There are analogies one could make about how suited the Lord of the Rings trilogy is for any moment in history, anywhere on the globe. They’re not related to current events, they’re just timeless themes.” (Despite online petitions, the film version of The Two Towers was not renamed.) In a 2003 interview, Jackson said, “It is not fixed to a particular moment in time, whether it’s post-September-11 or pre-September-11 or World War Two or World War One or any of these cataclysmic times in our age. Yet Jackson, just like Tolkien did, vehemently resisted his audience’s natural inclinations to compare the story to anything historical. It had been in development for years before that, of course, but the timing was such that Jackson’s recreation of Middle-earth provided a perfect escape from what was happening in the aftermath of 9/11, a soaring tale of good versus evil taking place in a universe that was equally foreign and familiar. The Fellowship of the Ring premiered on December 19, 2001. Instead, I held out until the darkest time of the year: late winter and early spring, which where I live is even worse than late winter because it seems like it should be getting warmer but never actually does. It was almost as if I was saving it for something, maybe a particularly gray day or a bout of pandemic despair.
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( “One does not simply get through quarantine without watching Lord of the Rings” was Esquire’s delightful headline.) Audiences return to it in times of extreme boredom: Google searches for the films tend to peak in December, when many of us are presumably enjoying some time away from normal life and possibly searching for something to occupy the endless non-days between Christmas and New Year’s. To be honest, I had to stop myself from submitting to a Lord of the Rings binge in the earliest days of lockdown, when that’s what seemingly everyone else was doing. Plus, the bulk of the events that compose The Lord of the Rings take place, canonically, in March (the Battle of Helm’s Deep begins around midnight on March 3 the One Ring is destroyed on March 25).
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This year marks the 20th anniversary of the release of The Fellowship of the Ring, which is being celebrated by an (in-theaters-only!) three-part reunion hosted by noted Tolkien head Stephen Colbert, as well as several online articles discussing crucial subjects such as which orcs are the sexiest. Hundreds of people are watching The Lord of the Rings at every minute of every day, all of their own volition. Do you really need a recommendation to watch one of the most widely beloved film trilogies ever made, which is itself based on one of the bestselling books in history? Of course not.
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So now is the perfect time to decide that what you are going to do with the time that is given to you is watch The Lord of the Rings. After an entire year of misery and despair, there is, literally and figuratively, a light at the end of the tunnel. Summer, we are told, might be somewhat close to normal.
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Tolkien novel the last “to” isn’t there, but whatever.) I used it as my high school senior quote, because I was very cool, and while certainly appropriate for an occasion in which one’s path in life feels suddenly mapless, I also think it applies to right now - for Americans, collectively.Īccording to our new president, we’ve got about two months left before most adults in the US will have access to at least one of three available coronavirus vaccines. There’s a quote from Peter Jackson’s 2001 film The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf says, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” (If you want to be a real nerd about it, in the original J.R.R.