Have sequels gone too far?
By Rachael Goddard-Rebstein
Now post production and only a few months away from widespread theatrical release, Peter Jackson’s long-awaited ‘Lord of the Rings’ prequel, ‘The Hobbit’, has already generated considerable hype. It hearkens back to the success of the original ‘Lord of Rings’ series while at the same time tapping into contemporary cultural trends, particularly with the inspired casting of Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins and Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug. What self-respecting ‘Sherlock’ fan could miss the chance to see their idols together once more, particularly as the next season of their beloved series has been put on hold for the sake of the movie?
But as well as reeling in multitudes of ‘Sherlock’ fans, ‘The Hobbit’ has the potential to exert a broader, more family based appeal than any of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ movies; if it is anything like the book, it will have fewer scenes of remorseless, brutal bloodshed and more encounters with fantastical creatures, fewer complicated political feuds and more snappy dialogue between highly eccentric characters. In short, the film looks set to attract a diverse range of audiences, everyone from ‘Sherlock’ worshippers to children enthralled by fantasy adventure to Tolkien experts—or at least it did, before the bombshell was dropped.
It was announced that there would be not one, but three ‘Hobbit’ movies; the story would be split into thirds and released as one small segment after another. This news reignited the debate over the rise of the sequel that has been dragging on, fruitlessly, for years—do the sprawling franchises of the past decade represent the height of epic storytelling or a headfirst dive into the cesspool of commercialism? Whatever view the audiences and critics take, the outcome is always the same; they will end up dragging themselves back to theatres to see sequel after sequel, complaining all the way. But something about the restructuring of the ‘The Hobbit’ touches a nerve; it represents a definite break from the past, a new milestone along the road of movie development, since it signifies the rise of an entirely new type of sequel.
Not too long ago, sequels were generally added to the original movie as an afterthought. Any movie that stood out from the others and managed to find its own particular niche in the market, like ‘Shrek’ or ‘Madagascar’ or ‘Toy Story’ or ‘Home Alone’, would go on to spawn endless reproductions of itself, generally until the series ran into the ground and the last spark of originality was entirely extinguished. But the original movie as well as each subsequent sequel would have a structure of its own, a perfect story arc with a beginning, middle and end. The relative independence of each movie in the series gave the audience the pleasant illusion of free will; technically they could watch just the first movie and leave it at that, or even watch one of the many sequels and get a relatively clear idea of the plot. But with this new version of the sequel, even that illusion is stripped away; if the audience wants to know the fate of the characters they love and the conclusion of the struggle they care about, they have no choice but to pay the ticket for the next movie. Little by little, sequels have become encoded into a film’s very DNA; the entire film is structured around the presumption that audiences will have to come and see the next one, whether they like it or not. The cliffhanger ending, which has for so long been the staple of soap operas and reality television, has finally made inroads into the world of movies.
Of course, it can be argued that the ‘The Hobbit’ is by no means the first to embrace this lucrative innovation; cliffhangers were the driving force behind lengthy movie series like ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Harry Potter’. But those series were structured according to the literary works they were based upon; even though there were rumblings of discontent over the splitting of the seventh Harry Potter book, fans begrudgingly agreed that as J.K Rowling’s longest work it probably deserved the most screen-time. ‘The Hobbit’ by contrast, does not naturally lend itself to a three part series; it is a single, cohesive adventure story, with nothing close to the epic scale and complexity of ‘The Lord of the Rings’. With no literary precedent to go by, the filmmakers must find their own way to reshape ‘The Hobbit’ into three semi-independent segments. For unlike a TV show, a movie series must do more than build up to a thrilling climax over several mediocre installments; each movie is expected to have some quality in itself that makes it worth the price of a ticket.
PHOTO/Film_Poster, Scott Monty
Anonymous
24/08/2012 at 02:13
Having studied the Old English and Middle English and Old Icelandic texts that made up Tolkien’s scholarship at Oxford University, from where he drew all his ideas for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and taking into account that Tolkien was an educator, I see these three books as introductions into that literature. And I see that it is done in a way by Tolkien that takes into account human development. That is, The Hobbit is a children’s introduction into that literature, while The Lord of the Rings is an adolescent survey of that literature with the appendices aiding that process, while The Silmarillion is an adult completion of that process. Therefore, I don’t think Tolkien would have done it any differently.
Note that ‘The Riddles in the Dark’ sequence as written in 1937 is very typical of a traditional literary device in Old Icelandic literature where one character tricks another into doing something for him that they otherwise wouldn’t do. The terms of the game in the 1937 edition is that if Gollum wins the game then he can eat Bilbo, whereas if Bilbo wins it Gollum will give him the Ring as a present but because Bilbo already has that in his pocket and really wants to get out of the Orc tunnels he does not reveal this so that when Gollum finds the Ring is gone he has Gollum show him the way out of the tunnels instead. The change to the 1950 edition of The Hobbit and the reference to that change in The Lord of the Rings where the deal is that Gollum shows Bilbo the way out of the Orc tunnels and plots to use the Ring to eat Bilbo if he loses the game only to discover that Bilbo has the Ring because Bilbo asks the question: ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ and then: ‘What have you lost?’, which also has Bilbo discover more about the Ring, explores the idea of how story telling in medieval times, where it was mainly oral, changes in the retelling and, in fact, the story about the Ring being offered as a present is the second account of the story as it is told by Bilbo to the Dwarves with the first account not even referring to the Ring. Also, Frodo makes the point in The Lord of the Rings that the final account of the story is the most likely. Note that the riddles themselves in fact are allusions to actual riddles in the Old English canon with the question ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ indeed referring to some in that canon that have too much of an adult theme to them, which render them unsuitable for a children’s book but nonetheless could explain why Gollum is so precious about the Ring and why Sauron is so impotent after it is taken from him.
As far as the film versions go, I think The Hobbit trilogy will follow the pattern of The Lord of the Rings trilogy where the first movie will be probably be something like 80% of the tone of the original, while the latter two will converge away from that. I think also that another way that The Hobbit’s first movie will be different from the book is that it will include material regarding Hobbits and their society that Tolkien describes in the beginning chapters of The Lord of the Rings that Peter Jackson couldn’t bring into the movies, which he will adapt into the Hobbit. Meanwhile, a lot of things he didn’t have time to say about the Men, Elves and Dwarves in The Lord of the Rings will be adapted into The Hobbit particularly in the latter two movies of the trilogy. I also think that it will be done in a way to get people to go to more movies after The Hobbit movies are over like The Lord of the Rings movies were but I won’t be complying with that. I saw through all that here in New Zealand when people in the film industry were saying things like: ‘Every New Zealander should go to King Kong’ when the latter was released, which had me thinking that they thought that The Lord of the Rings was only written so that they could have an industry and that the only way that we could help our economy was to watch every movie that the film industry made. I was, however, fortunately rather distracted by the release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the time and not because it was directed by Andrew Adamson, a New Zealander, but because it was written by Tolkien’s contemporary CS Lewis whose Narnia series and his more adult space trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength uses Lewis’s own scholarship in Medieval and Renaissance Literature to explore the educational ideas that makes up that literature.