Gird your loins, John Ronald Reuel lovers.
If ‘Lord of the Rings’ Isn’t Quite Dead, This Guy Can Finish It Off
The Fellowship of the Ring — the opening chapter of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of the greatest achievements in movie history — turns 25 this December, and since then, Hollywood has inflicted one indignity after another on Tolkien’s masterpiece. The worst may be yet to come.What’s it called when the greedy mining company takes the tailings from its strip mine and runs them through the smelter one more time with all the reckless abandon of Gollum diving after the One Ring into Mount Doom?
Ah, yes — it’s called The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past, and lame-duck late-night host Stephen Colbert will co-write it with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, for Jackson and Warner Bros, which now owns New Line. Variety reported late Tuesday that Colbert, “a vocal Tolkien fanatic,” and McGee will write a screenplay “from chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring that didn’t make it into Jackson’s 2001 adaptation.”
Or as the movie’s official logline put it, “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.”
So Shadows of the Past won’t really take us back to 2001 and fill in the missing parts of Fellowship. It will take aging versions of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin and saddle them with an all-new girl-boss.
Fan reactions on X range from “I’d rather jump into the fires of Mount Doom” to “What is this need to mar great artistic works with slop fan fiction manglings?” Despite my best time-wasting efforts, I was unable to find a single positive response.
Maybe Colbert is a vocal enough Tolkien fan to make this work. Or maybe Jackson and his crew should do what Saruman couldn’t, and just leave the Shire alone.
A big, fat AAAAA-fargin’-MEN to that, Steve.
Update! Ace puts in his two cents:
Good heavens, what an absolute disaster.
We have the Hunt for Gollum coming up, directed by Andy Serkis, who just remade Animal Farm as a pro-socialism, anti-capitalism message movie.
And now Warner Bros. has hired this absolute assclown to write a draft of what is being called “The Shadow of the Past.” The concept of the movie is not terrible: A good part of Fellowship of the Ring was cut out of the Lord of the Rings movies because of time restrictions and also because it contains the character Tom Bombadil, who is just a big ball of plot questions. Like, given that he has godlike power that makes even Gandalf and Elrond envious, why doesn’t he just take the ring? (Tolkien’s lame answer: Because he’s flighty and would eventually just forget about the ring and let it go back to Sauron.)
The reason this section of the book is worth possibly making a movie about is the creepy, scary encounter with the Barrow Wights. If you know, you know.
So Colbert, I guess, pitched the idea of doing these four chapters of LOTR as a stand-alone mid-quel movie.
Couldn’t they just have said “Yes that’s an okay idea, here’s $20,000 as a finder’s fee, now fuck off”?
Sure they could’ve. But being shitlibs, they’d have never, ever, dreamed of doing such a thing, thereby offering tacit insult to one of their most iconic Trump-deranged heroes.
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