Behold the Biopic, the Pillar of the Great Man! Today, Fox Searchlight Pictures, happily celebrating 25 years with a new logo, released the trailer for Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien, which traces the formative years of the orphaned J.R.R. Tolkien (played by Nicholas Hoult) as he “finds friendship, love and artistic inspiration among a group of fellow outcasts at school.” Outside of a few red-tinged flashes of warfare, the trailer doesn’t really give us a concrete sense of the tumult that Tolkien endured during his early years that might have inspired him to write The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but I guess that cutesy dissolve between a big old tree and a twirling Lily Collins—as Tolkien’s wife and muse Edith Bratt—suggests that Arwen and the Ents were on the mind of a young Tolkien while he was caught in the grips of a hallucination straight of The Theory of Everything.
See below for the film’s official trailer:
Fox Searchlight Pictures will release Tolkien on May 10, 2019.
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