When I was eleven years old, my life was changed not by a highly anticipated letter from Hogwarts (which never came), but by the beginning of a journey through middle earth that I embarked upon with The Fellowship of the Ring. I had always loved movies, but here was a film which captivated and transported me like few before or since. It was the fantasy film I had been waiting for all of my life.
Of course, I complained about its variance from the book. Where was Tom Bombadil? Why does Legolas have so many more lines? Why’d they replace Glorfindel with Arwen? (and much later: why didn’t they get Faromir right he was so cool in the books and they didn’t capture that!) But they weren’t real complaints. They were words to placate my book-loving self and my loyalist friends, staunch supporters of the opinion that movies could never do justice to novels.
Following that film, my friends and I set off on our own adventure to make a more loyal film adaptation. We didn’t get too far, but it set into motion a driving need to create and to live in that world that drove me to organize my free time into script writing, costume making, set building and filming. Working with film, I had to rearrange how I thought about story construction. My first films are heavy on exposition, and it took me several films and dozens of comics to start telling stories with images instead of simply creating pictures to match the words I already had on the page.
But The Fellowship of the Ring has been out for a decade, has had its praises sung, its merits worshiped and its flaws scrutinized. So we’re really here to talk about a smaller, tighter story, not a sprawling fantasy epic, but the story of the transformation of one small hobbit as he braves the world outside his home and rises to meet the challenges that await him. A story only partially told in the first of three long films.
I should have loved it. I should have been entranced, enchanted, transported. I should have been so deeply involved in that film that I exited the theater at the end not knowing who I was or where I was, at home not in Kansas but in Hobbiton, in Rivendel, in Middle Earth. But I didn’t.
I came out saying “They could have cut a lot.”
What I want is a single, really tight film, there and back again, about Bilbo’s journey. Not Thorin’s backstory or Gandalf’s adventures fighting the necromancer. A hobbit’s tale. Make a mini series with all the other story material, The Book of Lost Tales, The Unfinished Tales, the Appendixes, the Silmarilian and all the rest, but give me one concise and beautiful film with The Hobbit. And as much as I would love for Peter Jackson to do another cut when the third installment is over, taking material from all three films and cutting all the excess, that’s not where I’m going to get what I want.
I’m going to get it from Lego.
The other night as I was playing the Hobbit video game (a 2003 gem; a fun, cute game that deviates from the story but not too far for comfort), lamenting the length of The Hobbit and my desire to have a single film, my sister pulled up a youtube video that collected all of the cut scenes from the Lego Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
And… it was beautiful.
The Lego video games are full of humor and skillful, minimalistic storytelling. Though it may be necessary to be familiar with the original work to fully understand what’s going on, Lego tells the story simply, with quirky humor and not a lot of excess. It’s concise and well told and you can watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in an hour and a half.
So I’ll go to the next two Hobbit installments. And I’ll enjoy learning more about Thorin and Gandalf even as I long for a tighter movie more firmly centered on Bilbo. And when it’s all said and done, if Peter Jackson doesn’t give me the special edition cut I want, hopefully Lego will. And maybe next time Peter Jackson will give us a mini series, but also give in and create a single, tight, relatable, beautiful film. The film the Hobbit could have been.