Five Reasons Why The Silmarillion Should Be Filmed

So it turns out that Peter Jackson is further expanding the already expanded two film version of The Hobbit into three films.  It’s somewhat unclear just what this hypothetical third film will entail – one idea floating around is that it’ll use more material from the Lord Of The Rings Appendices to bridge the two series, making The Hobbit basically a prequel trilogy.  Still, it does seem that if Jackson wants to continue working on film adaptations of Tolkien’s work, there is already a vast corpus of writings to build on that does not require making stuff up outside of Tolkien’s writings.

That corpus is, of course, The Silmarillion, the vast collection of stories and legends from the First Age, a mythology upon which the characters of the Lord Of The Rings (set in the Third Age of Middle Earth) look back.

Fig. 1: This somewhat naff painting cannot contain the awesomeness that is The Silmarillion.

Naturally, due to its immense scope and over-elevated tone, many people scoff at the idea of a Silmarillion film series.  They make jokes like it being 12 movies long and filmed entirely in Elvish.  It’s not as widely – or repeatedly – read as the Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit, so there’s just not the same demand for a film version.  This is unfortunate, because if it were pulled off correctly, it’d make pretty sweet series for the following reasons:

1. The Silmarillion is more episodic that the Lord Of The Rings, and therefore more easily translatable into a series of films.

It seems somewhat spurious to regard the Lord Of The Rings films as three separate movies.  Really, they constitute one cohesive story split into three sections.  You wouldn’t, for example, just pop The Two Towers into your blu-ray; rather you would watch each of the three in order (not necessarily in one sitting).  Narrative-wise, both The Hobbit and the Lord Of The Rings are each one single, self-contained quest (it’s worth noting that both the film and the novel version of The Lord Of The Rings omit any depiction of the other theatres of the War of the Ring).

The Silmarillion, on the other hand, has a basic framing plot – back in the day, Morgoth (Sauron’s boss) stole some valuable gems (the Silmarils) from the Elves, who then rebel against the gods and wage a series of wars against Morgoth to try and recover them – but the Silmarils themselves merely act as a MacGuffin for the various series of events that lead to Elves’ downfall.  Really, this stuff is just a background for the individual stories that make up the text.  As a result, each installment of any Silmarillion series would be a more or less self-contained story that can stand alone while still being part of the overarching narrative.

Also, because of the synoptic nature of the text (well, texts – there are multiple and sometimes contradictory versions of the stories in The Silmarillion), the filmmakers would have much more freedom when it comes to adapting the story.  This freedom would come in handy since the multiple, complex plots would require some compression even for an epic film series.

All in all, I reckon The Silmarillion could be done in 5 or 7 separate films, depending on the amount of plot compression.  Again, because of the stand-alone nature of each film, they could be done by separate directors to save time since a consistent tone would not be necessary for the whole series.

2. It actually has meaningful female characters.

Surely one of the challenges for adapting the Lord Of The Rings to the big screen is that, until Éowyn shows up in Volume II, there are really no female characters of any importance: Galadriel has a key cameo appearance in Lothlorien and Arwen is mentioned in passing, but that’s pretty much it.

Fig. 2: Barely in the original novels.

For the film adaptations, Arwen’s role had to be greatly expanded (Éowyn’s also, to a lesser degree), and Galadriel will presumably end up folded in as the only female character in the forthcoming Hobbit. Still, these three are pretty much the only substantial female characters in what’s supposed to be a world-spanning, epic story.

The Silmarillion, however, has no dearth of strong female characters.  Luthien, Aredhel, Nienor, Morwen, and Galadriel are all central lead characters, not to mention the many other women throughout the various tales.  As such, The Silmarillion is much more gender-balanced and undoes some of the male chauvinism of Tolkien’s later works.

3. It’s much more adult-oriented than the kiddycentric Hobbit.

It’s a good job The Hobbit features a flying, fire-breathing dragon because without Smaug, the films will seem a bit of comedown after the epic Lord Of The Rings trilogy.  Judging from the trailers, it seems they’ve made the originally rather juvenile Hobbit in the same serious tone as the LOTR movies.  That’s one of the reasons why they’ve expanded the book into two (and now three) movies – by showing more behind the scenes stuff that ties the original kids book to its somewhat more adult-oriented sequel.

Now, one of the things that worked so well with Christopher Nolan’s recent Batman trilogy is how he used the comic book characters to explore deeper issues of justice and vengeance.  With The Hobbit, there’s less philosophical meat, as it were, to play with.  The Lord Of The Rings does have the idea of the corrupting effects of power as a central theme (although the films de-emphasize this in favour of focusing on the defence of freedom), but even then it doesn’t seem to have the same intellectual weight as, for example, Nolan’s Batman films.

Because it is the most “adult” of Tolkien’s works, The Silmarillion could certainly be the basis for a truly great film that balances spectacular visuals (see #5) with interesting ideas (what Prometheus failed to do).  The stories themselves explore ideas of pride, creation, fate, and vengeance.  Not to mention that the whole work is basically the Catholic Tolkien’s Middle-Earthification of the Original Sin myth.  Above all, The Silmarillion features something largely absent from the other two works: the element of tragedy.

4. You will actually get to see Elves kicking ass and taking names.

One thing that kind of annoyed me about the Lord Of The Rings films is the way the Elves were.  A bunch of smug hippies who were accompanied wherever they went by lame, Celtic new-age music.  And then you see Legolas fight and he’s a goddamn ninja.  I’d much rather see more of that than a bunch of long-haired Wiccans mope about being immortal.

Of course, you don’t see the Elves do much in the Lord Of The Rings because supposedly “their part in the history of Middle-Earth is done” (even though they started this ring nonsense in the first place).  In The Silmarillion, however, there’s tonnes of Elves running around being badasses.  That bit in The Two Towers when some Elves inexplicably show up at Helm’s Deep is just a taste of what could be to come in a Silmarillion film series.  There’s even some Elf on Elf violence in there.

Fig. 3: That’s not an Elf (left), that’s an Elf (right).

Also, whereas in the Lord Of The Rings, the Elves are more or less one-dimensional, bland good guys, the Elves of the First Age – when they were the primary characters in the mythos – are much more complex.  We do get a glimpse of this in LOTR when Galadriel is tempted by the ring, but in general, the Elves of the Third Age are more or less wholly good (and kind of aloof).  In The Silmarillion, however, the Elves are much more balanced – capable of guile, intrigue, and, above all, pride.

Indeed, characters like the tormented Maglor, the proud-before-a-fall Thingol, the helpful-to-fault Finrod, and the conflicted Maeglin are much more interesting than any of the characters in the Lord Of The Rings (who all tend to oscillate between wholly good and wholly bad).

5. Everything cool about The Lord Of The Rings is cranked up tenfold in The Silmarillion.

Not only are the Elves cooler, but pretty much everything about The Silmarillion is the Lord Of The Rings jacked up to eleven.

• Remember the Balrog in the mines of Moria?  How about of a whole bunch of them.  In battle.
• Shelob, the gigantic horrible spider?  The Silmarillion’s got her mom, the even more gigantic and horrible Ungoliant.  Fights the Balrogs at one point.
• Rivendell and Lothlorien are pretty, but not as nice as the hidden city of Gondolin, the caves of Nargothrond and Menegroth, and the blessed realm of Valinor.
• Likewise, Saruman’s industrial nightmare of Isengard is a nice office park compared to the Satanic smokestacks of the Thangorodrim and Angband.
• Instead of the disembodied eye of Sauron as a principal antagonist, The Silmarillion has the fearsome Morgoth as a proper, full character (Sauron himself runs around causing trouble as Morgoth’s right hand man).
• And of course, the battles of Helm’s Deep and the Pelennor Fields are but skirmishes compared to the epic clashes of the First Age, which were fought primarily by Elves and Orcs with an assortment of monsters and dragons (and some men), not to mention the armies of Dwarves in their hideous war-masks.

So even though as a book, The Silmarillion may come across as difficult, stuffy, and overwrought, the stories themselves could be brilliantly translated to the screen.  Given that there is already a built-in audience of Tolkien fanatics (though admittedly less so than for The Hobbit or the Lord Of The Rings), and that the epic visual flair of Peter Jackson and/or Guillermo del Toro will surely attract the uninitiated, I can’t see how a film adaptation of The Silmarillion could fail.

Unless they film it in Elvish, of course.

~ by Isaac Bickerstaff on August 1, 2012.