Hacker Cinema
The Return of the King
1980 · Film · 98 min
Part of The Lord of the Rings (Animated) Collection
Directed by Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin Jr.
Two Hobbits struggle to destroy the Ring in Mount Doom while their friends desperately fight evil Lord Sauron's forces in a final battle.
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3 comments on Hacker News
I read this one the other day and couldn't make heads or tails of it. I must not be the target audience.
> The Lord of the Rings seems immersed in racism (the superiority of the fair and noble elves, the inferiority of the brutish, mongrel orcs), colonialism and imperialism (the return of the king means the restoration of empire), and deeply retrograde sexism (with a core cast of characters that is overwhelmingly male).
That's just one half of Tolkien's dialectical examination, though. An apolitical reading reveals all sorts of nuance in these themes, especially in LOTR. Racism cuts both ways - humans are portrayed as being baser than Hobbits in many cases, but aren't discriminated against despite their weakness and short lives. Imperialist virtue is mocked by the government of the elves, who almost completely lack individual agency owing to their trust in governance and religion. Sexism... I don't even know how DEI-obsessed you have to be to care about this. Women are portrayed with depth, depicted in positions of power and recorded in combat. It's exemplary, for 20th century literature.
People always talk about the influence of WWII on Tolkien's writing, but I'm fascinated by the increased politicization of the novels as we drift away from a postwar unity. Part of me even wonders if the Peter Jackson films could be made nowadays without being accused of wokewashing the whole thing.
The Return of the King is particular has a real structure problem. Multiple endings after the actual ending. And then really the final wrapup/epilogue is in the Appendix. The movie tried to clean of this up--most controversially by axing the scouring of the shire--but still didn't wholly succeed.
Certainly 3D realistic games (AAA FPS titles, for example) are very expensive to make. However, many of them also have fantastic returns and have generated extraordinary revenues. Just as in the movie industry there is a place for both high and low production values.
Modern Warfare 2, for example, was the highest grossing entertainment launch in history, including blockbuster movies, making a third of a billion dollars in a single day. Today only perhaps 2 or 3 films have had higher box office revenues than Modern Warfare 2 has made. No sane person would pass up a chance for such revenues. More so when you consider that at that scale games cost far less than movies to produce: MW2 cost about $60 million to make, whereas Avatar had a budget of $237 million, Titanic had a budget of $200 million, and even the Return of the King had a budget of $94 million.
Hollywood seems to be chugging along just fine, and the gaming industry seems to have lower costs and comparable revenues.