I don’t have a great deal to say about Tolkien. Although I acknowledge that he was, and always will be, one of the finest writers to ever live, I’ve never personally considered myself to be a huge fan of his works, but I was intrigued to see how his story would be told in this biopic.
Sadly, however, I found myself to have very little interest throughout and I actually found this film to be quite dull and boring. That’s not to say it’s necessarily bad, the film sports a very strong cast (Nicholas Hoult does a great job of making Tolkien a likeable protagonist) who all give good performances, and there is enough heart and substance to stop it feeling like a complete slog, at times it is a rather heartwarming tale about friendship, but it’s nothing different to what I’ve seen before, and other movies have done it better.
This is the very definition of an average movie, it doesn’t do anything wrong really, but it doesn’t do anything that sets it apart from other biopics or dramas, and I often felt that the filmmakers were attempting to make this story feel a lot more interesting than it really was, there are times that it switches into pure fantasy, and although it’s nice to look at, it didn’t really make sense to me and felt like a futile attempt to make this film appear to be a bit more stimulating. It also made me question how much of this film is accurate, and how much of it is pure drama. Usually, I can let this sort of thing slide, but then I realised that I was bored by something that could be more drama than fact, and if that’s the case, then I consider that to be a failure from the filmmakers.
Tolkien is okay, and if you’re a big fan of his works you’ll probably find it more interesting than I did, but for me, I just saw it as a bog-standard film that is no more than average and I can’t shy away from the fact I was incredibly bored for most of it. I can’t recommend paying to watch this film, it’s something you should just wait for a Netflix or TV release.
I give Tolkien a 5/10.
Wado Reviews 