father, the beauty of the countryside he grew up in in England, a brutal war, his love for his wife (Luthien), telling tales to his children (the Father Christmas letters and drawing are particularly lovely), his desire to give England its own form of myth and legend… he must have had one of the busiest minds of his day… teaching, researching… and always thinking of his stories and languages — even his daily newspapers had drawing all over them while he was doing the crossword puzzles… his maps were meticulous and his drawings both droll and pointed and poignant (there was a sketch of Oxford, i would have given a lot to have a copy of. sadly, no prints were available of *any* of his works). some minds take everything they see, feel and experience and turn it into something else. it’s called genius… no point in looking for some central point or experience. after the exhibit i have even more respect for his omnivorous mind.
Sounds like the same approach to creativity seen in The Man Who Invented Christmas – no writer ever really makes anything up, they just repurpose things they’ve experienced, because the ability to have an original idea is scary and incomprehensible.
Funny how common an attitude that is in Hollywood.
… You know, I’m not going to watch it at all, but as a lifelong Tolkien fan, I have to know: did they even bother to spend any time on the myths, folktales, and legends that were a decent chunk of his academic career? The ones we know from his own correspondence and obvious parallels are obvious were major influences?
Or is it 90% “Fantasy absolutely has to come from the GRIMDARK! TRUTHINESS! of the real world!” and then like a teeeeeeny smidge of “oh and he then was inspired to read about monsters” tacked on at the end?
I’m not even going to ask whether or not there’s any real scholarship to support this, as opposed to the well known influence his service in WWI had on his opinion of war vs. that Lewis had, since apparently, Lewis gets ghosted, you said earlier in the comments.
Nope.
You know, that depressingly correlates with what you said above. The part about them excising every mention of religion. A denial of the power of the fantastic. It’s not like acknowledging the power of the fantastic is the same thing as endorsing it or believing it. Oh well. Thank you again for watching ALL the movies so we don’t have to! :)