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Otaku-sempai
Elvenhome
Sun, 5:05pm
Post #1 of 9
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(Official?) Hunt for Gollum Film Synopsis
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While the 'bots are away, let's catch up on some news for The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. Our Justin Sewill has posted a story on the homepage:
Hunt for Gollum film Synopsis promises “New characters, returning heroes”
Upcoming movie to take fans on an unexpected journey through time in telling the story of Sméagol. A new Spy Report collaboration with Knight Edge Media brings what looks like a leaked, possibly official, synopsis for the upcoming feature film The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. While we cannot absolutely verify if it’s a “final” version, the story points hinted at align with previous rumors, leaks, casting auditions, and even things Ian Mckellen has said. TheOneRing.net reached out to WB for comment or confirmation, but they had nothing to share at this time; nor had anyone in New Zealand. Film Synopsis Here is the full text as sent to us via spy report. Reminder, you can drop us inside info (or casual info!) to spymaster ~at~ theonering.net
Hunt for Gollum film synopsis text
Before the Fellowship, one creature’s obsession holds the key to Middle-earth’s survival — or its demise. In The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, we meet young Smeagol — an outsider drawn to trinkets and mischief — long before The One Ring consumed him and began his tragic descent into the tortured, deceitful creature Gollum. With the ring lost and carried away by Bilbo Baggins, Gollum finds himself compelled to leave his cave in search of it.
Gandalf the Grey calls upon Aragorn, still known as the ranger Strider, to track the elusive creature whose knowledge of the whereabouts of the ring could tip the balance toward the Dark Lord Sauron. Set in the shadowed time between Bilbo’s birthday disappearance and the Fellowship’s formation, this perilous journey through Middle-earth’s darkest corners reveals untold truths, tests the resolve of its future king, and explores the fractured soul and backstory of Gollum, one of Tolkien’s most enigmatic characters.
Directed by original cast member Andy Serkis, produced by Peter Jackson, and written & produced by Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens — the creative team behind the Oscar-winning trilogy — this live-action movie bridges the beloved films with new characters, returning heroes, and a deeply engaging origin story that resets the stage for, and changes everything you know about the legendary Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Full article here: https://www.theonering.net/...rs-returning-heroes/
“Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved.” - Tony Isabella
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Chen G.
Mithlond
Sun, 5:50pm
Post #2 of 9
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It's been kind of going around
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There also a two-line "blurb" from Deadline that's mostly consonant with this. So I don't really doubt its veracity, even if one of my friends doing spy-work on Gollum says it sounds AI-ish.
Ultimately, there are a few questions which this synopsis doesn't quite answer:
Is the film more Gollum-centric or more Aragorn centric? The first paragraph orients us towards Gollum, but the seconds puts a major emphasis on Aragorn. I bet the filmmakers themselves couldn't easily answer this question, and probably wouldn't be able to until they do a rough cut of the film. It might end up being along the lines of Thorin and Bilbo.
Is the film strictly set between the Farewell Party and Moria, or does it also cover the period between the trilogies? Again, the first paragraph seems to imply the latter, while the third the former. Obviously Peter's scripts tend to include lots of flashbacks, but just in terms of where the emphasis lay, we don't know.
What other storylines may be brought to bear upon this film? Philippa mentioned several times that they keep on finding how this story is intertwined into other things and how, actually, "there's a lot there." So you wonder what else might be woven through this film: I mean, the attack of Mirkwood is concurrent with the one on Osgiliath. Gollum ends-up in Moria after it's been cleared of Balin's folk: Do you show that? This synopsis doesn't tell.
What NEW is this film promising to add to the series? Philippa seems confident that this film promises much that's new, in terms of place we go to (where?), dramatic situations and new characters. But we have almost no way of guessing at any of that. The synopsis does promise new characters but with the possible exception of other rangers, we have no way of knowing who those might be.
This second question, in particular, has major ramifications, including for the part of Aragorn: is the "Strider" they're looking for - with an age quota a full decade younger than Mortensen was shooting Lord of the Rings - for flashbacks of some sort? Is the film strictly a "sidequel" or an "interquel" like the original conception of the bridge film?
Related to this last point, how will the film play to an audience? What knowledge does it pressuposes of Fellowship of the Ring? What knowledge does it pressuposes of The Two Towers? An Unexpected Journey? Will we ever be able to sit back and watch from The War of the Rohirrim, through The Hobbit, this film and up through The Lord of the Rings as a cohesive narrative and aesthetic experience?
Questions, questions that need answering!
(This post was edited by Chen G. on Sun, 5:59pm)
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Otaku-sempai
Elvenhome
Sun, 7:21pm
Post #3 of 9
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I think that The Hunt for Gollum will split its focus between Aragorn and Gollum. My best guess is that the film is mostly set in the interval between Bilbo's birthday and the Fellowship entering Moria with a prologue (or flashbacks) exploring Smeagol's past. Other flashbacks might trace Gollum's travels in search of Bilbo and the Ring. We might get a few glimpses into Aragorn's past as well. Depending on how far Aragorn goes in tracing Gollum's previous movements, we might see the new Lake-town or even Dale restored and ruled by King Brand (played by Luke Evans perhaps?). I would not be surprised to find our Ranger in the Beornings' territory at some point and interacting with Beorn's son and successor Grimbeorn the Old.
I suspect that the young age in the casting call for Aragorn might be connected to possible future film projects, specifically one or more movies exploring his previous journeys and errantries (Third Age 2957 to 2980 and perhaps beyond in the continuity of Tolkien's legendarium).
“Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved.” - Tony Isabella
(This post was edited by Otaku-sempai on Sun, 7:29pm)
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Chen G.
Mithlond
Sun, 7:44pm
Post #4 of 9
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My best guess is that the film is mostly set in the interval between Bilbo's birthday and the Fellowship entering Moria with a prologue (or flashbacks) exploring Smeagol's past. Other flashbacks might trace Gollum's travels in search of Bilbo and the Ring.
You see, you'd think that would be the bulk of the movie - and it may well be! - but then:
The Hunt for Gollum very much evolved out of the "bridge film" concept, which explicitly included the Hunt for Gollum as a plotline (see also this comment by Philippa Boyens).
Focusing more on the period between the trilogies fits with a more Gollum-centric vision for this film, which on balance seems to be the direction they're taking, at least consciously.
Focusing on this period is also more familiar territory in the sense that it's easier for the filmmakers to ressurect Dale (still ruled by Bard at the time that Gollum gets there) and the Woodland Realm, from just a decade age.
Any number of interviews from the creatives point in that director. Most notably, this interview of Andy's - from pretty far down the line in terms of the development of the script - where he CORRECTS the reporter who suggests the film is "set sometime in the Fellowship [era]" and instead says it sits "between losing the Ring to Bilbo Baggins and The Fellowship of the Ring."
This can also sit nicely with the "Young Strider" thing.
I suspect that the young age in the casting call for Aragorn might be connected to possible future film projects, specifically one or more movies exploring his previous journeys and errantries (Third Age 2957 to 2980 and perhaps beyond in the continuity of Tolkien's legendarium).
Sure, that's one of basically two options for the second film which seem the likeliest. But I just wonder if they will also have the "Mature" Aragorn (as opposed to "Old Elessar") of Mortensen's for scenes set at the time of Fellowship of the Ring.
(This post was edited by Chen G. on Sun, 7:44pm)
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Sun, 7:48pm
Post #5 of 9
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So... it sounds like there will be a heavy focus on flashbacks to pad out the story in length and complexity. I expect that the promised new characters will feature Gollum's grandmother, among others.
I continue to be pessimistic about this movie. I don't trust the writers enough to think that they can make a good movie from very little genuine Tolkien content and a setup that tonally would be more suited for a depressing art movie than a fantasy blockbuster with wide appeal. We already know how Gollum's story ends and have a good idea on how it begins, and it's all grim and hopeless.
Aragorn in turn is better main character material for the movie, but he has no character arc for the time period in question, so the writers will have to make up something. We could well end up seeing flashbacks about Aragorn's past too, maybe even about his birth and the prophecies associated with it. It would contrast with the depressing Gollum flashbacks, I suppose. The core of the movie could potentially be contrasting the characters and choices of Aragorn and Gollum.
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Chen G.
Mithlond
Sun, 7:59pm
Post #6 of 9
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Not a fan of this idea that the filmmakers need Tolkienian "guard rails"
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There are two arguments here and we need to clearly delineate them:
That - not being an adaptation of a novel - it will have that uncanny "arsatz Tolkien" feel that stuff like Rings of Power has. Now THAT'S a very reasonable concern - even though Gollum relies on more material than people think and is a single film, not a 42+ hour show - but it hardly circumscribes the project. But either way it is a DIFFERENT argument from...
Saying that these writers are not good enough to write well without having Tolkien as guard-rails. That's an argument that can really only be said by people with a superficial knowledge of their oeuvre. They had no problem almost winning an Oscar for an ORIGINAL screenplay for Heavenly Creatures, to name just one examples. They had their ups and downs - who doesn't? - but they're great writers.
I just think it's always cause for excitement to see the same core creatives come back to "their" film series. Jackson and Weiner as producers, de Luca and Kamins as executive producers, Walsh and Boyens as writers, Serkis and Wood as actors, but also Dan Hennah as production designer, Alan Lee and John Howe as concept artists, etc...That will never not be exciting, at least to me. What other film series of this scope has this degree of involvement from so many of the same people so far down the line? It's a uniquely Herculean achievement.
Ontop of that, I just find it Romantic that filmmakers can, all this time later, come back to an idea that had been percolating since the earliest conceptual phases of the project (circa early 1997). If we had no trouble being excited for the bridge film in 2006-2009, then I see no reason to not see that excitement revived today. Stories are plot, but they're also structure and the idea of putting some extra adhesive between the end of The Battle of the Five Armies and the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring is not an unappealing concept, especially now that we have the symmetry of two trilogies.
(This post was edited by Chen G. on Sun, 8:05pm)
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
12:21am
Post #7 of 9
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Difficulty level just too high
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There are two arguments here and we need to clearly delineate them:
That - not being an adaptation of a novel - it will have that uncanny "arsatz Tolkien" feel that stuff like Rings of Power has. Now THAT'S a very reasonable concern - even though Gollum relies on more material than people think and is a single film, not a 42+ hour show - but it hardly circumscribes the project. But either way it is a DIFFERENT argument from...
Saying that these writers are not good enough to write well without having Tolkien as guard-rails. That's an argument that can really only be said by people with a superficial knowledge of their oeuvre. They had no problem almost winning an Oscar for an ORIGINAL screenplay for Heavenly Creatures, to name just one examples. They had their ups and downs - who doesn't? - but they're great writers.
The precedent of The Hobbit movie trilogy does not fill me with confidence. I know the main fault lies with the studio for demanding an epic fantasy trilogy on a quick schedule, but my opinion is that the new non-Tolkien content just isn't anywhere near the level of the parts sourced directly from Tolkien, with very few exceptions. Somehow the end result is less mature than Tolkien's children's book while striving to be the opposite.
The Hunt for Gollum benefits from what presumably was a more leisurely pre-production period, but the narrative material is also more difficult than The Hobbit bordering on unfilmable by normal standards without considering the LotR brand name appeal. The main "plot" is just a fragment of a backstory that Tolkien never intended to stand on its own. There is no satisfactory narrative arc, and the film-makers will need to produce one somehow, without contradicting the movies earlier and later in the timeline. The catharsis of Gollum's death won't happen until much later in the timeline. Notably, letting Gollum have a happy ending or even much in the way of permanent character growth in this movie is completely impossible without getting into really bizarre solutions, such as ones involving multiple parallel timelines or a flashforward into Gollum's soul being freed by lava and him being reborn as a normal hobbit baby who will hopefully make different choices in life.
I just think it's always cause for excitement to see the same core creatives come back to "their" film series. Jackson and Weiner as producers, de Luca and Kamins as executive producers, Walsh and Boyens as writers, Serkis and Wood as actors, but also Dan Hennah as production designer, Alan Lee and John Howe as concept artists, etc...That will never not be exciting, at least to me. What other film series of this scope has this degree of involvement from so many of the same people so far down the line? It's a uniquely Herculean achievement.
A good script is crucial to the narrative success of a movie. Good production values cannot save a movie that has a fundamentally broken script. Being a completely separate movie unconnected to the rest would actually be good for The Hunt for Gollum in the artistic sense, as there would be more leeway to deal with plot issues. For example, Gollum's death could be shown without a concern for the chronologically later movies being either spoiled or contradicted. Or it could be possible to focus on Aragorn the action hero to make the script easier to write and therefore easier to get to a functioning state, even if the result wouldn't be as unique as having Gollum as a true main character.
Ontop of that, I just find it Romantic that filmmakers can, all this time later, come back to an idea that had been percolating since the earliest conceptual phases of the project (circa early 1997). If we had no trouble being excited for the bridge film in 2006-2009, then I see no reason to not see that excitement revived today. Stories are plot, but they're also structure and the idea of putting some extra adhesive between the end of The Battle of the Five Armies and the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring is not an unappealing concept, especially now that we have the symmetry of two trilogies.
Scripts need internal structure too. The Hunt for Gollum is being released as a single movie, not as a middle episode of a miniseries.
And as for the overall structure, excess bridging material added for the sake of having something there can easily unbalance it all. The Hobbit is an excellent demonstration of how the whole can get dragged down by content that didn't need to be there in the first place and how the whole can sometimes be improved by cutting out entire subplots. When all the other movies in the series are entirely understandable without The Hunt for Gollum, there is good reason to question what the movie is really supposed to add to the series.
I think only a genius auteur could pull off this movie, script-wise, and I don't think we have grounds to expect that level of proficiency. An origin story for Barliman Butterbur would also be unnecessary but much easier to write into something that works as a movie.
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Otaku-sempai
Elvenhome
2:29am
Post #8 of 9
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That's certainly another possibility. As I said, I'm just making a guess. The problem is that we have been getting conflicting reports and even this one is not confirmed to be official or accurate.
I suspect that the young age in the casting call for Aragorn might be connected to possible future film projects, specifically one or more movies exploring his previous journeys and errantries (Third Age 2957 to 2980 and perhaps beyond in the continuity of Tolkien's legendarium). Sure, that's one of basically two options for the second film which seem the likeliest. But I just wonder if they will also have the "Mature" Aragorn (as opposed to "Old Elessar") of Mortensen's for scenes set at the time of Fellowship of the Ring.
I see three likely options for what will likely follow The Hunt for Gollum. 1. A film about the battles in the North (Mirkwood, Lorien, Dale & Erebor) bringing back many actors and characters from the Hobbit films. 2. The Journeys and Errantries of Aragorn as previously discussed. 3. Going farther back in the Third Age to the end of Arthedain and fall of Angmar. Introducing many new characters and situations unfamiliar to movies-only fans.
“Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved.” - Tony Isabella
(This post was edited by Otaku-sempai on 2:30am)
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Chen G.
Mithlond
6:46am
Post #9 of 9
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The precedent of The Hobbit movie trilogy does not fill me with confidence. I know the main fault lies with the studio for demanding an epic fantasy trilogy on a quick schedule.
Not really. The whole issue about the preproduction period is a kind of red herring, that has been propped-up on YouTube in what Michael Pellerin, the director of the making-ofs, had denounced both to TORn and elsewhere as editing his footage in a misleading way to make the point seem more melodramatic than it was.
Whatever the faults of those films may be - and they're very much in the eye of the beholder, and clearly far from fatal given the success of the trilogy, including fairly good reviews - they were things that Peter made as conscious aesthetic choices, not things borne out of a shortage of time, nor out of some (non-existent) studio bugbear pulling the strings.
I just refuse to give into a kind of creative equivalent of cancel culture, whereby when you make one bad film (yes, The Hobbit is three entries but they're cut from the cloth of one long shoot) in a beloved series, you're bad, will always be bad, and have always been "secretly" bad and your successes have to be explained away. Just because one didn't like The Hobbit doesn't mean Peter and Andy can't spin something more like Lord of the Rings out of this.
And yes, I know that's probably not where you were going with this, but I was on a roll. 
I see three likely options for what will likely follow The Hunt for Gollum. 1. A film about the battles in the North (Mirkwood, Lorien, Dale & Erebor) bringing back many actors and characters from the Hobbit films. 2. The Journeys and Errantries of Aragorn as previously discussed. 3. Going farther back in the Third Age to the end of Arthedain and fall of Angmar. Introducing many new characters and situations unfamiliar to movies-only fans.
Basically the way I see it as well. I think they'll want to do either [1] or [2], or both, first. They have several reasons to do so:
They want to fill-in the period of The War of the Ring, which is the substance of their film series. If all these films are courses in a single meal, an Angmar trilogy would be a different meal, in a different sitting and different courses, in a different branch of the same restaurant chain.
They want to get out of the way, as it were, those premises that rely on the vintage cast, while that's still feasible. Angmar you could make whenever.
Ditto with the original crew, insofar as these films are more closely knit into the times, places, people and events of the existing films.
If they won't make those interquels, they know the studio eventually will, with other filmmakers and at an even greater time remove, so better do it now themselves.
Some of these story premises are ones they had toyed with making for a while: The Hunt for Gollum since 1997, The War in the North since around the same time as well. Young Aragorn came on their radar more during the early period discussing with Amazon.
Certainly with Gollum, they prize the opportunity to do a kind of "victory lap" over the set of films they've made. It must be an appealing concept.
These films allow them to take bite-sizes of the apple instead of a big gulp, as would be represented by an Angmar trilogy. So it's less daunting, and less risky, especially with the precedent of The War of the Rohirrim, and the "competition" from Rings of Power.
By putting out nine or ten films with a strong narrative and stylistic congurence, they're effectivelly creating a strong "bedrock" upon which other films, set at greater time remove from the War of the Ring, can be built.
(This post was edited by Chen G. on 6:57am)
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