Tolkien Review

Did any of you realize this movie came out this past weekend? Based on the box office numbers, I'd be willing to be that the answer for many is a resounding no. The movie only made $2.2 million from 1,495 theaters for a per theater average of just $1,472. Without diving too deep into the numbers, let's just say that anytime a movie opens into the $1,000 range in per theater average, that's not good. Usually you'd like at least $4,000-5,000, especially for a movie about someone as popular as J.R.R. Tolkien, a man who is obviously one of the most influential authors to ever live. That means opening in 1,495 theaters, this should've made at least $5-7 million, not a ninth place finish with $2.2 million. I think the problem here is that the marketing for this movie was flat out terrible. Outside initial buzz when the trailer was finally released a couple of months ago, I don't think the awareness here was very high. A big part of that problem is that Fox Searchlight was initially planning on a limited release, slow roll out plan for this movie, using word of mouth to build buzz. But Disney, who now owns Fox Searchlight, panicked and threw it into 1,400 theaters almost last second, probably because they knew they had a stinker on their hands so they tried to salvage as much as they could.

This turn of events was one of many red flags that went up for me regarding this movie. I mean, I didn't even include this movie in my May movie preview because I only cover wide releases in that segment and two weeks ago this was not set for a wide release. If we're backing things up a bit, the movie did get some buzz back in February when the initial teaser was released, followed by a lot of buzz when the full trailer came out in March. I knew a lot of my friends that were really excited. But I didn't jump on that train. Yeah, the trailer looked good and a movie about Tolkien sounded like a great idea, but I immediately had a whole lot of questions. The biggest one was why is this movie coming out in May? That might seem like a silly question to have, but Fox Searchlight is one of the most prominent studios for independent films. In this decade alone, a movie of there's has taken home the trophy for best picture at the Oscars three times ("The Shape of Water," "Birdman," "12 Years a Slave"), which is the most of any studio. And very rarely does a year go by where at least one of their movies is not in the running. So they know this game just as good, if not better than anyone. Yet they chose to release "Tolkien" in May instead of giving it an awards push.

Maybe that's a silly thing to be worried about, but a well-made biopic of J.R.R. Tolkien is an easy pick for a big awards contender. If they were confident that they had something great on their hands, they would've put it through the festival rounds, then given it an awards-friendly release date towards the end of the year. But they didn't. Because they have to make money during other times of the year, too, so they pick the movies they know won't be big contenders and give those release dates earlier in the year. And hey, if they're not confident that this movie is good enough to win any awards, why not throw it in the summer season and attempt to attract the huge Middle Earth fan base? It makes sense financially, but it still had me worried. So then in an attempt to figure out why Fox Searchlight wasn't confident about this, I checked out the director here. Dome Karukoski. Never heard of him? Exactly. He's a Finnish filmmaker who's made close to nothing that anyone's heard of. Even in checking out the smaller, foreign films he has made, none of them have very high marks. So that gave me even less confidence. Thus the signs all seemed to be pointing towards this not being a good film.

There's plenty of other things that I could get into. Like the Tolkien Estate wanting absolutely nothing to do with this project. Or the fact that Fox Searchlight doesn't release religious films, which I think needed to be a huge part of this movie for it to work in my books, but I think it's time to start discussing the movie itself. Long story short, I was not the least bit surprised when I saw the movie get a 51 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 48 on Metacritic. For clarification, those aren't bad reviews. I hate it when people look at a 50 percent score and say that the critics hated the movie. That's not what it means. It means they were split. In this case, half of the critics liked it and half of them didn't. But mixed reviews is not an encouraging sign here, but given everything I just stated, I was not the least bit surprised. However, I didn't want to go into the movie having hated it before I even watched it, even though my expectations were rock bottom. And based on all the red flags, I felt like I wasn't in the proper mindset to give this movie a fair chance and I became angry at myself because of that. So I tried. And I tried hard. I ignored all of this and went in to watch a movie as if I hadn't heard anything about it.

My goodness, though, did this movie not do me any favors. Given that this is about the man who created Middle Earth, perhaps a Middle Earth comparison here is appropriate. I felt like Gollum when he's arguing with himself. When the movie was boring the tar out of me, the Gollum part of my mind was screaming to be front and center, yelling things like, "You knew this was going to be bad! So give in and tear it to pieces. Look for the negative! Make this experience worse!" But then the Smeagol part of my mind took over and said things like, "No! That's not fair. Thousands of people put their heart and soul into making this movie work. The director was touched by Tolkien and wanted to tell history and the lead actors are trying their hardest to make something people can be proud of!" This debate went back and forth for the whole film. The Gollum part of my mind kept looking for the bad, but the Smeagol part of my mind kept forcing myself to look for the good. It was exhausting. The end credits rolled after this nearly two hour film, then I drove home and just crashed into my giant love sac. I couldn't even properly express any coherent thoughts to my roommates when they asked me how it was. So I determined that I needed to sit on it for a day or two.

That was a bad idea. Because when the dust settled in my mind, all the thoughts just disappeared. They evaporated from existence. I quickly learned that this is a movie that I'm going to completely forget ever existed. And perhaps all of this is the problem. This movie should be an Oscar contender. It should be welcomed by the Tolkien Estate. It should be made by a great director. It should hit the festival circuits. It should be released at the end of the year. It should have a high score on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. And most of all, I shouldn't have to spend the whole movie debating in my mind as to whether or not this is good or not. It should be a magical experience where I can come home and shout to the rooftops that everyone should go see this movie. This is fracking J.R.R. Tolkien for crying out loud. The man who wrote "The Lord of the Rings." Like everyone else who has lived on this planet since "The Hobbit" was published in 1937, followed by "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy in the 1950's, I love these books. I love this story. Not only are these stories on their own extraordinary, but the world of fiction has not been the same since as their influence is far reaching. A movie about this man's life shouldn't be anything less than stellar.

However, unlike Tolkien's stories themselves, this movie has no idea what it wants to be. The movie has no focus. It has no direction. It has no purpose. You'll learn more about Tolkien himself by reading the Wikipedia article about his life than by watching this movie. I mean, the best this movie has to offer is an endless barrage of instructions on how to pronounce his last name. I mean, it's phenomenal how often that comes up. It's Tol-KEEN. Not Tol-KINE. Not Tol-KIN. Tol-KEEN. That's the only thing I really learned from this. Admittedly I have probably been on the Tol-KIN route for most of my life. Like the word "token," but with an an "L." I apologize for making that mistake. It won't happen again. Outside that, well, yeah there's not much here. The majority of this movie is focused on how he met his wife and the relationship he had with a group of friends who really gave him something to live for after his mother's passing orphaned him. That's this movie. And oh yeah, he went to Oxford. He loved languages. He fought in a war. The director claims there was things in there about religion, but I didn't see it. And he eventually wrote a book series that people liked. But all of that is beside the point. This is a movie about his wife and friends, with everything else being more of an afterthought.

I think that there is the disappointing thing. There's so much potential in a story like this, yet all the interesting things are thrown to the side so that we can witness a romance drama between Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins. And to their credit, the two of them are phenomenal. Nicholas Hoult is trying his absolute best to bring this man to life. And it mostly works until his religious guardian tells him that he's not allowed to make his own decisions until he turns 21. Yeah, Nicholas Hoult turns 30 at the end of this year. And he definitely looks that old, too. I say that because 30 is my age. Lily Collins is also 30 years old. She turned 30 back in March. Like Taylor Swift, we were all born in 1989. When you make people born in our year portray teenagers, it doesn't work. Wikipedia informs me that Tolkien met his wife when he was 16 years old, she being three years his senior. They were married in 1916, when he was 24. He fought in the war starting in 1915, when he was 23. Most of this movie is prior to those two events. Nicholas Hoult looks none of these ages. So if the goal is to tell the story of early Tolkien, we have some miscasting going on. But that's the least of my problems here. Despite being the wrong ages, these two performances were one of the bright spots.

Ultimately, though, that makes me feel a bit bad for them. With a proper screenplay and proper direction, we're looking at Oscar nominations for these two. They'd at least be in the conversation. But alas, they're doing their absolute best in a movie that has no idea what it wants to be. I'm no screenplay writer, but this doesn't seem like that hard of a task. I immediately am thinking to a movie called "The Man Who Invented Christmas," which is about Charles Dickens writing "A Christmas Carol." That movie showcases the exact influences on him writing that story. In fact, his characters are in the movie themselves. It shows how it happened. Do something similar to that and you have a great movie here. Figure out the main influences for "The Lord of the Rings" and fashion a story that directly focuses on those influences. The war was a big one. That was an afterthought here. I mean, there was one scene where he's on the battlefield and the battlefield becomes like a battle from "The Lord of the Rings." That was cool. It lasted like five seconds, though. His Catholic faith was another huge influence. All of that was completely M.I.A. from this movie. How Tolkien met his wife is not a movie I really cared to see when you tell me there is a movie about his life.

I get it, though. The fellowship. The group of friends he had formed a strong bond that was obviously like the fellowship from "The Fellowship of the Ring." But the movie refused to even use the word fellowship until the last minute of the movie. And even then, the stories revolving around this group of friends felt random and scattered. There's no real focus. Just a bunch of scenes of them living life intertwined with the how Tolkien met his wife story arc. It wasn't that interesting. There was no narrative structure to this movie. Just random sequences of events loosely tied together to form this thing we called a movie. The cinematography was great. The score was beautiful. And as I've said, all the acting was phenomenal. But there's no movie to this movie. The plot doesn't really happen. I mean, technically it does, but it's scattered and all over the place. I had a really long day of work before I saw this and I was hoping that this movie would be my reward for the end of the day, but instead it was perfect background noise to help me fall asleep. The only reason I stayed awake is because I didn't pay to go take a nap in the theater. And I can't write a review for a movie I ended up sleeping through. But man did I really want to throw in the towel and just fall asleep.

When all is said and done, I have to zero in on one thing that I believe to be the root of the problem. This movie has no direction. And when the movie has no direction, that means you hired the wrong director. So now we've come full circle to my initial fears. When I tried to figure out why Fox Searchlight was releasing this in May instead of during awards season, I looked up the director and panicked. But hey, no name directors come out of thin air to make great masterpieces, so maybe this could be this man's big break? Nope. He was the wrong man for the job. And now it's unfortunate because this may have been our one chance to get a Tolkien biopic done. Yes, Hollywood is super busy remaking and redoing everything. But it's not often that Hollywood takes a second shot at a biopic. It happened with Steve Jobs and said second attempt was miles better, but that's the only example I can think of. That means this here might be our one Tolkien biopic. And they dropped the ball. That sucks. There may be good elements in this movie. You can tell that a lot of people tried to make this good. But in examining the movie as a whole, it doesn't work. It's just going to fall by the wayside as a movie that no one will remember ever existed. Thus I'm giving "Tolkien" a 5/10.