Are we right to be nervous about the new Lord of the Rings movies?
Far be it for me to put words in Elijah Wood’s mouth – somebody tried that once, and it didn’t work out well. But according to a new interview with GQ, he’s not exactly gobbling up Warner Bros’ much-discussed plans for a new run of Lord of the Rings movies like a Hobbity second breakfast.
“I’m fascinated and I’m excited,” Wood told the magazine. “I hope it’s good. I’m surprised – I don’t know why I’m surprised because, of course there would be more movies. Obviously at the core of that, is a desire to make a lot of money. It’s not that a bunch of executives are like, ‘Let’s make really awesome art.’ And, again, not begrudging anybody because, of course, it is commerce. But great art can come from commerce. So those two things are not mutually exclusive.
“But Lord of the Rings didn’t come out of that place,” said Wood, who is currently promoting his role in the second season of Yellowjackets. “It came out of a passion for these books and wanting to see them realised. And I hope that that is ultimately what will drive everything forward with whatever these subsequent movies are. I just hope that it’s the same motivating factor at its core, whenever they hire a screenwriter and a film-maker – that it is with reverence for Tolkien’s material and enthusiasm to explore it.”
In a separate interview with Extra, Wood goes on to suggest that he would be more than up for a return as Frodo Baggins should the opportunity arise. “If there’s more films that potentially involve Frodo, I would be down,” he said.
We should probably recall at this point that as well as playing wide-eyed halfling innocent turned beta-male saviour of Middle-earth in Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings, Wood was also involved in the director’s Hobbit prequel trilogy, which combined moments of brilliance (the gloriously realised Riddles in the Dark scenes) with completely unnecessary padding (Kili and Tauriel’s weird and utterly superfluous dalliance, pretty much everything that happened in Lake-town, and indeed every shot involving Wood). If Jackson’s splendid triptych can said to have been made due to a “passion for the books”, The Hobbit might best be described as having been made because the Kiwi film-maker really fancied doing the whole thing all over again despite only having a relatively short and concise, fable-like tome to work with. One imagines the money also helped.
Jackson and his team have made it clear they have been “kept in the loop” by Warners and New Line, but it’s not yet clear how much involvement they will have in the new films. Long-term observers will recall that Jackson’s attempt to shift into the role of producer on The Hobbit (Guillermo del Toro was originally lined up to direct) did not work out at all well, largely because the Mexican film-maker was made to wait so long to get started that Mount Doom itself would likely have frozen over before he even got to roll the cameras.
Nobody really knows much about the new films. Will they, like Amazon’s luxuriously nebulous current TV series (which I really enjoy watching, even if I have absolutely no idea what’s going on) mine Tolkien’s other writings for inspiration? Or might we see original stories taking place against the backdrop of Middle-earth?
If Warners could create new films that feel as detailed and mythologically dense as the original trilogy, there’s no doubt we would all be down to see them. But at what price? To keep those who side with Wood happy, the studio might need to backwards engineer Tolkien: find a fusty Oxford don with a passion for Old English and Norse myth and philology, allow them to spend half a lifetime adding to the original author’s incredibly detailed “imaginarium” of demigods, monsters and fantasy races, then teach them the art of screenwriting. Either that, or perhaps there is a lock of the author’s hair somewhere that we can use to clone him.
Barring such unlikely events, we will all have to accept that the further from Tolkien’s original works we go, the more we are at risk of losing the magic that first inspired us to experience them. On the other hand, I would rather experience ersatz original stories set in the world of the Misty Mountains, Númenor and Lothlórien than see anyone butchering the books further in the way Jackson screwed up The Hobbit. There are only so many elf-dwarf romances and additional orc antagonists one can take before even the prospect of diving headlong into the depths of the Mines of Moria in search of a cuddle with a Balrog would feel preferable to watching another minute.