CASTING SPELL
Twenty years ago, two fantasy franchises were launched into a crisis-wracked world. They turned out to be just what we all needed. And as darkness has fallen once more, their power is greater than ever
MAGIC’ IS A word with multiple definitions.
It can mean prestidigitation, the performance of tricks that deceive in the most entertaining ways. It can be used to describe otherworldly beauty that transports us away from mundane reality. It can refer to a supernatural force, exerting its mysterious influence on the world. And, to some, it’s just another way of describing incredible talent — you know, when someone ‘works their magic’.
It’s hard, then, to think of a word which more perfectly encapsulates the seismic collective cultural impact of Harry Potter and
The Lord Of The Rings. And not just because both series feature wizards.
The entertaining trickery employed by visual- and special-effects magicians both down in New Zealand and at Leavesden Studios has been thoroughly explored in these pages, whether it be old-school (forced perspective to make Hagrids look big and hobbits look small) or cutting-edge (the performance capture that brought Gollum, and later Putin-lookalike Dobby, to life). The incredible talent behind both series has hardly gone unlauded — Rings won 17 Oscars in total; Potter
garnered 12 Academy Award nominations. Their escapist power was immediate, immense and ever-enduring. But can they really be seen as a supernatural force that’s affected the world? It’s not so much of a stretch as you might at first think.
Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone
and The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring arrived within roughly the space of a month (the former released in the US on 16 November 2001, the latter on 19 December). They also both premiered just a few months after one of the greatest atrocities of recent times: the September 11 attacks.
Just as the streets of downtown Manhattan became choked by the dust of the fallen World Trade Center, the entire globe — watching it all unfold, in real-time, on our TV screens — seemed cast into darkness. Any post-cold War optimism was swept away in a horrifying instant, as international insecurity took hold.
It did not seem the most salubrious time to launch a fresh blockbuster series — not least one (or rather, two) fancifully populated by elves, trolls and, yes, wizards, no matter how popular the novelistic source material. But it turned out they were exactly what the world needed.
THE FANTASY GENRE’S ESCAPIST PULL
has long been recognised, often in derisory terms. A month before Fellowship was released, Jenny Turner wrote in the London Review Of Books that “even as I find the book silly and boring and rather noisome, [The Lord Of The Rings] still locks with my psyche in a most alarming way… It’s tit in some way, it’s an infantile comfort.” The Potter books, despite revolutionising the publishing industry, drew similar flack, as full-grown adults the world over were seen as adulating silly stories for kids.
And let’s not forget: at the turn of the century fantasy was, more or less, moribund as a cinematic genre. Sure, Star Wars was technically fantasy, but it garbed its swordfights and spellcasting in science-fiction finery, and sci-fi was the genre which predominated among its imitators. Classic fantasy — as in sword-andsorcery, rather than the fairy tales that fed the Disney machine so heartily — did have a moment during the ’80s, partly thanks to the popularity of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. But the fad was brief and yielded less-thansatisfying results.
John Milius’ lurid and lusty Conan The Barbarian, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, set a quality benchmark that was never really passed. The genre was typified by campy, low-budget affairs, in which much oiled flesh was bared and buckets of blood were spilled. Movies such as The Sword And The Sorcerer (which wasn’t messing about with that title), Hawk The Slayer (featuring Carry On star Bernard Bresslaw as a “giant”), Krull (also featuring Bresslaw, this time as a cyclops), Don Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster, and Brigitte Nielsen vehicle Red Sonja, which confusingly cast Schwarzenegger as someone who looked exactly like Conan but definitively wasn’t.
Even George Lucas had a stab at ‘straight’ fantasy in 1988, producing the Ron Howarddirected Willow to modest success, but by then studios and filmmakers had grown tired of wizardry and pseudo-medieval adventuring.
The Lord Of The Rings itself was still solely
represented on the big screen by Ralph Bakshi’s animated flop, which left the story hanging around midway through The Two Towers, as Bakshi and producer Saul Zaentz couldn’t find the funding to make a planned Part Two.
Most lamentably of all, while both
Rings and Potter were in production, New Line Cinema (the same studio which bankrolled Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptation) released the long-awaited Dungeons & Dragons movie. Rather than warm up cinema audiences for the return of fantasy, Courtney Solomon’s ambitious misfire seemingly kicked the genre into an even deeper hole, thanks to its nonsensical plot, substandard VFX and the odd creative decision to allow Marlon Wayans to spend half the movie shrieking.
As Jackson told Creative Screenwriting in 2001, Rings offered him an exciting chance to break new ground. “Every film genre has been done well over the last 100 years, but not this type of fantasy story. If we get it right, it will be the first time. No filmmaker could ask for a greater challenge than that.”
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE NOW, BUT EVEN
the most ardent fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling would have been forgiven in early 2001 for expecting the worst. However, talent won through. The results spoke for themselves — sonorously, and from a fiery mountain-top. Middle-earth and Hogwarts were exquisitely realised, to a granular level of world-building detail. One film convinced us there could be a hidden world of magic within our own; the other presented us with an entire library’s worth of forgotten history.
These films were not guilty pleasures, nor were they craven acts of geek service. Their visual textures and narrative tones may be markedly different — the early Potters are episodic, school-based mysteries, reliant on set-builds and CGI; Rings is a heaving epic, boasting raw locations and awesome practical effects, with barely a child in view — but they are united as expertly crafted entertainments, worthy of your immersion.
They also bore an emotional weight that had rarely been felt in fantasy cinema before. It’s hard to think of anything in Beastmaster, or even Conan The Barbarian, which chokes you up like Samwise (Sean Astin) carrying Frodo up those sulphurous slopes, or the fate of Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson) in Goblet Of Fire. So 2001 cinemagoers were not merely losing themselves in adaptations of supposedly juvenile material as the world order crumbled outside. They were connecting with people who felt as real as their friends and family.
Both Philosopher’s Stone and Fellowship were, deservedly, bona-fide mainstream hits: industry-shaking successes (the former made $975 million worldwide; the latter reaped $888 million) which ushered in a new wave of fantasy.
Setting aside the boom in Young Adult fare that Potter caused (best exemplified by The Hunger Games), the greatest beneficiary of the Rings/potter effect has to be Game Of Thrones.
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire
proved that fantasy could be properly grown-up as well as mainstream, as it took the genre’s old-school flesh-baring and gore far beyond Milius’ Conan.
However, the likes of The Golden Compass, Eragon, The Spiderwick Chronicles and Seventh Son failed to ignite, their desperation to bottle the Rings/potter lightning outweighing their ability to visualise their source material. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe — based on the book by Tolkien’s Inklings pal C.S. Lewis and, like Rings, shot in New Zealand by a Kiwi (Andrew Adamson) — couldn’t sustain its success across further Chronicles Of Narnia. Even franchise-extenders The Hobbit and
Fantastic Beasts haven’t, honestly, measured up to their progenitors.
THE APPEAL AND IMPORTANCE OF
Rings and Potter still separates them from their many predecessors and imitators. And it goes deeper than mere fantasy escapism. They were, in short, the right films for uniquely difficult times.
The return of Voldemort, and its brutal tainting of Harry’s wondrous discovery of the Wizarding World (not to mention the boy’s own privileged status within it), felt bittersweetly relatable to an audience in late 2001. So, too, the shadow of Mordor falling over the blissful pastures of The Shire. Both series begin in relatably domestic settings, worlds that seem safe and untouchable, but which it is soon revealed are under existential threat.
Of course, there is all-too-easy reassurance in the ultimate triumph of good over evil in both Harry and Frodo’s worlds, while those critics who question such simplistic, arguably reactionary takes on the clash of civilisations or ideologies aren’t entirely without a point. After all, George W. Bush’s ‘War On Terror’ was a geopolitical disaster. But both series distinctly blurred the line between good and evil, questioning early assumptions about characters’ motives and ethical positioning, whether they’re Gollum or Snape, Théoden or Sirius Black, Saruman or Voldemort. “There is no good and evil,” says the Dark Lord in Philosopher’s Stone. “Only power, and those too weak to seek it.” Or to put it another way: there’s power, and those strong enough to resist it.
While both Potter and Rings climax with sprawling, crowd-pleasing battles, it’s not military might that truly saves their respective days. It’s everyday people going to extraordinary lengths and making dire personal sacrifices. The boy from Privet Drive giving up his life.
The Hobbit from The Shire almost losing his soul. The anguish on Elijah Wood’s face as Frodo absorbs the gravity of his Ring-destroying quest was keenly felt by audiences. “I wish The Ring had never come to me,” he confides to Gandalf amid the sunless depths of Moria. “I wish none of this had happened.”
“So do all who live to see such times,” the sage greybeard replies, in Ian Mckellen’s comfortingly mellifluous tones. “But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
TWO DECADES ON, WE ONCE MORE
find ourselves in dark times. As Covid grips the world, forcing millions into lockdown and mercilessly robbing so many of loved ones, while denying so many the sweet relief of communal experience (including, of course, cinema), Gandalf’s words ring truer than ever.
Neither The Lord Of The Rings nor Harry Potter have lost their spectacular and poignant resonance, whether nostalgically revisited (again and again) by those who once sought cinematic solace in late 2001, or freshly discovered by new generations — many of them children of those original viewers, who are eager to share Hogwarts and Hobbiton with their offspring as soon as they’re old enough to handle all those “fantasy horror” moments. Both series have become truly pan-generational cultural events, un-dated by modern trends and outmoded fashions (well, aside from the Muggle stuff in Potter, but that is tastefully muted).
It speaks volumes that, when cinemas tentatively re-opened after the UK started to emerge from the first lockdown in July 2020, Fellowship’s Extended Edition appeared at number five in the UK box-office chart. Warner Bros. (which acquired New Line, and The Lord Of The Rings with it, in 2008) might have needed back-catalogue material to fill the hole left by delayed releases like Tenet and Wonder Woman 1984, but the demand was strong. Potter returned, too, with Vue Cinemas running a marathon rerelease of the entire series in October; “The Harry Potter films are some of our most-requested,” noted the chain’s head of screen content.
Bolstered by impressive home entertainment releases (Rings’ awesome Extended Editions remain the gold standard), and spawning multitudinous memes — from “One does not simply walk into…” to that awkward Draco/ Voldemort hug — Potter and Rings have never left us. They are always there, primed to bring comfort. In conversations with friends. In knowing references on TV shows and in movies. In video games, board games and LEGO sets. As discs on front-room shelves, their sleeves scuffed and battered from being repeatedly reached for. They continue to transport us away from the troubles of the real world, but they also speak to our reality in a way that feels personal to each and every one of us. They are, in a word, magic.