TOLKIEN
Director Dome Karukoski
Cert 12A 112 mins
So great is the bounty with which [the Christian artist] has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know. JRR Tolkien
It takes little imagination to consider a world in which Tolkien the film never exists because Tolkien the man never makes it out of a French battlefield alive. Another ricochet, a recalibrated mortar shell, a slight tactical misstep, and one may swap the deaths of Robert Gilson or Geoffrey Bache Smith – two of Tolkien’s best friends, both killed at the Battle of the Somme – for John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
