Guillermo del Toro Will Direct "The Hobbit"

jagermeister101 tips us to news that Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings production team have officially selected Guillermo del Toro to direct the upcoming Hobbit film and its sequel. del Toro's resume includes films such as Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Blade 2. This confirms rumors which began after the controversy between Jackson and New Line Cinemas was resolved last year.

Comments

What's the draw?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Honest question. With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein?

Re:What's the draw?

[Squarewav]

If you compare The Lord of the Rings movies movies with other fantasy movies (book based or not), it is extremely well done with a minimal amount of cheese-ness that you expect from a fantasy movie.

People think that because LOTR movies were well done and was based on a Tolkein work that another movie based on what he has done will also be well done.

This, of corse, isn't likely, but that isn't going to stop someone from trying to make money on the idea

Re:What's the draw?

[kongit]

Honest question. Why would you consider Tolkien to be second rate fantasy? Beyond the fact that it stands up on its own merit, without Tolkien most of what you call "actual literature" probably would never have existed.

Re:What's the draw?

[rpjs]

So what would say is first rate fantasy then?

You may not think much of fantasy as a genre, and I'd tend to agree with you if you do, but I do think Tolkien is one of the best, if not the best fantasy writer there has been; to the extent that 95% of the rubbish that's been churned out since is a poor pastiche of him.

Re:What's the draw?

[Knuckles]

The fact that largely the same people are involved makes this a pretty reasonable assumption, no?

Re:What's the draw?

[Ihmhi]

And people could just as easily say Kirk, Uhura, Spock, etc. are shallow and undeveloped. That's how it is when you are one of the major pioneers in any genre or medium.

Did Star Trek start Sci-Fi TV? No, but it certainly brought it to the masses and started a rabid fanbase.

The character development of future sci-fi shows (Star Trek, Andromeda, Babylon 5, Firefly, etc.) owes a lot to Star Trek - not just because of the lessons learned, but because they paved the road that they're all walking over now. The same goes for Tolkien and current fantasy literature.

The books are pretty damn good for something written, when, like in the late 40s-early 50s?

Re:What's the draw?

[Knuckles]

[...] without Tolkien most of what you call "actual literature" probably would never have existed. Are you serious? I certainly hope that you are not, or that I misunderstand something.

Re:What's the draw?

[PoeticExplosion]

Because he is the foundation of the modern fantasy genre. Reading him now, he seems cliched. This is because he invented the things that are now cliches. In addition, he had one of the most fully developed worlds of any fantasy writer ever. He invented languages, mythologies, and detailed histories for multiple cultures. The fiction was just an afterthought for him.

Re:What's the draw?

[SanityInAnarchy]

If it's anything like Pan's Labyrinth, it'll be worth watching -- del Toro isn't bad.

Re:What's the draw?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Couldn't have said it better. The closest thing I've found to Tolkien is Dune.

Re:What's the draw?

[RoboRay]

I really enjoy Feist too, but he's no Tolkien. Surely you noticed how much he blatantly ripped off from Tolkien, including his entire elvish language!

There would be no Feist without Tolkien to inspire him, and that same statement is true of most modern fantasies.

Re:What's the draw?

[Pecisk]

And even then...

What is define Tolkien for me is his human down-to-earth display of magic, out-of-this-world influence. There is no big shiny stars going around Gandalf's hat, he is using his magic power very very rarerly. Force of the Ring is not seen, but felt as influence, as emotions - and such stuff. It allows much easer for reader/watcher (thanks to P.J. who kept the same balance in the movie) to connect with characters, because even if Frodo is the One who will destroy Ring, it is taking him, and last parts of book or movie are really painful to watch due of this, because if you even know the end, you really feel he can fail, because he is just a hobbit. It is humanity within fantasy what Tolkien actually defined (and no, not adult fantasy). And this is why so few authors have been capable to at least copy experience of LOTR world.

Re:What's the draw?

[msormune]

Blade 2 was actually pretty good, when you consider the quality of script. The point is, a good director can make the most out of a bad script. IMDB list already "The Hobbit 2", set to be released in 2011 :)

Re:What's the draw?

[Carewolf]

No Tolkien more or less invented Fantasy literature. There is a huge difference between Fairy Tales, ancient greek novels and fantasy. Tolkien invented the concept of constructing a fantasy universe with specific rules and trying to tell an epic and realistic story within that world using the rules of that world. Most literature before just added fantastic being to the story as they went along without consideration to their impact on the world they live in.

Re:What's the draw?

[Haeleth]

With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein?

Movies are not targeted at fans of "actual literature", who generally prefer to consume their literature directly from the book, without the massive cuts required to cram it into 2 hours and the massive changes required to translate from a verbal to a visual medium.

Re:What's the draw?

[Admiral Ag]

I don't think any of them are anywhere close. The "Tolkien trick" is to be able to create the illusion of another world by layering the languages and pseudo history so much that it leaves the reader hanging. That's essentially the function of all the places in the books that are named, but where we never get to go, or the people we hear about in outline, but whose story is never told in full. It's an old fashioned scholar's book, and it is no surprise it is the work of a Professor of Old English (the joy of subjects like that is the fragmentary nature of history and language that we get to fill in for ourselves).

Tolkien is underrated as an author because he, by his own admission, set out to write a book in defiance of modern literature. That it accidentally became wildly popular earned him the enmity of the literary establishment. This is a shame, because the LOTR certainly deserves scholarly attention. It's just that most qualified scholars are put off by its popularity or have been trained to dislike it.

Re:What's the draw?

[nomadic]

The fact that largely the same people are involved makes this a pretty reasonable assumption, no?

The problem is the source material isn't as strong. The Hobbit isn't nearly as good as LotR.

Re:What's the draw?

[TuringTest]

And The Hobbit would be 10 Base T. Wouldn't that be 13 Base Thorin?

Re:What's the draw?

[EEDAm]

Well the genre has been around that long and much longer absolutely yes. But I wouldn't want any overly-detail-orientated Slashdotee's to embark on reading the whole of the Odyssey for 'that stuff'. Response at the end of 12,000 lines of the Odyssey is likely to be in the region of 'WHAT?!?! NOT A SINGLE FRICKIN DRAGON, ELF *OR* MIDGET?!?!?!?11'

(You do however get some marvellous Sirens, Giants, Cannibals, generally hopped up gods and a lot of bad wind) :)

Re:What's the draw?

[d'fim]

You remind me of the story of the young lady who went to see a production of Hamlet and came out of the theater saying "I don't understand why everyone thinks that play is so great -- it's just a bunch of cliches strung together!"

Re:What's the draw?

[dajak]

I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.

I on the other hand find for instance the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses lacking in great valor and of little legendary significance. The story is also terribly hard to memorize, which would certainly have made it a dud in the middle ages. And it is yet another ripoff of Homer's work. This is no problem however, since it really isn't an epic story despite the fact that it is modeled on an existing one.

Tolkien was reviving a magical realm from the dawn of (written) history. This is the realm in which the epic poems -- concocted by cultures to connect their known and written history to mythical ancestors and their great deeds -- are set. Most of his readers would have been completely unfamiliar with his universe. There is no place for character development in LOTR. It's not that type of story.

Good modern fantasy very often takes place in a universe based on Tolkien's that is intimately familiar to the readers and focuses more on characters. Still a very "small" story like James Joyce's Ulysses would not work if set in Middle Earth: the story needs a mundane background, just like most of 20th century great literature. Similarly, you cannot simply move for instance WWII literature to Osgiliath without it becoming cheesy.

Re:What's the draw?

[just_forget_it]

Some people have the kind of personality that makes them automatically hate something because it's popular.

Re:What's the draw?

[dajak]

Because the books are spoiled by all the crap they've influenced.

(I first read LOTR in 2004. It read like a transcript of a game of D&D.)

Good point. I read LOTR in 1984, and played D&D later. You can think of D&D as a generalization of the LOTR fellowship and the background it is set against to a "universe of fellowships". This trivializes the LOTR fellowship. In Middle Earth Gandalf is for instance a unique and for the readers of those days fundamentally new character, and in D&D he is the mold for the spellcaster in *every* little group. In 1955 an allegorical story about delivering the world from an unspeakable evil was relevant. Today you can save a virtual magical world from an unspeakable evil every weekend. Familiarity with Tolkien's universe and fellowships saving the world fundamentally changes the experience of reading LOTR.

Re:What's the draw?

[sm62704]

without Tolkien most of what you call "actual literature" probably would never have existed.

How long was Mark Twain dead before Tolkien wrote The Hobbit? There have been literally hundreds of years of "actual literature" written in Englisn, and thousands of years of actual literature before what we now know as "English" was ever spoken.

Sometimes it's hard to tell trolling from innocent ignorance.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Opinion. Plain and simple opinion with no critical thought.

The Hobbit isn't nearly as epic in scale as LotR, but it's a solid story with good character development.

It's much more suited to film adaptation than LotR was mainly because it isn't so grandiose in scale. Fewer characters to follow and a much simpler plotline.

That LotR was as good as it was is nothing short of amazing. The Hobbit, with Del Toro at the helm and Jackson, Walsh, Boyen writing the script and producing, the film should be in good hands.

For all the liberties Jackson took with LotR, he approached the material with respect to it's source and to it's fans which is a major reason for it's success. I have no doubt they will do the same with The Hobbit.

Remember, we're dealing with Peter Jackson who is a lifelong film geek and not George Lucas who is really only out to make a buck... not good movies.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Well, the big difference with the prequels was the fact that George Lucas wrote and directed all of them himself... and he's a crap director.

Very few people will argue that Empire is the best of the 6 movies. Irvin Kirshner directed that. NOT George Lucas and Lucas had help writing from Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett.

Add to that the fact that he was mentored by Joseph Campbell and you're working on a whole different level than Lucas on his own.

When Lucas works on his own, he gets trite. The only good filmmaking he has ever really done was when he collaborated with others.... and American Grafitti.

And THX was a Kubrik knock off piece of garbage. Simple concept, overly stylized... Kubrik wannabe.

If Lucas wanted the prequel trilogy to be good, he'd have gotten someone like Ridley Scott to direct them and should have utilized some writing partners.

Re:What's the draw?

[SatanicPuppy]

Eddings wrote one series...Four times. Feist was better; I pretty much stopped after "Darkness at Sethanon" but up until then it was some quality work with excellent scope, and well developed characters.

Re:What's the draw?

[pressman]

Tolkien was trying to do more than just "write a story" with LotR. He was literally trying to create a "Modern European Mythology". He was trying to write an epic tale that was alive beyond just story and plot.

He was trying to create an entire world, where the world was one of the characters and all the flowery stuff most people skip over was part of that character development.

Like it or not, you have to respect it.

He'll do a good job

[Whuffo]

He's directed some very well realized fantasy movies already - if anyone can make a good movie out of a Tolkien story, he can.

Phew

[Pecisk]

From all directors which have been mentioned as directors of "Hobbit", del Toro is most interesting one in style (And he really made Hellboy tick). I think this is really good.

Let's see what will come out of it, but I at least hope for the best.

There can be only one

[Anonymous Coward]

The Hobbit (1977).

Re:Good

[SanityInAnarchy]

Being from America, I really don't care where the director comes from.

This one in particular -- he did Pan's Labyrinth. He'll do a good job with the Hobbit.

Not sure about this

[mccalli]

The Hobbit is not The Lord Of The Rings. This might sound crushingly obvious, but nothing I've seen so far suggests they're going to keep the light touch of the book. Looks like they just want to do another Lord Of The Rings and that's not right - it's a different style of story. And as for sequels...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Sequel to the Hobbit

[1u3hr]

Damn. Screwed up the HTML. Should be:

Okay, so it's been 15 years since I've read them, but isn't The Hobbit a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy? So how is there an "upcoming Hobbit film and it's *sequel*"?

Well, I read them 40 years ago. I can't recall either. According to TFA:

...its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between "The Hobbit" and "The Fellowship of the Ring

This is definitely NOT a JRRT book. I guess Christopher Tolkien has signed off on this, but it seems a bit sleazy. Though he's repurposed every scrap of paper his father left and worked out a way to print it, but this seems to be wholly "original". It smells a bit like the Herbert fils prequels to Dune, expanding throwaway lines ("The Butlerian Jihad") into an entire novel.

People said that about Jackson

[wiredog]

He started out as primarily a director of slasher/horror films.

Fantasy appears in the 16th century, actually

[Garwulf]

Sorry, but that's wrong.

The earliest fantasy as we would describe it appears in the 16th century, and was known at the time as an "Artificial Romance." Cervantes was spoofing these stories in Don Quixote, and they had wizards, and dragons, etc.

The genre reappears with a more horror-based theme in the 19th century, and an author named William Morris (if I have the name right) creates the first invented fantasy world in the 1850s. In the early twentieth century, you have fantasists like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard (who arguably created Sword and Sorcery as a genre), and H.P. Lovecraft. And all of this takes place before The Hobbit was published, much less the Lord of the Rings.

(For more information, read Wizardry and Wild Romance, by Michael Moorcock.)

And, for the record, at one point Tolkien himself mentioned that he was very fond of the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard.