There are some news stories that, as soon as you’ve clocked them, lead to a frantic bout of mental calendar checking – because it’s almost impossible to accept that they could be real unless it’s 1 April. “The Hunt for Gollum: Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis to work on new Lord of the Rings film” is most definitely one of these.
What on Middle-earth is going on here? We’ve known for some time now that Hollywood is primed and ready to re-plunder JRR Tolkien’s beloved high-fantasy tomes, ever since Warner Bros announced a deal to make multiple new movies based on the books in February last year. The first of these will be the animated venture The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which is set 200 years before the events of The Hobbit – because it is being delivered in an alternative format (and doesn’t retread events we’ve already seen on screen) feels like a reasonably intriguing addition to the canon. There’s also Amazon’s TV show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, an entirely unnecessary prequel to the film trilogy, which I nonetheless devoured like a warg that’s not eaten any fantasy homunculi for at least three weeks. By the end of the first season, I had absolutely no idea who any of these people were (except perhaps Galadriel), but the whole thing was so deliciously Tolkien-y that none of this seemed to matter.
Yet even the most devoted fan of hobbits, dwarves, wizards et al must draw the line somewhere, and, for me, it might just be at the entrance to Gollum’s gloomy cave. Why would anyone want to see this new episode? Unless Jackson (who will produce) and Serkis (who will direct and star) are being especially tricksy, the movie’s title infers heavily that we’ll be going over old ground that’s already been covered in the Lord of the Rings movies. Surely the “hunt” in question will be the segue (skipped over in the movies) in which Aragorn finally finds Gollum in the Dead Marshes, having been trying to track him down at the behest of Gandalf, as part of the wizard’s lengthy efforts (we are talking decades in the books) to discover whether the trinket found by Bilbo in The Hobbit might indeed be Sauron’s One Ring of power.
Tolkien does not narrate the tale of the near two-month journey in which Aragorn drags Gollum to the Mirkwood court of elf king Thranduil in a manner that suggests Serkis’s film is being set up as a kooky, fun-time epic fantasy take on The Odd Couple or 3:10 to Yuma. The future king of Gondor describes getting nothing more out of the despicable creature’s mouth “than the marks of his teeth”, and implies he was delighted to finally get rid of Gollum because he could no longer cope with the one-time ring-bearer’s rancid stink.
Some of Serkis’s best moments in the mo-cap suit, of course, came in similarly torrid sequences as Sam and Frodo dragged the tormented creature towards Mount Doom in Jackson’s films. But bringing scenes to the big screen that were not deemed vital enough to make the hardly fleeting, 12-hour-plus running time of the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, almost a quarter century on, feels a little gratuitous. This is the sort of material that is usually the domain of the fan film, and indeed there has already been one. Despite all their best efforts, its makers only managed to stretch the thing out to 40 minutes, so what exactly makes Serkis think he can get any more out of a retread? Lord knows Jackson is the king of Middle-earth padding – perhaps The Hunt for Gollum will feature a 20-minute interlude in which Tom Bombadil tries to romance a sexy Ent – but surely even he can’t get this one to two hours-plus.
It rather beggars belief that the Kiwi film-maker and his team, who won Oscars for their original efforts, should be scraping the barrel so desperately two decades on. What could be the advantage here? Are we missing something? If the team really are revisiting this section of the Lord of the Rings – why? We already know what happens – we have to assume that there is a chance Viggo Mortensen will be back as a (presumably de-aged) Aragorn, with Ian McKellen once again taking up Gandalf’s staff. Lee Pace made for an excellently haughty Thranduil in the Hobbit movies, but there must surely be more interesting ways to see him again.
Perhaps this is all smoke and mirrors, and The Hunt for Gollum will detail a completely different period of the sallow creature’s long life as a ring bearer. After all, he is more than 600 years old, so there might well be other stories to be told between Sméagol’s discovery of the ring and the best part of five centuries before he finally lost it to Bilbo Baggins in the mirk of the Misty Mountains. It could be fun watching the bit in which our hero is chased out of his proto-hobbit village for theft, murder and an unhealthy habit of not really ageing for centuries. But Gollum is so essentially tied up with the story of Frodo and the Ring of Power, that it seems unlikely we would be too interested.
What have Serkis and Jackson got in their pocketses? This is a riddle to which we do not yet know the answer, and like Bilbo in the tunnels of Gollum’s lair, would be better off never finding out.
