The Sandworms of Middle-Earth

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies: adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien's novel The Hobbit by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Peter Jackson; starring Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Richard Armitage (Thorin), Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Evangeline Lilly (Tauriel), Lee Pace (Thranduil), Cate Blanchett (Galadriel), Hugo Weaving (Elrond), Christopher Lee (Saruman), Ian Holm (Old Bilbo), and Benedict Cumberbatch (Voices of Smaug and The Necromancer) (2014):

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is not terrible. It has its moments. Turning one chapter of The Hobbit into a two-hour battle sequence is pretty strange, and none of the wholesale changes made by Peter Jackson to the original story seem to be worth the effort. For example, there's a 'comic' bit with the cowardly second-in-command of Lake Town that eats up minutes to no discernible purpose other than a terrible pun at the conclusion of this 'comic' relief. For this we lost the thematic and metaphorical significance of Beorn's role in the novel? Beorn's role in in the battle has been whittled down to a cameo, though it's a cameo that suspends the laws of physics, so, you know, Anti-gravity Bear.

Changes abound. The added characters of Legolas and Tauriel get most of Beorn's major actions. Thranduil rides around on an elk, and that pretty much just looks stupid throughout. There's some Kung Fu sword-fighting between the trio of Saruman, Galadriel, and Elrond, and the nine Ring-wraiths that once again features Peter Jackson's reluctance to have wizards do any of that wizardy stuff they do in the books. Instead, they fight by jumping around like Kung Fu Panda, swinging that wizard's staff that Jackson has clearly mistaken for a bo. It's as if out of all the things in the universe of The Lord of the Rings, the thing that Jackson and his co-writers found most unbelievable was magic itself. 

Well, and elves who laugh and sing. Jackson's elves are pretty much Vulcans by this point, and not early Vulcans, but the pissy jerks of the first three seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise. At least the invented elf-maiden Tauriel is nice, and Legolas sort of learns better. As Jackson's dwarves are pretty much Klingons, one wonders why he hasn't volunteered to direct a Star Trek movie already.

We also get the potentially exciting effort of Bard the Bowman to stop Smaug the Dragon as imagined by someone with a sudden loss of attention to drama. Does Bard shoot Smaug out of the air through that tiny chink in Smaug's armor-like skin? Well, no. Smaug lands about three feet away from Bard and jabbers away like the most talky of all talky villains, all the while keeping that hole in his outer skin exposed until Bard manages to McGyver together a bow from stuff lying around (including his son -- look, see it for yourself, I'm not kidding) and shoot Smaug dead. What larks, Peter Jackson, what larks!

As in the previous two Hobbit extravaganzas, Martin Freeman supplies all the wit and occasional gravitas as Bilbo Baggins. Ian McKellan is fine again as Gandalf. There's a Scottish dwarf played by Billy Connolly. There are endless widescreen shots of battlefields and ranks of warriors that don't seem to have been finished properly in the CGI department -- never has a Peter Jackson Tolkien movie looked more like a video game. The laws of physics come and go, subject to whether or not a character's going to die from a fall or just be slightly inconvenienced. And in an unexpected mash-up with Frank Herbert's Dune, there are sandworms. 

One of the long-standing discussions about The Hobbit's relation to The Lord of the Rings lies in the earlier novel's status as a work meant for children, implicitly taking the exaggerated and often comic tone of Bilbo's reminiscences long after the events of the novel. It's how things like the mountain giants are explained away, as no such things exist in the larger world of The Lord of the Rings and the other works about Middle-Earth. If we view the much different exaggerations and alterations of the three films adapted from The Hobbit in the same light, we're left with a Bilbo Baggins who must be addicted to video games and high-caffeine Mountain Dew. And poop jokes. And physics-free cartoons. Maybe his retelling of the events of The Hobbit occurs entirely in 140-character tweets. Lightly recommended.

Toad in a Hole

The Abyss by Jere Cunningham (1981): Cover-blurbed by Stephen King as "almost great," The Abyss presents a Christian apocalypse along the lines of King's own The Stand, only with more flying demons and coal mining. 

Our male protagonist, Seth, returns home to Bethel, Tennessee in the Appalachians after 20 years to get a job in the coal mine that's been re-opened after six decades. Seth didn't return for this express purpose -- he just needed a job. And the coal mine, believed by children for decades to be haunted, supplied that job.

Do things start to go wrong? Yes. Yes, they do. And you know that if you read any of the paperback versions of The Abyss because the jacket copy reveals a pretty major plot point. Suffice to say that Hell is Real. And it's apparently located several thousand feet below Tennessee.

Cunningham's and-the-kitchen-sink tendency to throw stuff into the narrative doesn't increase whatever terror or dis-ease the novel seeks to generate. There are surprisingly few scenes down the mine, and these quickly shift away from claustrophobia and darkness to increasingly dire and goopy supernatural shenanigans. Cunningham does nice work in depicting life in a dead-end, one-industry town isolated from the mainstream, though. His evil characters tend to the banal, but the sympathetic characters really are finely drawn at points. 

Plot-wise, Cunningham keeps a lot of pots boiling (and one of his minor characters keep a pot of water eternally boiling on her stove to throw at unwanted trespassers!). The female protagonist, Bethel's only medical practitioner, confronts various health-related issues that suddenly arise from the mine's re-opening. She also deals with nightmares about her childhood as the daughter of a stern, self-denying, violent, fundamentalist preacher. 

And a traveling revival show appears in town under its own tent near the mine. And some people start looking and acting like zombies. And a science whiz from Boston shows up because some really sketchy scientific stuff seems to centre on Bethel. People get blowed up with dynamite. Giant thorns menace everybody. An old woman direly prophesies what's coming. A fat woman is mean and evil and eats a lot of junk food and takes three plates at the church picnic. Everyone with a beehive hairdo gets turned into a demon. Dogs and cats turn into monsters. The statue of the Madonna starts disintegrating, as does everything in town. We check in with a Soviet spy satellite.

Well, you get the idea. There's so much stuff here that it suggests a longer draft that's been hacked at by an editor trying to fit the novel into a too-low page count. At twice the length, this might actually be a great horror novel of dark Christianity. At its published length, it's still fun and jumpy and, as the end draws near, surprisingly true to its core principles: it goes all the way, and everyone has to get off the boat. 

That the ending seems to riff on Tolkien's Sauron as much as any religious representation of evil isn't a bad thing at all, though some are also going to find strong echoes of a scene in King's The Stand. But boy, does it all end in a rush. Anyone want to fund a Director's Cut of this thing? Recommended.

The Desolation of Peter Jackson

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: adapted and directed by Peter Jackson with Phillipa Boyens, Fran Walsh, Guillermo del Toro, and the Hollywood Screenwriting App, based on The Hobbit and portions of the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, starring Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins), a bunch of people as Dwarves, and Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln (2013): Oy.

There's about 45 minutes of decent material in this second of three movies based on The Hobbit. Smaug the Dragon looks pretty good, and the fact that he yaps away like Stephen Bloody Fry for 45 minutes pretty much necessitates CGI so that his lip movements look realistic. For a talking dragon, anyway.

So, you know, Smaug, who doesn't do nearly enough flying but does a lot of waddling around inside the Lonely Mountain's Dwarvish treasure caves where he's been asleep for the past few decades until being awoken by Bilbo Baggins, who at this point in the story should clearly be elected King of the Dwarves because of his much greater competency than any of the dwarves trying to get back their homeland. Home-mountain. Whatever.

So, you know, Smaug. And there's an interesting arm-wrestling match between Gandalf and Sauron. We learn that molten gold is mostly harmless in Middle-Earth, which begs the question of why the dwarves try to pour a lot of it on Smaug in the first place. I mean, everyone's standing around beside endless volcanic, oceanic amounts of the stuff without really breaking much of a sweat for lengthy periods of time. Why is this going to be trouble for a giant, nigh-invulnerable lizard who shoots fire out of his mouth? Middle-Earth molten metal once again appears to be room temperature.

So, you know, Smaug. There's a barrel race that seems to be a preview of a ride at the Hobbitland Amusement Park, opening in New Zealand in 2018. Orlando Bloom really looks a lot older than he did in the original trilogy. Given all the CGI thrown around, you'd think they could have fixed his face. Maybe Peter Jackson's elves age backwards, like Merlin in T.H. White.

So, you know, Smaug. Some dwarves crawl out of a toilet. What larks! The laws of physics are pretty much Looney Tunes at this point in Jackson's Middle-Earth. Almost all of the major emotional plot points have been lifted from The Lord of the Rings and stubbornly hammered on here. A reluctant king reclaiming his throne! A poisonous Morghul knife! A cliffhanger ending for part two! An elf and a dwarf making googly eyes at one another! Well, OK, is that last bit lifted? It's heterosexual googly eyes this time rather than repressed homosexual googly eyes. I don't know.

Apparently, the third movie will climax with 45 minutes of anal sex between Smaug and Shelob. Or a 45-minute battlefield sequence. I'm not sure which. Did I mention that Beorn looks like the love-child of Chewbacca and the Lorax? It's pretty rad, bitches.

The Strain Trilogy

The Strain: Book I of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2009): Apparently, the new F/X series based on this vampire trilogy is something of a slow-moving mess. That's too bad, as this book and the next two may have flaws, but being slow-moving isn't one of them.

Guillermo del Toro seems to have come up with most of the concepts, monster designs, and all-around ickiness for the series, with thriller writer Hogan supplying the actual prose. It's a pretty good match, as del Toro's main flaw in his film work has been the occasional aimlessness of his plotting.

The Strain builds to a climax that really sets the stage for greater, more apocalyptic events to come. The chief villain is a vampire known only as the Master, one of seven Vampire Ancients who have existed since pre-history. With the help of an extremely unscrupulous zillionaire named Eldritch Palmer (a nod to Philip K. Dick's malevolent cyborg Palmer Eldritch), the Master comes to New York to break the long truce with the other six Ancients and take over the world.

Against the Master are set a Van Helsing figure -- Setrakian, a survivor of the Holocaust who first encountered the Master at Treblinka -- and a ragtag group that also includes Ephraim Goodweather, a top-ranking doctor with the Centres for Disease Control; Nora Hernandez, his female co-worker; Gus, a Hispanic gang-banger; and Fet, a New York exterminator.

The Strain focuses on the quasi-scientific aspects of the vampire plague, while dropping hints throughout that these are nonetheless not simply the products of the world's worst Ebola outbreak. Scenes set beneath the streets of New York and in its increasingly vampire-infested bedroom communities are the strongest. Hogan keeps the plot zipping along while also doing a fairly strong job of arousing sympathy for both our heroes and for the unfortunate victims of the Strain.

As the first book of a trilogy, The Strain asks more questions than it answers. But the questions are pretty interesting. And the mix of science and, well, magic, suggests a world in which supernatural forces must occasionally work through scientific means to achieve their ends. The vampires have a viral pathology that's fairly well-explored herein, in the manner of Richard Matheson's landmark 'rational' vampire novel I Am Legend. But it's in service to something from Outside human and scientific experience. The scientific explanations for the efficacy of silver and UV-C rays against the vampires don't fully explain the speed with which silver and sunlight work in dispatching them.

As in his work on Cronos and Blade 2, del Toro heavily invests in de-eroticizing the vampire and returning it to its plague-bearing, rotting, drooling roots. The vampires here share some physical traits with his super-vampires in Blade 2. However, the squalid pathos of the turned also echoes some scenes in Cronos -- these are vampires who foul themselves while eating, and rapidly lose their sexual organs as the cancer-like apparatus of the vampire physiology takes hold. Shiny and sparkly they are not. Recommended.


The Fall: Book II of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2010): The vampire apocalypse accelerates in the second book of The Strain Trilogy, with lots of ickiness and tragedy for all. The supernatural starts to assert itself, as we gradually see that while the vampire plague seems to be viral in nature, it's supernatural in origin and intent.

There are a lot of nice set-pieces here, ripe for visual interpretation. One of the threads -- that the Master has learned new ways to be cruel from humanity -- begins to come to the forefront. So, too, the weaknesses of his human opponents, who are themselves compromised by their fear for their relatives, by old age, by alcoholism, and by ignorance of the Master's origins.

Part of the novel involves the quest to secure an ancient book that explains everything you need to know about vampires and how to kill them. Thankfully, the quest for this item is handled in a refreshingly off-beat but pragmatic way: the book is up for auction at a major New York auction house. It's these touches of the mundane that help make the second volume stronger in many ways than the first. Recommended.


The Night Eternal: Book III of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2011): This is the end. The Master, his vampires, and his human collaborators have won. Much of the Earth has been enslaved. Society continues to function under a pall of nuclear winter which has blotted out the sun for the most part. Inspired by his experience with the Nazis, the Master has created concentration camps to provide his vampires with a reliable source of liquid nourishment. People still live and work outside the camps, either as collaborators or as the cowed servants of the Vampire elite. The world is now one big factory slaughterhouse.

But the Resistance lives on, outnumbered and outgunned. The surviving protagonists of the first two books have been bloodied and beaten. The Master has now survived two attacks that should have killed him, were he simply a vampire like all the other vampires. Madness, alcoholism, and in-fighting plague the surviving rebels as much as the vampires do. Ephraim Goodweather, nominally the leader of the Resistance, has almost succumbed to alcohol-fueled despair when the novel opens. Can he get off the mat?

The supernatural elements introduced in Book Two now become ascendant, as del Toro and Hogan's narrative begins to resemble The Lord of the Rings more than anything else (and remember that del Toro was going to direct The Hobbit movies before he bowed out, and retains a screen-writing credit on them). The book delves into the secret history of vampires, thanks to the book that was the quest-item of The Fall. There is a way to end vampirism forever, one that the Master himself has shown them in the way he eliminated the other six Vampire Ancients at the end of Book Two. It's time to nuke it out to duke it out!

Even with a certain number of scenes of psychological anguish and equivalence on the part of several characters, the plot of The Night Eternal moves quickly and efficiently towards its climax, with a few enjoyable stops in the realms of myth and legend. The Master's origin story is bizarre and striking, as is the explanation for all the weaknesses of vampires derived from that tale. I was entertained. Recommended.