Will Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series embrace J.R.R. Tolkien’s original vision?
Amazon Studios is making a TV series set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth; rumor has it that it’ll be about a young Aragorn, the character played by Viggo Mortensen in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. The show is there, looming on the horizon like a gang of Ringwraiths about to ride down the hill and slice out your soul. Amazon is shelling out the big bucks in the hope that the series will turn out to be the next Game of Thrones, and as a fan of both series, I wish it the best. But if Amazon is going to succeed, it needs to distinguish itself from Thrones. A good way to do that would be to return to the original spirit of Tolkien’s work, but will Amazon go in that direction?
That’s the subject of an interesting editorial in The Daily Standard. Author Hannah Long tells us that, in a letter to his publisher, Tolkien wrote that his world was mainly concerned with three things: “Fall, Mortality and the Machine.” The themes of the Fall and Mortality are intermixed in characters like Morgoth and Sauron, immortal beings who fall from states of grace and attempt to exert control over Middle-earth to stave off decay and death. Even benevolent characters like Galadriel do this to some degree; Galadriel uses the power of her ring to maintain the beauty and spirit of Lothlórien even as the magic of old leeches out of the rest of Middle-earth. Tolkien’s work is filled with a sense of loss and melancholy.
Tolkien’s mortal heroes are also vulnerable to falls into evil. Isildur and Boromir succumb to the power of the One Ring, while immortal characters like Gandalf and Galadriel refuse to take it for fear it will corrupt them. Aragorn, too, shuns responsibility for most of his life lest he use power unwisely. In the end, it is the powerless Hobbits who do what the powerful heroes cannot.
On Game of Thrones, power is treated very differently. In Westeros, it is a tool that can be used for good or ill depending on who has it. Almost everyone, heroes and villains alike, want it, from Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister to Joffrey Baratheon and Petry Baelish. Characters seek power not because they’re trying to stave off their own mortality, but because it is the end goal of the game of thrones, and they are all players.
In The Lord of the Rings, characters like Sauron and Saruman use the Machine to exert their wills on the world. Saurman does this literally, chopping down trees in Fangorn forest and using them to fuel the fires of industry and creating his own army. After being deposed at Isengard, Saruman does the same thing in the Shire, leaving the idyllic home of the Hobbits in ruins.
J.R.R. Tolkien participated in World War I, and his antipathy towards the Machine may reflect revulsion at the mechanized slaughter he saw in the trenches. To put it more simply, in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, machines are evil.
So what does all this mean for Amazon’s show? My fear is that what’s driving the company to make the series will drive it away from these important themes.
Jeff Bezos built Amazon into the commercial giant it is by making shrewd decisions. The company is not entering the world of television lightly. The Lord of the Rings series represents its most ambitious project so far, and the best chance it has to get eyeballs on Amazon Studios. With the kind of money Amazon is spending come expectations, and that could lead to pressure to make the series more mainstream, with more battles, more shocking moments, and the like.
None of that is bad per se, but the more the company thinks about how to draw in viewers, the further it risks wandering from the heart of Tolkien’s work. Amazon might have more money than Smaug had hidden under the Lonely Mountain, but what’s the best use for it?
By and large, Tolkien used battle as metaphors for exploring his primary themes. Saruman’s consuming of the forest leads to the Battle of Isengard, representing the consequences of sacrificing the natural beatuy of the world in the pursuit of power. Isilidur claiming the One Ring after the Battle of Dagorlad represents the Fall, a once-noble ruler claiming power for himself just as the monster he just defeated did. These battles have meaning and heft. Adding battles for their own sake would be antithetical to Tolkien’s vision.
There’s also the matter of tone. Game of Thrones rose to prominence on the back of despicable, perverse villains like Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton. They transfixed audiences, but the villains in Tolkien’s world are very different: elemental, evil-with-a-capital-E and ultimately more PG-rated. Amazon shouldn’t feel the need to chase Thrones when it comes to graphic violence and sex. Embracing Tolkien’s gentler, grander world will help the Lord of the Rings show stand out from what’s come before.
Finally, I’m troubled by the first two writers Amazon has drafted to work on the show: JD Payne and Patrick McKay. Relatively new to Hollywood, Payne and McKay are best known for their work on Star Trek: Beyond and its upcoming sequel. Beyond, while enjoyable, played more like the bastard child of Fast and the Furious and Star Trek than anything Gene Roddenberry ever dreamed up.
If this all sounds sounds too gloomy, allow me to make like Samwise Gamgee and bring in some optimism. First of all, it’s a stretch to blame the deficiencies of Star Trek: Beyond entirely on Payne and McKay. In fact, if you believe Simon Pegg, who was brought on to rewrite the original script, Paramount didn’t like Payne and McKay’s work because it was “too Star Trek-y.” Why that’s a bad thing on a Star Trek movie, I have no idea, but it’s possible Payne and McKay were the guys who wanted to remain true to the spirit of the original show who got steamrolled by the big studio. If they’re also willing to stick up for Tolkien’s vision, it could be good for the fans.
And ultimately, we may be giving Amazon too little credit; just because they’re a big corporation doesn’t mean the people they put in charge of the show won’t care about doing it right. With any luck, this series could be a modern classic: a big budget embodiment of a legendary author’s work.
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