Tolkien Movie Review

Tolkien (2019) is a biographical drama about the life of young J.R.R. Tolkien. It was written by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford and directed by Dome Karukoski. None of these were known to me prior to this film, which can be a good thing as you don't have any other works to form your expectations. To be quite honest, I didn't have high hopes for this movie and I was unfortunately not happily surprised.

According to The Guardian, The Tolkien Estate did not in any way participate in, or even approve the making of this movie. They also stated that they do not endorse its content, and their response was even backed up by John Garth (author of Tolkien and the Great War, which I highly recommend) who expects that the movie will give rise to "new misconceptions".

I am not going to nitpick on this movie, although a lot of changes were obviously made in the making of the script. I usually defend the act of making (minor) changes for the sake of drama, but here I do not see much reason for it. My biggest issue is that the filmmakers completely left out the fact that Tolkien was a devoted catholic, which gives the word "biographical" a bitter taste. Tolkien's friends also talk about what a genius he is, yet we barely get to see any of it. He shows off his language skills in one or two scenes and that is it. However, to compensate for the ironic lack of language, we get an awful lot of WWI scenes, as if Karukoski thought the audience would be bored if they did not cut to the war every now and then.

Most of the scenes felt loosely connected and at least half of the move felt very rushed, the beginning in particular. So much in fact that I would even call it chaotic. Hi, this is young Tolkien, he had a mother but she died, okay moving on! 

Overall, I found this movie to be rushed and at the same time tedious. I would not recommend it to anyone. Just do yourself a favor and pick up a Tolkien biography, preferably John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War or Arne Zetterstens J.R.R. Tolkien's Double Worlds and Creative Process.