Tolkien an innocuous but uninspiring biopic

For Lord of the Rings fans, picking out the copious references will be half the fun.

Audiences all over the world may know J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories but how many really know his story?

A biopic starring Nicholas Hoult as the literary legend portrays his early years as a schoolboy and as a young man during World War I, and seeks to draw a link between his experiences with the mythical tales in his books.

Tolkien is an affable if generic movie with fine performances, but it also feels like it could be anyone’s story, if not for the copious references to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings Finnish director Dome Karukoski threaded throughout the film.

Nicholas Hoult makes a fine Tolkien

A casual LOTR fan would pick up on at least a dozen nods to Tolkien’s work — you can’t miss the Eye of Sauron reflected in Tolkien’s pupil on the battlefield — but one Tolkien diehard told me she was “overwhelmed” by all the allusions, and loved it

Framed around Tolkien’s experiences at the Battle of the Somme, Karukoski thrusts Tolkien into a miserable tableau. Walking along the trenches to the front, in search of a lost friend, the young Tolkien’s mental state is bewildered by trauma and trench fever.

Everywhere around him, he sees malevolent shadows in the mustard gas which form dragon heads while German flamethrowers become fire-breathing beasts. A brief scene on the battlefield is clearly aping The Dead Marshes from Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers.

In these moments, Tolkien straddles a fine line between homage and cynical fan service. Without the stylised visual cues to Jackson’s movies, what distinguishes this biopic about Tolkien from every other movie about an Englishman in the early 20th century?

Not much. It follows the conventions of the genre — the slightly stilted dialogue, the warm lighting and the pleasant surroundings of old stone buildings. Tolkien is innocuous but uninspiring.

The movie cuts between the Somme scenes and flashbacks to his childhood and schooling years, to the storyteller mother who died when he was a kid, to the languages he invented and to the three boys he befriends at the posh school he attends.

A fellowship

Together, the four of them form a close bond and an arts and literary society of sorts, with aspirations that they can change the world through art, if they can defy the expectations heaved upon them by parents who expect them to be lawyers and bankers.

At one point near the end, Tolkien refers to them as a fellowship. Oh yes, we see what you did there.

The beating heart of Tolkien is supposed to be the courtship between Tolkien and Edith Bratt (Lily Collins), the young woman who grew up in the same boarding house.

But like everything else in the movie, the relationship is fine, and not much more than that.

Rating: ★★★

Tolkien is in cinemas now

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