THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 122 - THE HOBBIT MOVIES & THE RINGS OF POWER

I decided to be a Tolkien scholar when I was eleven. This was 1987, Tolkien wasn’t a hot property, boomers had their Tolkien phase almost 20 years prior. The used book stores were loaded with evidence of this. I read everything he wrote multiple times, everything written about him multiple times, biographies, analyses, poetry, so much. I had a couple shelves dedicated to Tolkien & associated works. I would read Tolkien while listening to the BBC Lord of the Rings on tape. I knew Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movie was going to be bad. I enjoyed watching his Lord of the Rings when they came out. They didn’t age well, they left a bad taste in my mouth. What has been worse is that they have been the go to versions of the Lord of the Rings since they were released over twenty years ago. They aren’t good enough or correct enough to be the versions that people refer to. The poster by Jimmy Cauty is better, the Rankin Bass cartoons are better, the Bakshi version is better - there are so many better versions, interpretations to look to. Peter Jackson’s Hobbit is stupid, bloated, expensive fan fiction that tries to serve as a conventional Hollywood prequel to his Lord of the Rings movies. It uses conventional Hollywood kid’s  story writing  & tropes in order to somehow have an excuse to have such a massive budget. The scenes & characters felt like product placement for LEGO sets & for Citadel miniatures sets. In fact it felt derivative of 90s Warhammer, which was bizarre. All that said, it was fun to watch if I wasn’t constantly reminded that this is a world I know inside & out, like the corpse of a loved one animated by Hollywood maggots. Which brings me to Amazon’s “Rings of Power” series. Making a limited (hopefully) series based on the Silmarillion was just a stupid idea. I love Tolkien, but the Silmarillion just dunks the whole thing into this tedious world of mythological scholarship that was luckily concealed in dense text, but making it into a TV series just makes something accessible that should probably not have been published. The thing was, Rings of Power is better tonally than the Hobbit movies, it’s just dead boring, when it wasn’t boring it was dumb. They also use some black actors for the various fantasy races which I just found distracting. My argument is that if there is this racial diversity in these relatively closed groups of Elves, Dwarves & the proto-Hobbit Harfoots, they would just assimilate the color & all of them would be more ruddy or mixed or whatever. Ultimately it’s not a big deal & just a little distracting from a series that didn’t grip me at all. Also, these productions always go for these epic scenes & I feel no impact from them. It’s similar to all the “urgency inflation” in the big action movies, where everything is the ultimate battle of good against evil with the fate of the Universe at stake. After you’ve seen that plot line a hundred times, the urgency totally goes & it just becomes another boring story.