Last weekend’s rerelease of The Lord of The Rings highlighted that Fellowship of The Ring first hit theaters twenty-five years ago. Fellowship was released closer to Star Wars than to right now. Beyond making me feel very old, I can’t help but to wonder how long it’ll be until someone else takes a stab at adapting the books.
I’m not sure what all a new adaption would be able to accomplish that Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens’ trilogy didn’t. Sure, a new adaptation could try and hew more closely to the original text — and believe me I am someone who would love to see Tom Bombadil in all his confounding, nonsensical glory. Rewatching the movies last weekend, though, I was struck again by how pragmatic the choices of what to change are. Excising the Scouring of The Shire is certainly a blow to the arc of the four Hobbits, but it’s also a chapter afforded more by the luxury of a novel than the pacing of a movie. The movie instead takes a beat to have the newly-crowned Aragorn calling the Hobbits his friends and bowing to them — those that everyone wrote off as being too small and insignificant to have an effect on Middle-earth are recognized as having helped save the day. It’s a smart choice: after the eucatastrophe of the Ring’s destruction, a movie just doesn’t have space for yet another dramatic rise and fall.
Granted, a television show would have the space for it, but even then an adaptation is still an adaptation, and the cinematic trilogy did such a good job of finding the spine of the story that the prospect of lightning striking twice (or thrice) is an unlikely prospect. The 2001-2003 trilogy captured Tolkien’s work in all its hopefulness and melancholy so well that I fear any additional attempts would besmirch his writing. It’s been done, and it’s been done so well, it seems Sisyphean to try again.
Nor do I think would a new adaption be able to better capture Tolkien’s vision of Middle-earth. Special effects and CGI have come a long, long way in the intervening quarter-century, but the breathtaking scenery of Middle-earth and its denizens of Orcs, a Balrog and Gollum still look so very good. Sure, modern CGI would be able to add those farms around Minas Tirith that the book describes but… so what? The films already capture the beauty (and vitally: the mood) of the books, I can’t imagine what a new rendition would add.
Now, a common (and justified) criticism of The Lord of The Rings movies is that it is very white. I’m not particular interested in litigating the question of diversity within Tolkien’s books or the adaptions — suffice to say they are products of their times and I am glad we’re at a place now where we’re discussing the question of diversity in fantasy. A new adaption of The Lord of The Rings would be a a chance to do something different. The trilogy portrayed the Rohirrim with Anglo-Saxon and Norse stylings, reflecting Tolkien’s on inspirations for the people of Rohan; a new adaption could jettison all that in favor of other great horse cultures of history, say, the Scythians or the Mongols. There’s something very enticing there… if this hypothetical adaptation could still get everything else right.
Perhaps, at a certain point, it is time to move on from The Lord of The Rings. Not to say the stories are no longer relevant nor great works — I count The Lord of The Rings as one of my absolute favorite books and this past weekend was a reminder that the movies occupy a similar spot in their medium. I love these dearly. But I also want new stories; I want more stories. I have The Lord of The Rings, I have the books and their adaptations, but fantasy is such a rich world and rather than readapting the same stories I want something new. Sure, I’ll watch more Tolkien adaptions (and I’ll really enjoy them when they’re good), but we don’t need to adapt it again.
Essays, Not Rants! 