what we have come to

This review of the new War of the Rohirrim movie, which like other reviews I've seen describes as dull and forgettable this attempt to fill out Tolkien's brief backstory of Helm's Deep, gets one important thing critically right. The author writes, "Game of Thrones ... and others have assumed that fantasy will only appeal to modern audiences if it's people using violence to jockey for position. This is a far cry from The Lord of the Rings the world fell in love with, where power is a corruptive force and inflicting violence, while necessary in war, is not necessarily what makes a hero." (I've moved a comma to improve the grammatical sense.)

This is one of the strongest of the important points that distinguish Tolkien's work from the hack-and-slash fantasies so often incongruously associated with his. I once wrote, "Those mighty-thewed warriors would consider even Aragorn a rather sniveling fellow, and would not grasp the concept of the non-violent Frodo as a hero at all." So many people don't get this difference; this writer does; so far so good.

The problem is that context shows that what the writer means by "The Lord of the Rings the world fell in love with" is the Jackson movies. We have reached a state of degradation where Jackson's atrocious distortion of Tolkien's themes looks like a beacon of faithfulness to the original in comparison with the even worse atrocities - including Jackson's Hobbit - that have come since.

I survived only one episode of Rings of Power and found myself wondering why anyone who loves Tolkien's work would even want to watch this. The amoral whinging - so similar to the description of War of the Rohirrim in these reviews - is so totally unlike Tolkien as to leave nothing in common but a few of the character names. Surely that's not enough to account for its appeal. You might like this kind of hack fiction also, but only as an entirely separate thing: to affiliate it with Tolkien's suggests you weren't paying attention when you read the original.

Such a problem infects another review of War of the Rohirrim I've seen which takes a similar tack to the first one. This author claims that the sheer length of Jackson's movies is "part of why [they're] so beloved," explaining that "Jackson's films mimicked the feeling of reading Tolkien's novels, more focused on spinning a yarn than structuring a story for the necessary constraints of television."

Well, that Jackson didn't care about constraints for structuring his story is true. Jackson told the story the way he wanted to, ignoring the "rules" of moviemaking whenever he wanted to (which is why I refuse to accept the necessities of the rules of moviemaking as a defense for his atrocities on the source material). He didn't tell it the way that conventional moviemakers would have wanted, or the way that Tolkien would have wanted.

But if that's what makes his movies beloved, then his Hobbit - even longer (relatively) and less structured than his LR - should be even more beloved. But it isn't, so that's hogwash. And even more hogwashable is the claim that LR "mimicked the feeling of reading Tolkien's novels." My god, did you see the movies? Did you read the book? Despite the movies' length, the rush-rush-rush of the action, the pitching directly from one catastrophe into the next (not 100% accurate, but it feels that way next to the book), with pauses either entirely omitted (where's the days-long creeping through Moria, for instance? It could have been depicted in a brief shot of a few seconds without adding anything to the run time) or treated ineptly (Rivendell, beautiful but perfunctory and hamhanded, and Lorien, not even beautiful) is so far from mimicking the book as to be one of the atrocities.

I won't be watching War of the Rohirrim. I have no interest in a hack-and-slash adventure, even if it's supposedly set in Tolkien's world and has his invented names on some of the characters. And I don't get why other Tolkien fans would bother to watch it.