Sir Ian McKellen dropped a stinker on the British talkshow This Morning earlier in the week so putrid that even Gollum himself might steer clear of it. The 85-year-old star of the Lord of the Rings movies was being asked about a return to Middle-earth in The Hunt for Gollum, which will see Peter Jackson (this time as producer) and Andy Serkis (director, and Gollum) heading back to JRR Tolkien’s high fantasy classic more than two decades after the former completed 2003’s Oscar-winning The Return of the King.
“There’ll be a script arriving sometime in the new year, and I’ll judge whether I want to go back,” laughed McKellen. “I would. I would love to go back to New Zealand, number one. And also, I don’t like the idea of anyone else playing Gandalf.”
But then he added: “I’m told it’s two films. I probably shouldn’t be saying that. But I haven’t read the script. So, I don’t know if it is.”
Is McKellen winding us up? For those who haven’t been keeping a close eye on The Hunt for Gollum, which was announced in May, it’s possible this doesn’t sound all that weird. After all, Jackson made trilogies out of both The Lord of the Rings (1,000 pages +) and the far more breezy, 300-page Hobbit.
These movies kept the entire Kiwi film industry rolling for more than a decade. People ate, good times were had and McKellen was on screen longer than Gollum himself has spent gnawing on questionable fish. There were even quite a few bits of The Lord of the Rings that Jackson didn’t manage to reimagine for the multiplex, such as the scouring of the Shire or the bit featuring Tom Bombadil, though with The Hobbit he was forced to parachute in various Orc mini-bosses from Tolkien’s more obscure scribblings, as well as a highly dubious elf-dwarf romance, just to pad things out.
And here lies the problem with The Hunt for Gollum, and in particular the prospect of it being stretched to two movies. It’s not a book at all, in fact it’s barely a few hundred words of high-end Gandalf-speak at the Council of Elrond, in Rivendell, before the quest to destroy the ring begins a-proper (though there are some background details in the Lord of the Rings’ appendices and Tolkien’s posthumously assembled Unfinished Tales). Yes, we’re told that Aragorn’s search for the wretched former ring-bearer, at the behest of the grey wizard, took many years. But while the future King of Gondor’s adventures in the period are well-documented in Tolkien’s writings, he definitely did not spend all this time trudging through murky pools in search of Middle-earth’s equivalent of the guy in the park who’s always talking to pigeons.
Fair enough, Gollum is essentially Middle-earth’s hide-and-seek champion, a creature with the ability to vanish into a rock crevice like a feral cat who owes you rent money. Tracking him would be like trying to follow lembas breadcrumbs through a hurricane on the peaks of the Misty Mountains, or chasing a hyperactive squirrel hopped up on pipeweed through Fangorn Forest. But two (probably two-hour plus) movies? Perhaps we’ll get 20 minutes of Aragorn thoughtfully stroking his chin while staring at some vague footprints, or a 45-minute subplot where Gandalf takes a quick detour to the Prancing Pony for a not-so-swift half or eight. Or maybe there will be huge detours away from the dead marshes in which Strider gets involved in something else entirely, just for a bit of a break from the tedium.
Amazon’s The Rings of Power has shown it is possible to draw completely disparate threads of Tolkien’s legendarium (some of which took place thousands of years apart in the books) together into a coherent whole with the help of totally made-up additional characters and a side-order of irritating homunculi. Throw us a glimpse of someone who might be one of the lost “blue” Istari and the odd mention of “Rhûn” (RHÛN!) into the mix and those of us who lap this stuff up will soon find ourselves purring like a juvenile warg on the lap of Sauron who’s just been told it’s hobbit for dinner.
It turns out there really are plenty more stories of Middle-earth to tell, and this is indeed a world ripe for fleshing out. But that does not explain why Jackson is returning to a LOTR subplot that takes up as much space in Tolkien’s texts as Tom Bombadil’s haircare routine.
We’re also told, by the way, that Orlando Bloom will be back as Legolas, which makes a certain amount of sense. When Aragorn does eventually capture the wretched beast in the books, he takes him into the heart of Mirkwood, to the realm of the elf king Thranduil, who just happens to be Legolas’s dad.
The only issue here, of course, is that Bloom will be approaching 50 when this thing eventually gets made, but will be appearing as a younger version of the character he played 20-plus years ago. But don’t panic, the film-makers are reportedly planning to overcome such issues – elves are supposed to be immortal, but they do not age backwards – via the magic of artificial intelligence. “I did speak to Andy [Serkis] and he did say they were thinking about how to do things,” Bloom told Variety. “I was like, ‘How would that even work?’ And he was like, ‘Well, AI!’”
No doubt 65-year-old Viggo Mortensen will also be pricking up his ears at this news. And perhaps Serkis and Jackson can use the same AI tools to flesh out The Hunt for Gollum to epic length, like children who are handed a single Lego brick and somehow end up building a perfect replica of Minas Tirith complete with working trebuchets and a tiny Aragorn giving motivational speeches. Stranger things have already happened in the brave new world of Tolkien adaptations, and some of them are actually pretty cool.
But given we’ve now seen the wonders of Númenor, and even the mysterious Bombadil himself in Rings of Power, couldn’t Serkis and Jackson have given us Beren and Lúthien’s quest to retrieve a silmaril from the crown of Morgoth, the first dark lord of Middle-earth? Or perhaps even a film focused on the War of Wrath, the final battle to defeat the latter that saw elves, men and valar (gods) battling against dragons, balrogs and other dark creatures?
Frankly, they may as well give us Lord of the Rings Zombies (Aragorn and Faramir are duped into purchasing some dodgy jewellery and end up as proto-ringwraiths!) or Boromir: Origins, a six-part prequel series in which Sean Bean gets to die repeatedly in new and horrifically inventive ways each episode. It couldn’t be worse than the prospect of spending the best part of four or five hours crisscrossing the dead marshes as an increasingly desperate Gollum tries to convince Strider to partake of the icky local pond life.