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_Tolkien _is another ho-hum literary biopic, this time about fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of _The Hobbit _and _The_ _Lord of the Rings_. Beautifully photographed in the style of
varnished floors and Minwaxed furniture, and enhanced by a round of fine performances from a British cast that includes _X-Men _player Nicholas Hoult, veteran actor Derek Jacobi and Lily
Collins (most recently the girlfriend of serial killer Ted Bundy in the disastrously titled _Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil_ _and Vile_), it has the credentials to amount to something
more substantial and memorable than this empty epic directed by Finnish director Dome Karukoski. You watch along as it unravels with the tempo of a funeral dirge, and before you check your
watch, you realize you’re already bored to death. _SUBSCRIBE TO OBSERVER’S ENTERTAINMENT NEWSLETTER_ Meandering back and forth in out-of-sequence time frames from the death of his mother,
who encouraged his fanciful imagination as a boy and left him orphaned along with his younger brother, to his life as the teenage ward of a wealthy benefactor in Birmingham, to his
poverty-stricken student status at Oxford while totally dependent on scholarships, the movie shifts time, age range and location so often that it’s not always easy to pin down the narrative.
------------------------- TOLKIEN ★★ _(2/4 STARS_) DIRECTED BY: Dome Karukoski WRITTEN BY: David Gleeson, Stephen Beresford STARRING: Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins Derek Jacobi RUNNING TIME:
112 mins. ------------------------- Chief focus is on a private club formed with three favorite fellow students who were also academic weirdos, their goal to change the world. Before
graduation, World War I broke out and the boys ended up in the trenches of France, their dreams destroyed and their spirits dashed. Narrowly escaping death on a daily basis, the sensitive
Tolkien (Hoult) thinks back to his youth, his secret literary circle and his fascination with a girl named Edith Bratt (Collins), who shared his interest in writing and creating his own
language of words. Some nice fragments emerge, like the night the young lovers were ejected from a production of Wagner’s _Ring Cycle_ for being broke and improperly dressed, and sneaked
backstage into the props department to listen to the rest of the opera dressed in the performers’ costumes. But light moments are rare, thanks to a stolid screenplay by David Gleeson and
Stephen Beresford that fails repeatedly to reveal the true events that inspired Tolkien or laid the groundwork for his future books. Most of his time in the blood-filled pits of the war that
led to Mordor and the Dead Marshes is spent thinking about Edith and searching for his best friend Geoffrey, who is killed in the computer-generated battles, and then, later, we see
Tolkien’s postwar attempts to get Geoffrey’s poems published. Maybe Tolkien had a fascinating life story full of anecdotes that inspired his future work, but it isn’t told here. It’s the
kind of movie you admire without the conviction that it was a movie worth making.