Why Tolkien fans fear the new Gollum film

Sir Ian McKellen knows how to work an audience. At a convention for fantasy fiction fans last August, he all but confirmed that he will reprise his role as the wizard Gandalf in a new Lord of the Rings film.

“I hear there’s going to be another movie based in Middle-earth, and it’s going to start filming in May. It’s going to be directed by Gollum, and it’s all about Gollum. But I’ll tell you two secrets about the casting,” Sir Ian teased his fans in London. “There’s a character in the movie called Frodo and another character called Gandalf, and apart from that my lips are sealed.” The room erupted with joy.

The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum is set to reunite key players from the original trilogy. Andy Serkis, who played Gollum, is returning to the title role (and also directing the big-budget film), while Elijah Wood has dropped heavy hints that he will again portray Frodo Baggins. The roles of Legolas and Boromir may be played by Orlando Bloom and Sean Bean, respectively, once more.

One might have expected that the prospect of a new instalment showing Tolkien’s seminal work might be met by Gollum-like cries of “Precious!” by fans of Middle-earth, but reactions to the new film have ranged from apathy and weariness to downright dread.

While the recasting of beloved actors in familiar roles is usually seen as fan service, such as the highly anticipated return of Robert Downey Jr to the Avengers franchise this year, the Gollum film throws up a lot of problems.

The original films are being re-released in cinemas to mark the 25th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring. Wood – who was a baby-faced, shaggy-haired 20-year-old back then – now looks very much like a man in his mid-40s. Sir Ian was past 60 when he first played Gandalf and has not got any younger. The suggestion is that the new film will see the characters digitally de-aged, à la Robert De Niro in The Irishman, but the use of such technology has seldom been a hit with audiences.

Patrick Curry, an author and Tolkien expert, says that de-aging the stars would be a “strange thing to do” and that the film-makers will be “in trouble if people don’t like it”. He adds: “The proof is in the pudding. If it feels phoney then that’s a massive turn-off.”

Fans posting in online forums have been less kind. One person described the film as being the adaptation of “a third-rate storyline only being made because it is an excuse to bring back fan-favourite characters”; another said it is “insane that people want to not recast a movie that is coming out 20-plus years after the original was shot, but which takes place at the same time”; yet another simply comments that “de-aging looks like crap”.

To add to the complexity, it seems unlikely that Viggo Mortensen, who is now pushing 70, will reprise his role as Aragorn; if that is the case, it means one of the leads will be re-cast to play opposite artificially young co-stars.

Adding to the unease among some fans is the fact that Serkis, 61, will not just play Gollum for a fifth time, but will also direct the film (Peter Jackson, who helmed the original Lord of the Rings trilogy and the three Hobbit prequels, will instead serve as a producer).

Perhaps his ego has got the better of him. Serkis is a top actor and regarded as one of the very best at the tricksy magic of motion capture (as well as The Lord of the Rings, he has donned ball-covered suits for Planet of the Apes and Star Wars films), but his record behind the camera leaves a lot to be desired. His previous directing credits include Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, a poorly received Rudyard Kipling adaptation from 2018, and the critically unloved Venom 2: Let There be Carnage three years later.

His most recent effort may be the most execrable of the lot and it has not even been released yet. Serkis has directed an animated version of Animal Farm that has fans of George Orwell extremely worried. The film is Serkis’s passion project and he has said he wanted to make Orwell’s work “accessible”, not “overtly political”, but it has taken almost 15 years to go from concept to its May release date because distributors gave it a wide berth.

The release of the film’s trailer in December was met with a cacophony of disapproval from people who took issue with its seemingly whimsical tone and the fact that it has become a critique of capitalism, not communism as in the source material. In his review of the film itself, The Telegraph’s Tim Robey declared it “so bad, it’s enough to turn George Orwell fascist”.

But perhaps the biggest issue facing the new Gollum film is the story itself. Relating how Gandalf tasked the heroic Aragorn with capturing the fallen Sméagol to learn the truth about the One Ring of power, it was deemed superfluous enough that it did not feature in The Fellowship of the Ring, and by all accounts was not much missed. Instead, the new film feels like a cash-grab playing on nostalgia and familiarity.

There has already been a fan-made adaptation of The Hunt for Gollum, which was produced on a £3,000 budget and released in 2009. Though it met with a warm reception from many fans – it has more than 14 million views on YouTube alone – the fact that it runs for less than 40 minutes suggests that those behind the new film will need to stretch things somewhat.

It is also not the most significant part of the original novels excised from the films; viewers were more bemused to miss out on seeing the weirdness of Tom Bombadil and the so-called “Scouring of the Shire”, when the Hobbits’ homeland was taken over by malevolent pseudo-fascists.

Stuart Lee, an Oxford University English literature professor and Tolkien expert, says that this tale would “not have been on top of my wish list for tales from Tolkien that they could have filmed”. Most Tolkien devotees would much prefer to see Bombadil on the big screen, or a version of The Silmarillion (the creation story of Tolkien’s universe), but that has been widely and regularly described as being unfilmable.

“The big problem with Tolkien is that The Lord of the Rings is the end of it all, where everything gets wrapped up,” says Lee. “So once you film that, which Jackson did, everything that follows has to be a prequel to it; you know what’s going to happen to these characters. And that always is tricky, because how do you inject suspense or something that people will want to see?”

So, given all of the above, why bother? The answer may have something to do with money. The original Lord of the Rings trilogy made almost $3bn (£2.2bn) at the box office, with The Return of the King winning the Oscar for Best Picture in 2004, while the subsequent Hobbit trilogy fetched a similar amount. Warner Bros, the studio behind the new film, appears to be banking on the loyalty of Tolkien fans as original stories continue to suffer at the box office and Hollywood increasingly leans on existing intellectual property to fill the coffers. Even that approach has started to struggle in recent years.

And that fan loyalty cannot be taken for granted. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power, has been widely panned by critics and Tolkien devotees alike. The War of the Rohirrim, the animated prequel released in 2024, was a forgettable box office flop. Serkis is already in Wellington prepping the film, and has been photographed on the original “Hobbiton” sets – the local press claims The Hunt For Gollum could be the most expensive film made in New Zealand. All told, the new film is looking increasingly like a huge gamble. “I wonder if there will be a tipping point where people start to get a bit jaded about films from or about The Lord of the Rings,” says Curry.

Tolkien was a master world-builder who left masses of work in the Lord of the Rings universe that has not been filmed, such as The Silmarillion. But studios keep trying to squeeze more out of what has gone before. “The problem is nothing comes after it, really, because there isn’t a sequel to Lord of the Rings,” says Lee. “Tolkien started to write one but got depressed and didn’t get very far.”

Tolkien fans may well feel like their hero if their worst fears about the new Gollum film are realised.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]