The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King will be back in North American cinemas next month, to celebrate 20 years since Peter Jackson first debuted his Oscar-winning film. Its return to the multiplexes comes at a time when we seem to have more JRR Tolkien-inspired fantasies to choose from than a 1980s branch of Games Workshop. As well as Gollum and co returning to the big screen, we have the baffling, utterly superfluous yet sumptuously filmed and geekily delightful small screen The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV show. Then next year there will be The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated venture with Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhand and Jackson alumnus Miranda Otto as Eowyn (who will take the narrator’s role for the forthcoming prequel about the legendary warrior king of Rohan).
We are also promised several new live-action movies based on Tolkien’s Middle-earth, after a deal struck by rights holder Embracer Group and studios Warner Bros and New Line. Jackson and his two closest Lord of the Rings collaborators, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have said they are being kept in the loop “every step of the way” about the new films.
Meanwhile, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is about to hit cinemas, bringing back to the screen the American role-playing franchise inspired by Tolkien. Starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Hugh Grant, it looks a lot more silly and a lot less po-faced than the Jackson movies, and yet we are still talking about a tale of perky elves, wise wizards and nasty necromancers. If Sam and Frodo turned up halfway through to reveal that a new ring of power had been discovered that gives its user the ability to ride Ents and engage Balrogs in polite conversation, nobody would be the least bit surprised.
But wonderful as all this stuff isai, the ubiquity of Tolkienesque drama is overshadowing the fact that this is not the only way to make fantasy movies, or even deliver swords and sorcery on the big screen.
When Jackson was a toddler, long before Lord of the Rings had first been adapted for screen (via Ralph Bakshi’s ill-fated 1978 attempt), there was 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, Don Chaffey’s glorious tale of gods and stop-motion monsters. The scene in which Jason battles seven living skeletons, which apparently took the celebrated stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen months to create, still gives me the willies. The final film Harryhausen worked on, 1981’s Clash of the Titans, had the spine-chilling Medusa scene to equal it.
Chaffey’s aim was to bring Greek mythology to life for film audiences, replete with new deities, demigods and other assorted celestial beings. Yet Hollywood seems to have forgotten about this great pantheon of stories that are ripe for the plucking. Where are the soaring, splendid movies – especially given the remarkable advances in special effects since Harryhausen’s day – about brave but reckless Theseus and the minotaur, or Bellerophon and Pegasus, the winged horse? Why have the 12 tasks of Heracles been forgotten while Homer’s Odyssey, perhaps the ultimate tale of a fantasy quest, languishes in cinematic obscurity?
Perhaps studios think that the abject failure of 2010’s Clash of the Titans remake, and its useless sequel, 2012’s Wrath of the Titans, is reason enough to abandon Mount Olympus. But those movies were directed by Louis Leterrier and Jonathan Liebesman; Lord of the Rings got Jackson and his team. It’s hardly a fair contest.
A couple of half-baked Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief movies from the early 00s were not enough to shake up the picture. These days the ancient Greek tales are most likely to inspire comic-book movies. DC’s Wonder Woman is inspired by Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt (though she has been bestowed instead with the deity’s Roman equivalent, Diana) as well as the warrior goddess Athena. Russell Crowe played a fittingly pompous and effete Zeus in the recent Marvel movie Thor: Love and Thunder, while Aquaman has definite shades of Poseidon.
But superhero movies about godlike deities often seem to miss out on the gravitas and majesty of the original myths that inspired them, partly because there is a temptation to slip into comedy fish-out-of-water territory when such beings come into contact with 21st-century humanity.
I’m not sure I want to see Perseus joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Jason, leader of the Argonauts, battling Batman. But I can imagine both roaring back to big screen glory in all their heroic splendour if their stories were given to a director who is a genuine titan of Hollywood, rather than … you know … someone who’s made a few pop videos.