Hits and myths: why did Hollywood abandon ancient Greece? | Movies

Je Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King will return to North American cinemas next month, to celebrate 20 years since Peter Jackson debuted his Oscar-winning film. Its return to multiplexes comes at a time when we seem to have more JRR Tolkien-inspired fantasies to choose from than a 1980s offshoot of Games Workshop. Along with the return of Gollum and company to the big screen, we have the bewildering, utterly redundant but lavishly filmed and delightfully geeky small-screen, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Then next year there will be The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim, an animated adventure starring Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhand and former Jackson student Miranda Otto as Éowyn (who will play the role as narrator for the upcoming prequel to the legendary warrior king of Rohan).

We’re also promised several new live-action movies based on Tolkiens’ Middle-earth, following a deal reached between rights holder Embracer Group and Warner Bros. and New Line studios. Jackson and his two closest Lord of the Rings collaborators, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, said they are kept informed at every stage of new films.

Meanwhile, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is set to hit theaters, bringing the Tolkien-inspired American role-playing franchise back to the screen. Starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, and Hugh Grant, it looks a lot dumber and a lot less porous than the Jackson films, and yet we’re still talking about a story of perky elves, wise wizards, and evil necromancers. If Sam and Frodo showed up halfway to reveal that a new ring of power had been discovered, giving its user the ability to ride Ents and engage in polite conversations with Balrogs, no one would be the least bit surprised.

But as wonderful as all that stuff is, the ubiquity of Tolkienesque drama overshadows the fact that it’s not the only way to make fantasy movies, or even deliver swords and sorcery to the big screen.

When Jackson was a toddler, long before The Lord of the Rings was first adapted to the screen (via Ralph Bakshi’s ill-fated 1978 attempt), there was 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, the Don Chaffey’s glorious stop-motion tale of gods and monsters. The scene in which Jason battles seven living skeletons, which apparently took famed stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen months to create, still gives me the creeps. The last film Harryhausen worked on, 1981’s Clash of the Titans, had the creepy Medusa scene to match it.

Chaffey’s goal was to bring Greek mythology to life for movie audiences, filled with new deities, demigods, and other assorted celestial beings. Yet Hollywood seems to have forgotten about this great pantheon of stories ready to be plucked. Where are the splendid and booming films, especially given the remarkable advances in special effects since the days of Harryhausen on brave but reckless Theseus and the minotaur, or Bellerophon and Pegasus, the winged horse? Why have the 12 Tasks of Heracles been forgotten while Homer’s Odyssey, perhaps the ultimate tale of a fantastical quest, languishes in cinematic obscurity?

Perhaps studios think the abysmal failure of the 2010s remake of Clash of the Titans and its pointless sequel, 2012’s Wrath of the Titans, is reason enough to ditch Mount Olympus. But these films were directed by Louis Leterrier and Jonathan Liebesman; Lord of the Rings had Jackson and his crew. It’s not a fair contest.

A few half-baked Percy Jackson and Lightning Thief flicks from the early 2000s weren’t enough to shake the picture. These days, ancient Greek tales are most likely to inspire comic book movies. DCs Wonder Woman draws inspiration from Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt (although she was instead given the Roman equivalent of the deity, Diana) as well as the warrior goddess Athena. Russell Crowe played a pompous, self-effacing Zeus in recent Marvel film Thor: Love and Thunder, while Aquaman has definite shades of Poseidon.

But superhero movies about divine deities often seem to miss the gravity and majesty of the original mythos that inspired them, in part because there’s a temptation to slip into comic fish territory. out of the water when such beings come into contact with the 21st century. the humanity of the -century.

I’m not sure I want to see Perseus join the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Jason, leader of the Argonauts, fight Batman. But I can imagine both returning to big-screen glory in all their heroic glory if their stories were entrusted to a director who is a true Hollywood titan, rather than you know someone who made a few pop videos.