Fellowship 4 - Big Swings
We're still in the intro, so let's pivot for a second. Watching these movies one minute at a time is surprisingly agonising, so to increase my Tolkien dosage I've started reading the books as well. I'm only halfway through "Concerning Hobbits" so far (give me a break, I only bought it *today*), but I had an interesting thought somewhere around the third foreword.1
Rings is effectively the only time I've enjoyed a work of art built on the message of "things used to better". As a millennial I grew up with boomers thinking that dubstep and lattes were the first heralds of an oncoming apocalypse, so it's not a moral I usually get behind. Here, though (and in the books), it really feels like Sauron dying was the last good thing that happened in this world and I'm entirely on board with it.
Obviously that's not literally true, but in a few minutes we're going to see some relatively happy hobbits and we'll soon realise that they're probably the last happy people still alive in Middle Earth. Elves are dying, dwarves2 are being devoured and men are just being idiots. Again, back in 2001 it was *wild* to start a movie with this feeling. Even Harry Potter started with a clean slate, only introducing ancient history when it was convenient to the plot. Here in Rings, it's all immediately coming to an end.