If Warners is going to make more
Lord of the Rings films, here's what I want.
Animated adaptations of
Fellowship and
Two Towers in the Rankin-Bass style. Complete the sequence! Put them in theaters for a week or two, then put them on streeaming and home media.
Not sure how I feel about this news. As much as I love Andy Serkis and still hate how his work in motion capture in general is so grossly underappreciated, I don't see much of a need for this film.
I wonder if this is what the much-talked-about "bridge film" of fifteen years ago that would go between
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings evolved into. I'm curious.
The fact that Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens are all involved, including the writing, is promising, but they also gave us The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (granted stretching out the production into three films was more studio driven, it was still so damn unnecessary).
There's a lot wrong with
Fire Armies, and I lay much of the blame for that at Tolkien's door. Given more time, I think Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens could have fixed the fundamental problem of that part of the book, which is that the events -- the Battle of Five Armies -- barely involve anyone the reader knows. Bilbo (in the book) sits it out, Thorin and the Dwarves we know are holed up in the mountain pouting. The action is driven by characters we barely know (Thranduil) or have never met (Dain Ironfoot), and there's so much
deus ex machina (the arrival of the fifth army of eagles). The approach they took was valid, but it ended up feeling, to me, like a disconnected series of video game boss fights. One fix I'd have made: Dain needed to be introduced earlier (like, in the pre-credit flashback sequence) and have an actual character arc.
Or you go full Rankin-Bass and barely show it. I still love to bits the sequence in the Rankin-Bass where Thorin and Thranduil are fighting, Gandalf appears, and Thorin calls him an "old fool." Gandalf: "Old fool? Behold! An army of goblins approaches from the north with claim to the treasure!" And suddenly Thorin exclaims to Thranduil, "My truest friend and ally!" mere moments after trying to kill him.
I know many people think
The Hobbit films -- emphasis on the plural, there -- are misconceived, but I find them quite admirable in that Jackson accomplished what Tolkien attempted to do in the 1960s and could not, which was to tell the story of
The Hobbit in the mode of
The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien started a rewrite and abandoned it because his
LOTR style sapped
The Hobbit of all its charm, while Jackson had an established visual and narrative style that he could apply to
The Hobbit and was, I think, generally successful in so doing.
