Tolkien (2019)
Directed by Dome Karukoski
England, early 20th century. The future writer and philologist John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) and three of his schoolmates create a strong bond between them as they share the same passion for literature and art, a true fellowship that strengthens as they grow up, but the outbreak of World War I threatens to shatter it.
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Often playing like outtakes from Dead Poets Society , Tolkien primarily focuses on the formative school years of the English author (portrayed by Nicholas Hoult), whose camaraderie with three other lads informs his views on friendship and loyalty.
Mostly Tolkien takes the shape of a sort of pre-WWI Dead Poets Society, in which young Tolkien the church orphan discovers a new kind of family in a gang of arts-obsessed schoolboys, one of whom will go onto become an actual dead poet.
Orphaned as a young boy, he develops a “Dead Poets Society”-ish group of friends at boarding school, and within their bonds finds the inspiration to study languages and culture that would later inform his writing.
But Karukoski occasionally tries too hard to juice up his fustier Dead Poets Society-esque stretches with fevered battlefield visions of German flamethrowers transforming into fire-breathing dragons.
More than once Tolkien put me in mind of Dead Poets Society, and there isn’t higher praise for a literary coming-of-age screen story.
A life as singular as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s shouldn’t feel as if it’s been crafted from outtakes of Dead Poets Society.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Directed by Peter Jackson
Characters Themes
None of the other lads are given much definition — the older versions are played by Anthony Boyle, Tom Glynn-Carney and Patrick Gibson — but as a whole we take them as the nascent brotherhood that will later become The Fellowship of the Ring .
The LoTR allusions here are not subtle, and they’re our first reminder that this is a work of fiction based on a legendary man’s now-legendary life, not a strict biography.
A brief scene on the battlefield is clearly aping The Dead Marshes from Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers.