I love LOTR.
Saying this out loud sometimes seems to invite a challenge from superfans, the readers of Tolkien’s tomes. I haven’t read the books. I’m a fan of the movies. The Peter Jackson versions.
But I’m ok declaring my fandom these days without appending any disclaimers.
What makes LOTR great anyway?
The weakest and laziest answer perhaps is to say everything.
To be honest, the LOTR actually scores so well in so many aspects like plot, characters, dialogue, music, cinematography, costume design that the answer might as well be everything.
If that is indeed the case, then it is a staggering achievement because movies don’t lend themselves to genius.
Bringing Tolkien’s magnum opus to the screen would have surely required an absurd amount of courage and a hint of madness on PJ’s part. Throw in a little bit of luck too.
The biggest reason behind the success of LOTR is unassailably the genius of Tolkien himself. I mean, for god’s sake, who writes such epics for bed time stories?! It’s even more bewildering to know that the LOTR is but a sliver of his compendium.
Every single character in the movie can be traced across generations in the books. The first time I learnt about it blew my mind. These aren’t just origin stories that blur into the past. All of them can possibly be traced to Eru Iluvatar, the supreme deity.
For the uninitiated, it might be of interest (read shock) that Tolkien also invented languages and not just the story. I mean, how crazy can one human be?
Now, if I had to re-answer what makes LOTR great in a single word, worldbuilding would be it.
You can always model a part of the world and make it look great. An incident, a protagonist, a place etc. Almost all books and movies are simply one of those when you dissect them. But to be able to build a complete **world **altogether?
A world whose constituents are novel, compatible, natural yet magical with enough room for evolution… that’s just unbelievable.