Despite Its Flaws, Tolkien Is an Important Chapter in the Middle Earth Legacy

It's the ultimate The Lord of the Rings prequel, taking place long before even The Hobbit existed. It’s an origin story about how all those elves, dragons, wizards and quests were born out of a literary club, a teenage romance and a conflict dubbed The War to End All Wars. J.R.R. Tolkien fanatics likely won’t miss Tolkien, no matter how well they already know the story. But for the rest of us, director Dome Karukoski’s film connects the autobiographical dots that informed the greatest fantasy epic of all time. Tolkien also mostly manages to pull off some of the greatest magic of all: making books and writing compelling on screen. 

For the uninitiated, Tolkien is jammed with surprises about the man behind Middle Earth. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) and his brother were very well educated at home by their mother, and both knew multiple languages at early ages. Orphaned in early-20th-century Birmingham, England, the brothers were taken in by a boarding school foster mother and looked after by a kindly Catholic priest. They gained access to elite education, and Tolkien eventually became a professor at Oxford. Tolkien fell in love with one of his fellow orphans and housemates, but the two were separated when Tolkien left their foster home for university and then for the front at the beginning of World War I. Tolkien deftly demonstrates how all of these experiences found their ways into the author’s personal mythology and his fictional creations. 

As a writer and a movie lover, I’m automatically attracted to literary subjects on screen. Even so, bookish movies are often disappointing — the act of writing is largely internal and inherently anti-cinematic. That said, the passion and energy writers share for their work can make for compelling moving images, and Tolkien’s best storyline features the author and three grade-school pals creating their own literary secret society for the stated purpose of changing the world through art. All the young actors in this film are fantastic, and the scenes of these boys one-upping each other’s opinions about books and authors — waxing pretentiously about the purpose of poetry, gulping tea, reciting mythical tales aloud, pledging their commitment to a life in art — are the best in the picture. More than once Tolkien put me in mind of Dead Poets Society, and there isn’t higher praise for a literary coming-of-age screen story. 

The movie misses a step with its central love story, that of Tolkien and his wife Edith (Lily Collins). Their early scenes as youngsters set the love-of-a-lifetime tone, but the adult actors don’t have the chemistry to pull it off. And while Edith plays a part in Tolkien’s development as an author, these romantic scenes are overlong, distracting from the central theme of the film — the birth of Tolkien’s remarkable imagination.

But Tolkien isn’t entirely a coming-of-age film. It’s also a World War I movie, and Tolkien spends most of the film stumbling through miles of trenches during the Battle of the Somme, searching for his lit-club pal Geoffrey, who may already be dead at the front. Tolkien is all but incapacitated by the nasty disease known as trench fever, and his quest to find his friend is punctuated by hallucinations and reveries about growing up before the war. These play out in flashbacks that include Tolkien’s early experiments creating languages and cultures, monsters and magicians to populate the first versions of his fictional universe. The battle scenes here are overlaid with tasteful effects that hint at how German flamethrower squads might have inspired Middle Earth’s dragons, and munitions explosions are given ghastly countenances, resembling the face of the demonic Balrog from The Lord of the Rings. The battle scenes and the fantasy elements all look spectacular — not an easy feat considering the context of Peter Jackson’s six Middle Earth films. Tolkien now joins those films as another important chapter in Middle Earth’s cinematic universe.