So apparently there’s a movie about JRR Tolkien coming out Friday. It’s the first I’ve heard about it, even though it’s got a couple of big name actors starring in it. Has anyone heard any details or buzz about it?
Reviews are mediocre. In general, it seems aggressively bloodless and middlebrow.
A real Tolkien movie would consist of three hours of people sitting round the fire drinking tea, or sitting in the pub drinking beer, while discussing abstruse points of Old Norse grammar, or medieval Welsh mythology, or Christian doctrine. Interspersed with three hours of Tolkien endlessly writing and drawing on pieces of paper. 
Pub? You mean “The Bird & Baby.” 
Except for the little, small, almost insignificant action scene in the frikkin first world war 
I have read that Tolkien was the only one of his school class to survive the war. Was I whoosed?
Not sure about his school class, he said “by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
Would watch.
I knew about this, but only because I saw a poster for it in the theater when I went to see Captain Marvel. And the poster is all I know.
I saw this last night at an advance screening, it included a live Q&A with the director & stars hosted by Stephen Colbert.
It was OK but it was pretty middle of the road. Perfectly adequate. The Q&A was honestly the best part! Colbert and the director are both huge Tolkien fans and very knowledgeable about his works so it was fun to watch them discuss various aspects.
Legends of Tomorrow did Tolkien better.
Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins (who star as Tolkien and his wife) were on Colbert’s late night show a week ago or so, and they seemed visibly nervous at being interviewed by such a big fan of the author. I’ll see the movie eventually, on DVD if not in the theaters.
I saw it at the weekend and thought it was very watchable but rather schmaltzy and very heavy on the schoolboy comradeship angle.
Much of it is set during his time at a rather posh school in Birmingham and at Oxford University so there’s a lot of white male entitlement going about. It was the glory days of the British Empire afterall!
Of his three closest friends two died at the Somme but the other served in the Royal Navy and survived the war, living until 1987, well after Tolkien’s own death.
The major variation from history is that he married Edith before going to France during WW1, not afterwards as the film has it.