AN EXPANSIVE NEW VISION OF LOTR

Sophia Nomvete, Ismael Cruz Cordova in LOTR:TROP

 

As a huge Lord of the Rings fan I can’t wait for the debut of the new television series “Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power” on Amazon Prime September 2. A return to that intricately drawn world of elves, dwarves, long-lived men and mythical creatures is just the antidote I need to escape this drab world of plague and war.

The fantasy series is set in Middle Earth’s Second Age, thousands of years before the events we’re all familiar with from J.R.R.Tolkien’s books and Peter Jackson’s films involving the Fellowship of the Ring and their fight against the evil Sauron. In fact, this story is all about how the trouble began, with the forging of the rings of power, some of which, you’ll remember, were gifted to the elves, some to the dwarves and some to the kings of men. The One Ring, however, was forged in secret to rule them all, which came back to bite everyone in the proverbial butt in the Third Age. Some of this Second Age world we’ve only seen previously in ruins—like the caverns of Khazad-Dum—and some beloved characters only exist in this age in ancestral form (hobbits were “harfoots,” for example).

Most of this tale is only set out in the detailed backstory author Tolkien developed for his LOTR trilogy. When the first book came out, readers were so fascinated, they demanded to know more about his world. They wanted maps, histories, languages, genealogies. Fortunately, he had a lot of that in his notes, so he added appendices to the last book, some of which were drawn from a longer history of Middle Earth called The Simarillion that his publisher had rejected. (Peter Jackson’s co-writers on the film trilogy, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, used one such appendix to create the love story subplot for Aragorn and Arwen. Some of the lines in the film are taken word-for-word from the book.)

In 2017, the Tolkien estate decided to release much of this historical material in a separate auction. Though HBO and Netflix were in on the bidding, Jeff Bezos, himself a huge LOTR fan (are we surprised?), and Amazon won out with a $250 million bid. Production costs for the first season of the series on location in New Zealand have been estimated at $462 million. Eventually the series is slated to run 50 hours. So this is on track to be one of the most expensive television projects ever.

Showrunning duties have been handed off to two relative newbies, Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne. They got the job partially on the recommendation of industry star J.J. Abrams, who had worked with them as writers on one of the Star Trek films. McKay and Payne are longtime fans of both Tolkien and Jackson and are feeling the pressure here. “We felt like hobbits,” Payne told Vanity Fair. “We felt like two very small people in a very big world who had just been entrusted with something that meant so much to so many different people. Patrick and I will often look at each other in challenging moments of the show and say, ‘I’m glad you’re with me, Sam.’”

The creative team behind LOTR: TROP has worked hard to be true to Tolkien’s vision, while expanding on the world he only outlined in the appendices. Stories need characters and plotlines and themes, after all. And writers have had to condense the events of thousands of years down to a contiguous timeframe so things make storytelling sense.

Middle Earth might also look a little more like the world we know. This was a conscious choice. “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” says Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”

Of course, when the news hit the Internet that a Black woman (Sophia Nomvete) had been cast as a Dwarf princess and a Black man (Ismael Cruz Cordova) as an Elf, not to mention various other people of color in other major roles, the trolls (and I don’t mean the kind you find in The Hobbit) came out to spew all manner of racist and sexist vitriol about how there are no POC in LOTR or fantasy. (I say sexist because the worst of the criticism was apparently aimed at Nomvete and other female actors of color.)

As a lifelong fan of Tolkien and LOTR I call bullshit. First of all, as Weber so clearly points out, the whole concept of the Fellowship of the Ring is that five (if you count wizards) diverse peoples come together to fight a common enemy. They overcome their differences (which are significant and longstanding—remember Legolas and Gimli) to destroy a greater evil.

Secondly, this is fantasy we’re talking about. When you’re writing or filming fantasy you can make your characters white, black, green, blue or any color of the rainbow. Tolkien was writing in the first half of the 20^th Century in a generally white-and-male-centric British upperclass world; he was very creative with just about everything else in his world of Middle Earth. I’ll give him a pass for not consciously including any characters of color. But he did say he expected to “leave scope for other minds and hands” to expand his work, according to a letter to Milton Waldman. So, okay, the Amazon LOTR: TROP creative team is expanding on his work to reflect a more multicultural, open-minded consciousness.  I say good on them. The rest of us should follow their example and populate our spaceships and alien planets and castles and forest glens with characters of all colors and cultures (and of all sexual orientations and gender designations, too).

Cheers, Donna

*Information for this post provided by:

“Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Rises: Inside The Rings of Power,” by Anthony Breznican and Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair, February 10, 2022. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look

“The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Has People Of Colour, Get Over It,” by Ben Sledge, TheGamer.com, February 12, 2022. 

https://www.thegamer.com/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-has-people-of-colour-get-over-it/

 

 

 

MORTAL ENGINES: CITIES ROLL ON THE BIG SCREEN

Every once in a while a science fiction movie comes along that just has to be seen in the theater. The concept, the special effects, the cinematography are such that watching on your television or your computer are not adequate to the task. You really need the big screen and the big speakers of your local multiplex. MORTAL ENGINES, the latest production of Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films, is one of those big-screen movies.

I knew when I saw the trailer for this future-dystopia-steampunk-young-adult-action mashup about massive mobile predator cities that I would have to see it. The machine-cities are spectacular, grinding their stories-tall gears, swallowing smaller towns whole and breaking them down piece-by-piece, chewing up the landscape shattered by a long-ago “60-Minute War.” The way the apex-predator London has incorporated the landmarks of the ancient city—St. Mark’s Cathedral, Big Ben, the Tower—is evocative and macabre at the same time.

Even more visually impressive are the floating sky cities cobbled together from hydrogen-filled “balloons” and the graceful flying vehicles that serve them. These house members of the “anti-tether” movement, resisters fighting the predatory cities who terrorize the countryside. And, of course, they eventually provide the haven—and the overarching cause—for the film’s young heroine and hero, revenge-bound Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar) and nerdy artifact hunter Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan).

The pair are literally thrown together in the action-packed first third of the film when Tom foils Hester’s assassination attempt on the chief engineer of the rolling London, Thaddeus Valentine (a scene-chewing Hugo Weaving). Rather than reward Tom for his help, Valentine tosses him down the same waste tube Hester has just disappeared into, leading to the usual enemies-become-friends/lovers subplot as Tom and Hester cross a perilous wasteland toward an uncertain goal. 

Hester, at first, wants only to kill Valentine for murdering her mother over a valuable piece of old tech. But it turns out that piece is central to Valentine’s plan for recreating the ancient weapon responsible for destroying the earth. (He wants to use it to take down a wall protecting the last unspoiled land paradise on the planet.) The piece was then lost, but Tom happens to know where it is back on London. So, of course, our heroes find their individual causes become intertwined with the larger goal of saving the world.

I’m not usually a fan of the young-adult model of The Kids Save the World. But, in this case, the “kids” are not that young (early twenties, rather than teenagers), they’re interesting to watch, and they have plenty of help from older adults. Best in this category would be a hydrogen flyer pilot named Anna Fang (Jihae) who almost steals the show. 

A terrific subplot involves a cyborg named Shrike (Stephen Lang) who had raised the child Hester after the murder of her mother and now pursues the girl for breaking her promise to become a cyborg like him. The creature is a combination of the Terminator and the toymaker from BLADE RUNNER. He was once human, but his humanity is now twisted and obsessive, making him both terrifying and compelling as a character.

MORTAL ENGINES is based on a four-part book series by Phillip Reeve. The screenplay was written by the same award-winning trio that created the LORD OF THE RINGS and THE HOBBIT films, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. It was directed by Christian Rivers, who directed the special effects unit for Jackson’s KING KONG. Other critics have slammed the story as derivative and the plot full of holes, but I hardly noticed the flaws, given the breathless pace, the likable characters and the spectacular visuals of this screen experience.

Give it a chance while it’s still on the big screen. MORTAL ENGINES is a definite go.

Cheers, Donna

LOTR'S JACKSON TAKES ON STEAMPUNK

I can remember years ago when I first saw the preview of the lead film of Peter Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. The New Zealand director’s vision of my favorite fantasy world seemed to match my own exactly, and I sat in the theater absolutely gob-smacked by what I was seeing on the screen. I was so filled with excitement and anticipation I was like a kid waiting for Christmas; the months until The Fellowship of the Ring debuted stretched out ahead like an endless desert of time.

One of the nomadic cities in Mortal Engines takes to the air.

 Well, Jackson has done it again, this time offering up a visual delight that is even more jaw-dropping given that it is unexpected. At least, I had no idea this film was coming until I saw the preview in the theater as I waited for the much more mundane Duane Johnson action pic SKYSCRAPER a few days ago. The LOTR director is adapting (but not directing—that job is going to his longtime storyboarder, Christian Rivers) the British young-adult SF novel Mortal Engines by Phillip Reeve, a post-apocalyptic/steampunk mash-up about huge, nomadic, predatory cities. Jackson’s co-writers from LOTR, Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh, are sharing screenwriting duties with him, and word is that the romance elements of the story have been accentuated, with the protagonists aged appropriately for the beefier story.

And you would not believe the beautiful decayed-glory-remade-into-scary-tech eye candy of this film! I was immediately reminded of Meljean Brook’s Iron Duke series, also set in an alternate-universe London, or Zoe Archer’s The Ether Chronicles, which features balletic air battles between zeppelins. We’ll see all of this onscreen in Mortal Engines. Let me tell you, I cannot wait!

The only problem is that, once again, a young-adult novel had to serve as the basis of this wonderful science fiction film. The SFR series I mentioned above are only two of many that have been around for a long time that would have served just as well—and they wouldn’t have required massive rewriting to have two grown-ups carrying the weight of a serious plot. With a romantic element.

Just wondering when the film industry will get the message that science fiction is NOT just for teenagers.

Cheers, Donna