prime video takes fantasy lovers to middle-earth in the new series the lord of the rings: the rings of power. Although the show, which is the most expensive television show of all time, explores a time period thousands of years before the Hobbit or the Fellowship of the Ring, it is not the only adaptation of J. r. r. Tolkien’s World There have been several movies based on Tolkien’s works, and some are better than others. what adaptations are precious to us? which is the worst and what middle earth adaptations are in the middle of the pack?
For this ranking, we’ll look at nine titles, one for each of the Nazgûl. Peter Jackson’s three Lord of the Rings movies are in the running, as are his three Hobbit movies. Rankin/Bass’s 1977 animated adaptation of The Hobbit is a contender, as is the studio’s 1980 version of Return of the King. Finally, there’s the legendary animator Ralph Bakshi from 1978’s The Lord of the Rings. the rings of power will be added to this list once the season is over, as it seems premature to place it after only two episodes. There have been some Norse or Soviet adaptations of Tolkien, but we stick to the English titles only.
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let’s move on to the classification: the greatest adventure is what lies ahead. To paraphrase Bilbo Baggins, “I like less than half of these movies, half of what they deserve.”
9. the return of the king (1980)
this rankin/bass movie is kind of a sequel to their 1977 version of the hobbit, but it’s also kind of a sequel to bakshi’s lord of the rings, which came out two years earlier and just covered the events of the first two books of the trilogy while rankin/bass handled the third. legally, it’s not a sequel to bakshi’s movie (he was actually pretty pissed off about the whole thing).
the return of the king is not great, largely because it tells the third part of a three-part story. Skipping the first two chapters means everything feels abrupt and rushed, and Gandalf’s narrative has to do a lot of heavy lifting when introducing main characters or plot points as they happen. Aragorn, for example, the titular returning king, doesn’t appear or even get mentioned until an hour and 17 minutes into this 98-minute film. the dialogue is mostly characters saying what they’re doing too, desperately trying to establish some context for what’s happening after it’s already started happening. and yet there’s no sense of urgency, as the king’s return seems rather uninterested in the story he’s telling, meandering haphazardly from one plot point to another like a begrudging checklist. It makes all the spin-offs from the source material – a weird framing device, a long sequence where Sam just wanders around while Frodo is imprisoned, and a bunch of crazy folk songs – all the more irritating. It at least seems intermittently interesting, probably because it was animated by Topcraft, a Japanese studio that would go on to spawn the acclaimed Studio Ghibli.
8. the hobbit: the battle of the five armies (2014)
how did this happen? how did peter jackson, who made the lord of the rings trilogy such an incredible success, make three hobbit movies that are so bad they make the lord of the rings movies a little worse by their mere existence ?
Whatever the reason, the third film in a trilogy based on a single book that is shorter than any individual Lord of the Rings book, is the worst of the bunch. Despite the name, the climactic battle of the five armies doesn’t really have enough, narratively, to fill an entire movie, and so does jackson and company. come up with a bunch of things that supposedly look cool but actually look like graphics from a ps2 cutscene to complete the battle. the best way to describe how the battle of the five armies went down so far is to look at legolas (a character not in the hobbit book). in the two towers, he slides down some stairs on a shield while shooting arrows. instead, they improved on that by having him take down an oliphant single-handedly in a sequence that looks great but starts to make him seem less like a character and more like a quick-time event from a video game. In the Battle of the Five Armies, he defies the laws of gravity to run up a ruined stone tower while fighting Azog, a character barely mentioned in The Hobbit. what are we doing here?
7. the hobbit: an unexpected journey (2012)
You can see the promise in the hobbit movies on an unexpected journey. Howard Shore is back, and his “lonely mountain” leitmotif is instantly as iconic as anything in the original trilogy. the sequence between bilbo and gollum is perfect. and it feels good to be back in the world of middle earth.
The problem is that the charming and picturesque world of the hobbit’s middle-earth is apparently not good enough anymore. that’s why there needs to be all these padded additions like azog and some framing devices with frodo laying it down really, really thick. plus these movies look worse than the lord of the rings movies even though they were made a decade later. you can attribute a lot of that to an over-reliance on cgi. the original films used it (relatively) sparingly. Gollum, a completely computer generated character, was a wonderful technological breakthrough that still holds up today. Azog, meanwhile, doesn’t feel like a real character, and not just because he essentially isn’t, story-wise. he just looks weightless cgi compared to the practical orcs from previous movies. this excessive use of cgi leads to things like the truly absurd sequence in which the dwarves escape from the goblin king, a risk-free run through unimportant and unbelievable enemies.
6. the hobbit: the desolation of smaug (2013)
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the desolation of smaug has a few things going for it. the conversation between smaug and bilbo, like the gollum sequence from the previous film, is taken verbatim from the book and is delightful as a result, even if the dwarves’ subsequent fight with the dragon is a bit over the top and more or less meaningless. it also features possibly the only good addition to the hobbit canon, tauriel the elf who begins to fall in love with kíli the dwarf.
however, the film suffers immensely from the need to retroactively make a children’s book that was written before the lord of the rings and an explicit prequel, resulting in a disappointing subplot in which, according to the movie logic, gandalf really should have known for certain that sauron was returning and yet he is still quite perplexed by the events of the brotherhood. we also got a lot more laketown politics than anyone was asking for. and then this is kind of minor, but even though jackson was hell-bent on shooting and releasing his hobbit movies at 48 frames per second, there are a couple of point of view shots when the dwarves escape in barrels down the river that are obviously pixelated because it seems pretty clear that they just put a go-pro in a barrel and let it explode.
5. the lord of the rings (1978)
to ralph bakshi’s credit, he wanted to fully adapt all three tolkien books, but a three movie plan turned into two movies and the second one, which would have covered the return of the king, never made it out of the county, so to speak. The Lord of the Rings, therefore, is an incomplete story that covers the Fellowship of the Ring and the Two Towers at a pace that is breezy at best and rushed at worst. however, it is still effective. while some characters, especially anyone not in the community, don’t get much screen time or development, bakshi is largely faithful to tolkien, and specific moments or lines pulled directly from the text are just as effective in this truncated narrative as such. and as they are in the original.
It also looks wild in a way that’s a mixed bag, albeit ultimately admirable. Bakshi was a big fan of rotoscoping, a process by which animators essentially painted over live-action footage. when rotoscoping works, the animation is incredibly fluid, as the animators are essentially following a person alive and in motion. It can also seem strange, because the live-action elements are clearly not part of the same world as the more cartoonish hobbits. this works great on orcs and especially nazgûl, who are supposed to be “others” of our heroes, but it’s less effective when all of a sudden there’s only real human dudes sitting around in bree.
4. the hobbit (1977)
the hobbit is a children’s book, despite what the jackson trilogy would have you believe. it is charming and curiously strange. that makes it a good choice for rankin/bass, since it’s not an epic but something more like a fairy tale. (it’s also a complete story, unlike a third of the lord of the rings). it has a quirky, slightly ugly aesthetic that actually works well with the vibe of the story it’s telling. this is, after all, a book about a little guy who lives underground who is asked by other little guys who live underground to go steal from a dragon (who lives underground). it’s kind of a dirty story, and rankin/bass makes it unique and charming.
the hobbit also features some songs that, from our point of view almost 50 years later, we can only assume made sense at the time. they’re what I imagine you’d get if you sent a 1970s folk musician back in time and told him his only chance of survival is to endear himself to the king and try to become the bard of the court. plus, he had a lot of quaaludes when he was sent back in time. and yet something about hearing “the greatest adventure” over and over works for this hobbit. if other adaptations of tolkien were high fantasy, the hobbit is more like fantasy, high.
3. the lord of the rings: the two towers (2002)
This is where it gets tricky. although the tolkien estate doesn’t really like peter jackson’s lord of the rings movies (puzzling isn’t it?), his trilogy is by far the best, most moving, beautiful and epic depiction of middle earth in a movie . you could put these three movies in any order, or even sneak around and make it a three-way tie for first, and it would be a valid arrangement. however, just as frodo’s burden was to bear the ring, ours is to commit to a ranking. the margins here are very thin, but both towers will get a bronze medal.
two towers is when the lord of the rings opens. the fellowship has been broken. Sam and Frodo on their walk to Mordor have the “smaller” story, though the stakes are high. Gollum makes his full debut in Two Towers, and Andy Serkis’ performance (aided by legions of extremely talented animators) is transporting even today. Meanwhile, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas go to rescue Merry and Pippin, in the process aligning themselves with the Horse Lords of Rohan as they fend off Saruman’s Uruk-Hai. it is at this point that the lord of the rings really becomes an epic as there are nations fighting with massive armies and we start to see what war is like. Two Towers makes Middle Earth seem big enough to hold massive armies and have different towns, whereas all the previous movies were smaller in scale. It all comes to a head in the Battle of Helm’s Deep, which just might be the best battle sequence ever filmed.
Because it’s a middle chapter, two towers may not benefit from the humble beginnings of the partnership or the great catharsis of the return, but that’s not to say that it lacks emotional weight.
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plus this is the movie where viggo mortensen broke his toe kicking that helmet.
2. the lord of the rings: the return of the king (2003)
if you believe in the academy awards, this is the best lord of the rings movie. It cleaned up at the 2004 Oscars, winning a record 11 awards, including Best Picture. He won every one of those awards, no doubt, but that spate of Oscars was also, in a way, a crowning award, a way for the academy to honor the entire trilogy.
That’s fair and sells the short film, because Return of the King is an incredible climax to an incredible trilogy and a landslide triumph in its own right. while there are some quibbles one can make about the return, like the all too easy way the ghost army literally sweeps the battle off pelennor fields or the number of endings the movie has (although all endings are good, in reality), it’s hard to deny that return is the ultimate high fantasy finale. The battles are epic, especially the charge of the Rohirrim (“Ride now, ride now, ride! Ride to ruin and the end of the world!”) and the final battle before the Black Gate of Mordor.
but, what makes the return of the king such a great representation of tolkien’s world is that, even though it has many epic sequences and iconic fantasy heroes, it never forgets what is at the heart of middle-earth . It’s two hobbits, Frodo and Sam, who ultimately save the day, with the unwitting help of a fallen soul who found an important and ultimately good role in the world. That’s why the most poignant moments of the return come not when Gondor is victorious, but when Gondor’s newly crowned king tells four little hobbits that they “bow to none.” That’s why the final image of the trilogy isn’t a majestic look at the king returning in all his glory, but rather a charming, bittersweet take on Samwise Gamgee, at home with his family.
1. the lord of the rings: the fellowship of the ring (2001)
For all the praise Return of the King gets for finishing the trilogy, none of it would matter without The Fellowship, the film that first introduced audiences to what would be the definitive version of Middle-earth. (the prime video series is clearly going to have a similar aesthetic). Fellowship exercises its excellence in its opening moments, first with a masterful voiceover from the impossibly ethereal Galadriel explaining the history of Middle-earth, filled with massive battles between the forces of good. and the evil and twisted saga of a ring of power. so the focus is on the county. That contrast, between doomsday fantasy stakes and peaceful people trying to live their lives, is what makes Middle Earth. Jackson nailed it from the start, and his cast, costumes, and especially his music are perfect for Tolkien’s world.
it is difficult to choose a moment that establishes fellowship as the best adaptation of tolkien. the opening is great, the balrog is awesome and boromir’s death is cute and serious. Perhaps, however, the best sequence in the film is a smaller one: a conversation between Frodo and Gandalf during a break in their journey through the Mines of Moria. “I wish it hadn’t happened in my time,” says Frodo, lamenting that the ring of power has shown itself and threatened everything he holds dear.
“So do all who live to see those times,” replies Gandalf. “But that’s not for them to decide. all we have to decide is what to do with the time we are given.”
is tolkien’s original dialogue, but fellowship recognizes how important and how subtle this exchange is at the same time. it’s the driving force of the story, and the companionship gives it the quiet, emotional moment it deserves. that’s what middle earth is all about.
The first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are now streaming in prime video.
Are you looking for high caliber fantasy? Click here for our list of the best fantasy movies available on Peacock.
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