I felt a wave of relief reading my colleague Jennifer Oliver O'Connell's article about "The Hunt for Gollum." It would appear that its lead director, Andy Serkis, is taking Tolkien very seriously.
If you've never heard of Andy Serkis... yes, you have. He's the man who portrayed Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy by Peter Jackson.
As O'Connell notes, the media couldn't help but notice that the cast he had was awfully white, which in the modern era, is a sin so great that it won't be long before we start hearing demands for cancellation or Serkis's firing once news gets out, especially after what he said to the media when they asked him about his lack of diversity:
The BBC asked the veteran actor and director about what they described as a "lack of diversity" in the Lord Of The Rings film franchise and asked Serkis why his LoR film The Hunt For Gollum has so far only announced white actors as its main cast.
"Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology; there’s a lot of that feeling," Serkis told the BBC. “The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know…”
Serkis continued: “They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of The Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in."
This line, however, had me smiling:
He then conceded that there "have been criticisms" and added that: “This particular film is somewhat acknowledging that. But we don’t think we will be doing a politically correct just-casting-for-the sake-of-casting-and-ticking-boxes version of the film. So, it’s only where relevant basically.”
If Serkis means that there will be people of color in the film, but likely only in places where it makes sense, then... Serkis just became the best steward of Tolkien since Jackson, more so than Tolkien's own society.
Read: Actor-Director Andy Serkis Says 'The Hunt for Gollum' Will Favor Tolkien Over DEI
But I want to point out something here that Serkis seems to get that many modern storywriters in the entertainment industry seem to have forgotten.
Serkis seems to get The Shire. It's isolated, its borders closely guarded (unbeknownst to them), and as such, they're incredibly untrusting of anyone different from them. Logically, this place wouldn't have a lot of diversity. The Shire doesn't even have a wide diversity of family names. You can drunkenly list them off underneath the party tree on your 111th birthday. Your wife is likely your second or third cousin.
So it would make absolutely no sense for there to be a wide diversity of skin colors in the Shire, because that would open up questions where the answers would have to break lore to make sense. If you went through with that, the suspension of disbelief would come to a screeching halt.
You can square dragons, wizards, elves, dwarves, and dark lords with magical rings in your mind, because that's what the world has. These fantastical elements, despite being fantastical, make sense.
However, if you suddenly start putting in things that are uncharacteristic of regions, peoples, or items, the "logic" of that world begins to break.
In the live-action "Snow White" remake, it's pretty clear that the kingdom is isolated and, based on its architecture, very German. Yet in the movie, it's very keen on showing you how diverse the kingdom is racially. Despite all this diversity, the kingdom is still uniformly German in architecture and dress.
As I explained in a video regarding "The Rings of Power," one of the biggest logic-breaking moments wasn't even the racial diversity in every single location, including the ones where it made absolutely no sense, but in the fact that orcs could have loving families.
Modern writers collapse entire long-running, highly successful franchises by introducing logic-breaking things, such as diversity and inclusion, where it's both unnecessary and nonsensical. It forces the audience to remove themselves from the world they're trying to immerse themselves in. Even if they do like the politics that forced this DEI nonsense onto the story, their brain still has to square the discrepancy.
They end up not enjoying the movie on a deep level despite raving about how great it is. You can tell they don't actually like it due to a lack of rewatches, bad merch sales (big indicator), and silence about it as time goes on.
People are still going on about Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings," and box office numbers prove that people are clamoring for the old "Star Wars" movies, even the prequels.
But no one is watching logic-breaking entries like "The Rings of Power" or "The Acolyte." The numbers show no one is going back to watch these shows long after they defended them to the death.
Break the logic. Break the world.
