It is hard to believe that Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings movie, The Fellowship of the Ring, is now almost 20 years old, yet a new 4K restoration of the full trilogy reminds us without doubt that this is the case. At the turn of the century, it was not superhero movies or space opera that hit that purple patch of audience mass interest combined with critical praise, but unexpectedly, a big-screen adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s high-fantasy triptych. It was a work thought unfilmable after the debacle of Ralph Bakshi’s unfinished 1978 version.
In the intervening decades, there has been no viable successor in the swords-and-sorcery genre, despite continued interest in Tolkienesque fiction, as exemplified by the success of video game sagas such as Legend of Zelda and World of Warcraft, as well as George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels and the accompanying Game of Thrones TV series. This week, reports emerged that Chris Pine is in talks to star in a new film adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, the seminal role-playing game that was once frowned upon by Tolkienistas, but these days bears an undoubted cachet of 80s cool thanks to TV shows such as Stranger Things.
Hollywood has been trying to get a new Dungeons & Dragons movie off the ground – some of you may recall in regret the awful Jeremy Irons movie from 2000, with its two lamentable sequels – for the best part of a decade. However, if Pine does sign on the dotted line, it sounds as if studio Paramount is serious about bringing Gary Gygax’s famous role-playing game back to the multiplexes.
So bring on the paladins, modrons and mind flayers, for at times like these we all need a little geeky escapism. Pine may not have quite the star power of a Ben Affleck or Tom Cruise, but he’s younger and seems less likely to pick an absolute stinker than many of his peers. Perhaps he could bring Star Trek comrade Karl Urban along – the Kiwi actor surely deserves it after his superb turn as Éomer in Lord of the Rings.
The real question here is whether the genre can flourish on the big screen without the oxygen of a Tolkien base. This ought to be a ridiculous suggestion: the Marvel movies continue to leap tall buildings in a single bound despite the fact that the creators of the superheroes they rely on have long since died. Star Wars, despite the odd bump, has proven that it does not require George Lucas’s input to jump to hyperspace. It can’t be the case that only swords and sorcery movies with a direct link to Tolkien have a chance of being any good, can it?
Sadly the evidence suggests the opposite. A succession of terrible fantasy efforts, from Eragon, to Duncan Jones’s Warcraft, have left fans of the genre flailing in the swamps of despair over the past 20 years. Let us not even mention Uwe Boll’s execrable, Jason Statham-led In the Name of the King from 2007. Even Jackson struggled to repeat his own trick with The Hobbit, a misguided attempt to film Tolkien’s fleet-footed and folksy fable as a LOTR-style epic trilogy. Quite how the Oscar-winning film-maker failed to realise that preposterous elf-dwarf romances and endless entirely superfluous action sequences were unlikely to convince audiences of the need to shoot a 304-page fable as an eight-hour fantasy mega-spectacle remains one of the most mystifying questions of recent times.
The worry, for those of us who recall the thrill of seeing Gondor, the Mines of Moria and Mirkwood on the big screen for the first time, is that if Hollywood does not find a way to repeat the success of The Lord of the Rings soon, the opportunity may be lost. Amazon is already shooting its LOTR TV series, which will attempt to fill in the gaps surrounding the English author’s two best-known works, and there is a sneaking suspicion that the small screen might actually be the better vehicle for such complex and detailed tales. The groundbreaking work of Weta Digital on Jackson’s trilogy was feted at the time as a new dawn for fantasy film-making, yet TV shows such as Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian have proven that next-level CGI is no longer the preserve of the multiplex.
Against this background, the chances of Dungeons & Dragons emerging as the gilded successor to Lord of the Rings that we all hope it can be seem about as likely as rolling a single number on a 20-sided die. Then again, Pine does have something of a history of pulling off miracles on the big screen.
