Newsflash: The Prologue in 'The Fellowship of the Ring' is a Banger
The Friday High 5
Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High 5. 🙏🏻I was feeling a bit low this week, both physically and spiritually, and thus returned to Middle-earth to rest and replenish. It’s a repeating theme, though sometimes the venue changes.
I fired up The Fellowship of the Ring, because it’s the first and some things must be done correctly. But it’s also the best. It has the entire fellowship, together, which imparts some very D&D vibes. Everything is still in front of them—tragedy and triumph. And the Moria sequence is my favorite in the entire trilogy. Plus, Gandalf the Grey is 1000% better than the bleach-white alternative.
This time around, I was struck by how amazing the prologue is. Starting a movie with a voiceover describing events that took place 3000 years prior is a no-no, for the same reason Dungeon Masters avoid lore dumps in D&D: They’re boring, and they have little to no relevance on the characters. But the rules go out the window when Cate Blanchett is doing the talking, backed by Howard Shore’s soundtrack, because Fellowship’s 7-minute (!) prologue is bonkers. It’s so good! It absolutely captures the sweep of history, and the epic nature of the story. It grounds the audience in what’s to come. Incredibly, impossibly, it’s never boring. It’s the exact opposite.
The prologue makes me want to strap on a sword and go out in search of adventure.1 Or at least grab the nearest 20-sided dice, and lay evil low from the safety of my basement.
D&D was somewhat influenced by LotR—everything in fantasy is influenced by LotR, because fantasy is LotR—but it typically evokes a grungier fantasy, the like you’d find in Conan novels or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. There’s a tabletop RPG that specifically evokes Tolkien fantasy. It’s called The One Ring and I’ve owned it for years. One of my 2025 goals is to escape into Middle-earth properly by finally playing it.
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Here are some other things I enjoyed this week.
Transformers One
The Transformers movie franchise is a hot mess. I enjoyed the first one but it quickly became a series of diminishing returns. In retrospect, that was clearly the outcome of building around Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Discount Timothy Olyphant, and Michael Bay. Bumblebee is fun, probably because none of those people were involved.
Animation has always been the franchise’s true home; it’s where the ‘giant robots transforming into other things’ premise has the biggest payload. I generally prefer live action to animation, but here at least, the slick, physics-defying nature of animation fits the IP.
Transformers One is a prequel that takes place before the robots come to Earth. It’s set so far back in the timeline that Optimus Prime and Megatron are much smaller robots with different names who are BFFs. I know, crazy. It’s an origin story as much as anything else.
It reminded me a lot of Into the Spider-Verse, both in look and feel (I’m sure that was intentional). Transformers One is not on that level, but I liked it.
Transformers One is currently streaming on Paramount+.
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
As I was typing Horizon’s full name, it occurred to me that if the name of your movie has more than one punctuation mark, you might’ve fucked up.
Kevin Costner definitely has.
Horizon isn’t a bad movie. I actually liked it, though I’m predisposed to enjoy movies in which people wear sidearms slung low on their hips and there’s a lot of regulating on tap. It’s fun to observe from a distance.
Horizon looks great. It feels a bit derivative. Which is a weird thing to say about a Western, as they’re all more or less the same.
The main issue is it’s so disjointed. It feels like an anthology, as the 4 (or is it 5?) storylines don’t relate to each other at all. Yet. That’s obviously to come in one of the future parts—sorry, Kevin, chapters. Assuming he gets to make them. Chapter 2 was supposed to hit theaters in August but the first stanza did so poorly, its future is now in doubt.
This movie has no resolution of any kind. The narrative just stops and invisibly segues into a 4-minute trailer for the rest of the story. It’s weird and nonsensical.
I think there’s a longer article to write about the Costner of it all, and his love of self-mythologizing via these kind of movies. I’ll file that one away.
Horizon: Ridiculously Long Name is currently streaming on HBO, which I refuse to call Max.
The Private Lives of the Romans
I picked up this book at the library a few weeks ago, after I ended up wandering the stacks of ancient antiquity (which happens more often than you’d think). I don’t expect the book will get too into the private lives, as in orgies and such. But who knows! I’m only a chapter in. “When in Rome” is a saying for a reason.
I checked it out because I thought it’d have all sorts of interesting mundane details I could steal borrow for some fiction I’m plotting. I wonder what a similar tome written about 21st century America would look like, written some 2000 years after the fact. It’d probably be short: “Most Americans were consumed by the comings and goings of people they will never know, and online arguments without resolution, while the world burned all around them.” But that presumes our human-shaped descendants will have the capacity to read and write, and the luxury of time for both.
Eh, that got dark.
I blame the book. It’s practically an artifact—nearly a 100 years-old. It was first written in 1903, and revised in 1932. Here’s how old it is: The cover is plain red hardback, with white letters on the spine. When this book was printed, you couldn’t judge it by its cover because there was literally nothing there.
The original, 1903 preface, says the book is primarily intended for high school seniors, as it “will enable them to understand the countless references to [the private lives of Romans] in the Latin texts which they read in the classroom.” Time’s have changed, huh?
It seems like some kind of a miracle that I can sit here in 2024, reading a professor’s words from 1903, about a people that lived over 2 millennia ago.
Anyway: I’ll keep you posted on the whole orgy thing.
Steve Jobs (2015)
I’m not exactly sure why I revisited this movie. Sometimes the muse suggests something and you do it, and then sit there in the aftermath wondering what that was about. I’m working on some stuff I’ll be announcing soon, and I think it’s maybe related to that. Not that I’m on Jobs’ level as a genius or a jerk. Just that sometimes you look for pointers wherever you can find them.
Steve Jobs is an entertaining little biopic that compresses Jobs’ life into 3 press conferences across a 14-year period. It’s an effective narrative device. Though you have to wonder if there’s any messaging in the fact that his life is best summarized by events in which he sells products to people. Kinda bleak, no?
The movie also drives home the point that people like Jobs are not like us. I don’t know if the movie is saying you have to be a sociopath to become a billionaire, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. And based on the billionaires I can think of right now, it holds true.
Michael Fassbender is great as Jobs, but the MVP is Kate Winslet speaking with a Polish-American accent. Though frankly I could’ve just stopped at ‘the MVP is Kate Winslet.’ I’m still holding out hope for a second season of Mare of Easttown.
Your Turn!
In your opinion, what’s the best sequence or scene in the Lord of the Rings trilogy?
What’s your go-to comfort movie?
Kevin Costner’s hat in Horizon is freaking dumb, right?
Do you have a favorite Kate Winslet role?
It might surprise you to learn that I don’t actually own a sword. I know!
I like Horizon actually. But that trailer at the end was a really bad idea.
Personally I think Fellowship could work without the prologue. It is good but like a lot of them it tends to demystify and reveal things long before the audience is supposed to learn them. At one point the idea was to apparently do flashbacks when Gandalf first tells Frodo the story of the Ring. Id be curious to see that version of the movie.
Ran some TOR last weekend. Looking to put together a regular group for it…