Review by 'Rerevisionist' of Film   18 May 2015, 31 May 2024     Lord of the Rings

J R R Tolkien was born in 1892; just right for the 'Great War', in which (my notes say) three friends from Birmingham Grammar School died in the trenches. They agreed on some personal aesthetic, not very clearly defined, which perhaps Tolkien felt obliged to carry on. Tolkien became a Professor of Anglo-Saxon; by 1924. He called himself 'Ronald', wrote with an 'italic' pen in archaic style, and explored other languages, such as Finnish. The Hobbit was first published in 1937, with his own hand-drawn maps and runes. It attracted quite a wide readership, including people one would not expect to like such a story. The Lord of the Rings was published from 1954-1955 in three volumes, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, when he was Merton Professor of English, whatever that was, at Oxford University.
      He was over 60; it's claimed he wondered if he'd find any readers. Many supposedly-educated persons in that pipe-smoking era were influenced by Greek and Latin classics; Tolkien's mental furniture was rather different, and its flavour of ancient rurality and antiquarian lore affected many people, musing over such things as the Anglo-Saxon meaning of 'Arkenstone', the possibilities that Merry was Merovingian and Pippin Pepin, the Welshness of place-names, the Victorian interest in the Morte DArthur, whether such documents as the 'Red Book of Westmarch' existed, and where 'Middle Earth' might be.

Tolkien's influence must surely be responsible for the crude US 'fantasy' genre, with dragons, unusual linguistic structures (in English), and exotic-sounding names and places. Even fairly recent history had places which no longer seem to exist: Transylvania, Schleswig-Holstein, Wessex; and fantastic titles: Kings, Prince-Regents, Empresses Regnant; lost occupations: cooper, thatcher, wheelwright; and strange prophecies, predictions and beliefs, such as the 'Angel of Mons'.

Tolkien's publisher was Allen & Unwin, the same as Bertrand Russell's, and of course a part of the Jewish campaigns for wars between whites. There were various takeovers, including by a group $1 billion in debt. His books sold posthumously (after 1973) in huge numbers, and the final reckoning must have been expanded by the films. I wonder if there was much wrangling over the rights.

All this is entirely unfilmable without computer-generated graphics, with Peter Jackson and his large studios and fellow-workers in New Zealand as the facilitators. There are glaring sillinesses—the principal ring only being destructible in the 'Crack of Doom', and Saruman only having a single assistant, and the long perilous journey when the eagles could presumably have flown with the ring and delivered it more expeditiously. A more overarching problem is the chronology: as with a fairy-tale, everything works out just at the right time: Treebeard's waited before noticing trees once his friends had been cut down; the Dwarves' Hall converted into a tomb, apparently a century or two earlier, and yet expected to be occupied; Aragorn inspecting a broken sword a few thousand years old, and yet being part of a continuous bloodline—the tale's components are left around, like props waiting to be picked up. Much of the film follows the book, though I think ringwraiths in the book are afraid to travel except at night. There are anachronisms—tobacco, potatoes.

A fascinating aspect of the 'Great War', though perhaps not as perceived by Tolkien and his youthful friends, is the question of finance and repayments. The orc asking Christopher Lee, "What orders from Saruman, my lord?" is told he has been instructed to build a huge army. (Something like that). Apart from a complaint about maggotty bread, there's no hint about practicalities, just pictorial stuff showing industrial activity and what might have been meant to be biological or genetic processes. This is of course an accurate representation of the simple mechanicals propagandised and conscribed and shuffled into war.
      The 'Great War' started the process of mass race battles, though this is rarely made clear. The French 'elite' used coloured troops in Germany, for example. Saruman obeying orders and assembling or breeding an inarticulate aggressive race may have been modelled on Jews arranging one group to be used against another group of non-Jews, not something new, of course: Jews had a long traditional 'ethic' of slavery, including in the USA. And Jews invented Islam as a way to use Arabs. I don't know whether Tolkien was aware of this aspect of the world, his unyielding oratorical factless fixations aren't appealing to me. Possibly he was more concerned with class fixing, in the way that 'Grammar Schools' were fixed against ordinary, or non-existent, or 'Public Schools'. Unpleasant stuff, generally not discussed.
      The Two Towers extended DVD has two Appendices, one showing Peter Jackson—at the time I write this, about 25 years older—discussing the 'Great War' in innocent, unrevisionist form. He thinks it was a disastrous waste, not imagining that some people wanted war and planned and worked for it. Bob and Harvey Weinstein seem to have contributed much of the advance budget, so that Jewish bias, as is normal, dominates the films. Jackson is shown (with an untranslated b/w sequence of Hitler) saying there were no doubts about the Second World War, a Jew-based view which also erases Stalin. I wonder if the screenplay writers had any clue about this sort of thing. I'd guess not. In any case they could mostly use Tolkien's rather empty verbiage, slightly reminiscent of Churchill in his usual oratorical mode.

The main failure in my view was the omission of what must have been part of Tolkien's emotional message, namely the effects of the wars in Mordor and Helm's Deep and wherever. Volume 3 of Tolkien's trilogy, The Return of the King, has 'the scouring of the shires', in which the malign influence of Saruman is fought against: morals have decayed, a strange wizard moves about corrupting people and their lives, frauds and trickery multiply. Bilbo's hobbit-hole effects are being auctioned: in just such a way Tolkien, returning from France and from the war he never understood, must have mourned his lost friends, and been shocked at life continuing in its rather sordid indifference.
      The film has none of this, apart from the auction: just a sentimentalised last journey, a painfully slow ending, resembling in fact the conventionalised 'we will remember them' lie, and resembling what must have been the experience of many 'veterans'. The long-drawn-out ending suggests that a lot of material was abandoned.
      The Appendices have a lot of detail ('huge', 'incredible', 'surreal') and implausible stuff about craftsmanship, when probably they just liked long-term employment in place of low-cost parings. At the very end there's a long sequence promoting 'chemotherapy' for youngsters, part of the promote-cancers-for-young-people movement, mixed with ball-game stuff on the USA model. (Really). At one point Jackson even compares his films with big home movies.
      There's a parallel with events after he 'Great War', when Jewish paper money from the USA and control over the US regime led to flooding of eastern Europe with terror. Pretty much omitted from all Jewish 'narratives'.

I wonder whether a large part of the attraction of the books—the feelings of stability, the Ages of Middle Earth, the historical appendices packed with details of remote events—is the fairly systematic accounts of meaningful history, as a counter to the squelching absurdities of Jewish rubbish which have been imposed for at least a thousand years on Europe.

It's why I give the film only 4 stars, and even that is excessive considering the ending. It seems appropriate that Jackson's subsequent work includes the completely unimportant impossibly large monkey in New York, and the Belgian cartoonist's Tintin, animated with Steven Spielberg, the Jewish fantasist and liar. Modern techniques could film (e.g.) the Jewish takeover of Russia: murder scenes, famine scenes, war scenes, worldwide skulduggery. But this is not for our time and would need determination on a scale I cannot believe Jackson has.

(But at least it provided a title for my 'nuclear' video, Lords of the Nukes).

When I watched Part 1 in a cinema—a long time ago—I watched the interminable list of specially-credited fans, in alphabetical order. I now see that Luke W. Mathis is one of them; brother of Miles W. Mathis?

I wonder if 'Gondor' might possibly have been London, with two letters changed. I also wonder how much filmic spectacle had part of its function distracting from 9/11.

RW   2015, 2024