The Last Ringbearer: or, playing in someone else's sandbox, sort of a review

I recently had the interesting experience of reading The Last Ringbearer, by Kirill Yeskov. If you've read The Lord of the Rings, the name sounds oddly familiar, and it should: The Last Ringbearer is a novel written parallel (or maybe crosswise) to the plot of LOTR, with the central conceit that Tolkien's novel is a "victor's history" written by Gondor's partisans after their successful war against Mordor.*

I can't recommend the book on its own merits**, but I'm not here to rag on it either. If you're a quick reader and the above sounds interesting at all, then do read it***, or at least the first part, which tracks most closely with the events of Tolkien's book.

LRB diverges from LOTR from the first page, and it diverges hard. Beyond the broad category of "fantasy" the books don't even share the same genre: LRB starts out reading something like a Conan yarn, and it evolves into something more like a Cold-War spy thriller. What gives?

I'll tell you what. Because I could complain about the genre shift as "missing the point" of the source material--and other people have--but I think that, itself, is missing the point. In an important way, Yeskov's Middle Earth is strikingly true to Tolkien's Middle Earth.

You see, Tolkien's Middle Earth was a canvas, or perhaps a terrarium, which he filled with linguistics, Norse epics, his experiences in the Great War, and an undercurrent of Catholicism--in short, anything and everything that interested him. Later writers have mistaken Middle Earth for an archetype, and hesitated to deviate from it.

I think Yeskov did what Tolkien did, and filled his version of Middle Earth with whatever the hell he found interesting: rationalism, politics, spycraft, werewolves, parallel universes, and so on. I honestly couldn't tell you whether J.R.R. Tolkien would approve of the result, but I'm pretty sure more fantasy writers could stand to learn a lesson from it.

* Perhaps in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which retells the story of Jane Eyre from a perspective more sympathetic to Bertha Mason.

** It was written in Russian originally, and the English translation is the sort that you have to make allowances for. The plot itself is a little disjointed and, pretty conventional if you sift out the fantasy elements. Yeskov's Middle-Earth amalgam is certainly the most interesting thing about the book. But then, I don't think the book was meant to be sold commercially, and it's free (see next footnote), which softens but doesn't obviate criticism.

*** Because the book is from Russia, and the Tolkien estate is not a fan, the book can't be sold. The e-book, on the other hand, is freely available from the translator.

An unexpected disappointment

I had a sad realization today while walking through a Target. Actually, I had the realization earlier, and then I had it again--can you have a realization twice... I mean, I could say "I had a hamburger yesterday, and I had a hamburger today," but I guess if it were the same hamburger both times that would be gross.

Well. Anyway. Today in Target I passed a display of DVDs and Blu-Rays of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. My realization was not that, hey, The Hobbit is out on video now. My realization is that I had no desire to buy it.

This came as a bit of a shock for me. Understand that there was no question in my mind about getting any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy special edition DVDs. (Not that I bought it--but I made dern sure I got it for Christmas.) So did basically everyone I knew. Remember that when these DVDs came out I lived with three other people. Through most of college we had four copies of the trilogy between us. It wasn't a matter of having access to the movies--there were lots of things I never owned in college because one of my roommates had one.

I don't want to wax too exuberant about the connection my friends and I had with that movie--I really think a lot of people felt the same way--but it was something more than you can get from a really good movie, or from fully leveraging really popular IP. I speak now in the language of the enemy, because I think the enemy really needs to hear that. The reason the Lord of the Rings movies made so much money, and lasted so long as a cultural force, is because people loved them--in a sense that is not just a more intense version of "like."

What possibly makes me sadder than my disappointment in The Hobbit 1/3 itself is the sense that the people in charge of it made too much money to register that they screwed up. But I saw Return of the King three or four times in theaters. I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey once in the theater and, three months later, don't want so much to see it again as I would like to un-see about a third of it.

In the language of the enemy, take $10 for a movie ticket, multiply by two repeat viewings. Add the cost of a special-edition Blu-Ray. Multiply all that by the number of people who think more or less like me.

There's more missed opportunity than actual profit.

Back when it was almost timely I made my opinions on The Hobbit known. Specifically, I said:

I am more optimistic about the second movie than I might be. It will probably consist mostly of fanfic about the White Council and the Necromancer, but I will give that a go if Necky is a more compelling villain than Azog.

It's actually a little frightening how effective TH:tUJ's artistic triage was. Fred and Satan both knew what notes would have to play true in order for fans to come back for part 2/3. What absolutely had to work really worked, but there was lot of slack in between.

 That's what I thought just after seeing it. Three months later, if The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug came out next week, I think I'd read a few reviews. I'd wait and see.

In which I hardly spoil The Hobbit at all

I'm going to have to almost beg some of my friends to read this post, since after my post about The Dark Knight Rises my reputation for spoiling things has approached mythic proportions in certain circles. So here goes: Guys, come oonnn. Every single one of you has read the damn book.

That said, if you haven't read The Hobbit, go do that. Seriously, just go. Don't use the internet until you've finished it. Your life will be better for it. I'll wait.

With that out of the way, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was a positive experience on the whole. It also made me sad. Sad because I came away convinced that while Peter Jackson--no, not Peter Jackson, since we can't truly know the minds of the creative people involved*--but some entity or force, either a person or the emanation of commonalities in multiple persons' psyches--we'll call it Fred--brought The Hobbit to the screen as an act of artistic love; and a second entity or force--we'll call it Satan--compelled the story to be stretched into three long movies in a naked grab for money.

This is not actually what I expected. I thought of the Peter Jackson who shopped a two-movie Lord of the Rings for years until Robert Shaye made the brilliant--but then bold--suggestion that the films be a trilogy. When I first read that The Hobbitses would be not two movies but three, the article included some gushing by Mr. Jackson about all the extra material he was excited to be able to fit into the newly trilogized series. I now suspect that Mr. Jackson was compelled by Satan to say this. About 10-20% of the film's run time is padding and cruft that I can't believe anyone was excited to be able to include.

The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Okay Film is a prolonged battle between Fred and Satan, with both gaining and losing the upper hand at various points. The arc of the movie is a happy one, inasmuch as Satan solidly controls the movie in the beginning but Fred manages to prevail in the end, with only a brief resurgence just before the credits to promise that there will be a sequel.

Fred's influence on the film meant that the worst of my fears were averted. I had worried that there would be no differentiation in tone between The Lord of the Ringses and The Hobbitses. Instead, where Fred had his way, at least, there seemed to be an awareness that LotR belongs to the genre of Epic Fantasy while The Hobbit belongs to the genre of Fantasy Adventure. This is a difference that makes a difference. For example, Tolkien's habit of having his characters spontaneously bust rhymes was suppressed in the LotR movies. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Musical, not every song that Tolkien wrote shows up (by a long shot) but some of the characters sing, and they do so more spontaneously and with more coordination than anyone in the LotR movies did. There's also a slightly cartoonish veneer over the whole thing, which is not wholly unwelcome... but I'll get to that later, because it is mostly unwelcome.

Martin Freeman is definitely a servant of Fred, and Fred's power is at its apogee when Freeman's Bilbo encounters Andy Serkis' Gollum. In fact, this movie actually excited me about the character of Gollum in a way that the LotR movies didn't. LotR Gollum was innovative and praiseworthy; the Riddle Game would have been a brilliant scene if Andy Serkis had been on screen himself in grey makeup.**

Satan's influence on the film meant that I was disappointed in unexpected ways. Perhaps the most pervasive effect of Satan's influence was--believe it or not--the CGI. Basically all the goblins, trolls, wargs, eagles, staircases, hedgehogs, and bunny rabbits are fairly obviously digitized illusions. It seemed pretty blatant that after demanding eight hours of movie, Satan was not willing to shell out for bigatures, props, and makeup on the scale of LotR. (After all, we were all going to see the movie anyway, and aren't computers 10 years better than they were 10 years ago? That has to be enough.) As a result, the movie mostly works, but it never inspires the awe that its predecessors did because it is mostly fake. See the aforementioned cartoonish veneer.

The inserted character Azog, who is apparently set to be the series' visible Big Bad (allowing for Smaug to be handled more intelligently, like Jaws), is particularly unconvincing, which is a particular shame. He also feels thoroughly obligatory and joyless... and pretty detachable. He may not be as much an attempt to pad out the movie as to create a throughline in an otherwise episodic story, but the attempt is misguided. If I were a betting man I would bet that his prominence was ramped up in post-production to fill the void left by the Necromancer, who presumably was going to be the villain of the first half of The Hobbit but will now be contained instead in the second third.

The writing is uneven, in places as insubstantial as the CGI, but I expected weakness there. I am really surprised to have been so visually disappointed by The Hobbit's superfluities. It is true that a lot of the superfluity is super-superfluous. Elijah Wood, in particular, seemed to have just wandered onto set on his way to pick up his check. There are several characters who we are apparently just supposed to be happy to see, and we don't do much more than see them.

I am more optimistic about the second movie than I might be. It will probably consist mostly of fanfic about the White Council and the Necromancer, but I will give that a go if Necky is a more compelling villain than Azog.

It's actually a little frightening how effective TH:tUJ's artistic triage was. Fred and Satan both knew what notes would have to play true in order for fans to come back for part 2/3. What absolutely had to work really worked, but there was lot of slack in between.

Finally, a lot of fuss has been made about the framerate. I can't speak to it. What I saw was obviously old-fashioned 24 FPS, and if anything, it actually ended up blurrier than other movies I've seen. So if you can, I guess, try the 48 FPS, maybe. I don't know. All the reviews I read complained about it. It's probably the future, though, so get used to it, I guess.

* And certain people insist that copies of The Silmarillion burn when Peter Jackson touches them, and he wants to cancel Christmas to make more room in the year for warg attacks.
** Not to minimize the contributions of the digital puppeteers who created the physical performance. It's beyond me to say where Serkis' decisions end and the animators' decisions begin.

Superheroes, Spartans, and dwarves!

Yesterday Girlfriend and I went ahead and saw The Avengers--ahem, Marvel's The Avengers, no doubt to ameliorate the confusion of three or so people expecting a new John Steed movie. I'm not too sure what to say about it. Any accurate account of my opinion would probably be unfair considering the extent to which I enjoyed the movie; just saying that I enjoyed it would give the wrong impression, too. (I suppose this is a knot that movie reviewers learn how to cut early on.) I enjoyed watching The Avengers on a big screen. I do not think it would have held my attention on my television. It was, as I told a few people, a lot of scenes, the majority of which were entertaining. That they don't add up to much is probably not the fault of any of the artists involved. After all, we know whose movie this really is. It's in the title.

 I was not invested in this being a good movie. Since Iron Man 2 I haven't had hopes to speak of for Marvel movies. If Batman weren't still going, I would be ready to call this comic book movie thing over. The Disney Renaissance lasted 10 years, generously defined; if we're having a Golden Age of Comic Book Movies, well, it's been 11 years since Spider-Man.

One place I do hope the magic is lasting out the decade is in the Lord of the Rings franchise, for franchise it has become, and The Hobbit is coming (and coming again next year, because why not?). I wouldn't mind seeing a comparison of how much money is riding on these two enterprises.

Now, back when I played Halo: Reach I noticed a problem that I almost wrote about at the time, and looking forward to The Hobbit I see the chance for the same mistake. It turns out that good characterization can ruin a good character.

I played the Halo games, and I, for one, thought the character of the Master Chief was a very good one. I'm not going to call the series an example of deep or transcendent literature, but the Master Chief was a nearly flawless action hero. He wasn't exactly flat; his character had some conspicuous, gaping holes. He was Spartan 117, and he had extra kung fu where most of his personality should have been. This was apparently the human cost of the Spartan program. There was pathos in it. That's how he came off to me, anyway.

Then came Halo: Reach, where we had the privilege of meeting six other Spartans. Now they had to be differentiated. (Actually, did they? For the story Bungie wanted to tell, but I wonder.) They had to be characterized, and humanized. For the Halo series, some of them were pretty well-rounded. Jorge maybe even had depth--at the very least, there were tensions in his character that made him interesting. The gentle giant thing isn't the freshest character angle, but I liked him. He certainly didn't seem to have parts of his soul missing.

Suddenly, what the hell was wrong with Master Chief? If the other Spartans were capable of feeling the tragedy of war--capable of feeling fear and empathy--capable of bonding with and mourning comrades--then 117 lost his excuse. Now, apparently, the Spartan project wasn't dehumanizing. Master Chief must have had his Clint Eastwood growl when he shipped out to boot camp. He doesn't care because he doesn't care. The pathos is gone. Suddenly, he's either a cardboard character or a psychopath.

So I had that problem with Halo: Reach. By elevating its characters above their type, it made the old hero--first and foremost an excellent specimen of a type--and undermined him. If I ever go back to play the campaign in any of the Halos, I will probably ignore the characterization in Reach, but I can't unplay it.

So, Tolkien gave us elves and dwarves. In The Lord of the Rings he could use the different races and types. Dwarves were a certain way, elves were a certain way, and you didn't need to think about it too hard. Tolkien helped us out by never making us deal with more than one dwarf, or more than one elf, at a time. So Gimli and Legolas stand out as distinct from the rest of the Fellowship, and they have personalities, even without ever being much more than representatives of a cultural type.

I'm not going to get on Tolkien's case at all. The Lord of the Rings movies flattened out Legolas and Gimli even further--Gimli in particular. And to be fair, the movies' Gimli is not the character Halo's Master Chief is. He comes dangerously close to being the sum of the running gags around him.

So Gimli is, at best, a type. The shallowness of his characterization is supported, inasmuch as it is supported, by the absence of other dwarves to compare him to. So what am I worried about? The 13 dwarves in The Hobbit. In the book, not all of them are characterized. In the movie, they're all going to have to be differentiated, at least. Maybe even well-developed--actors get bored, after all. Which is fine, except I suspect it's going to get harder to appreciate the LOTR trilogy on its own terms.

This is Peter Jackson's fault, more or less. He left The Lord of the Rings open to this. Admittedly, his neglect in this area may have freed him up to do awesome things in other areas of the movies. And really, I'd rather see The Hobbit be as good as it (they) can be. I just wish everything could be perfect and everyone could win. You know.