And bonus. The 25th anniversary of Fellowship of the Ring is coming up in a few months!

First one that came to mind. What an absolute ungodly beast of a movie (movies actually)!

Ugg, Tolkien. Uses 89 words when 23 would do. Then adds a dozen more just for good measure.

I’m an avid reader - read over 200 novels before trying The Hobbit. The man spent a page describing the Hobbits front door.

So you can create entire languages (which is very impressive) but adds nothing to the story (it’s just something the reader has to contend with).

Immersive is one thing, that’s beyond the pale.

Edit with further exposition on why Tolkien isn’t what people think:

Tolkien is best understood not as someone continuing an ancient tradition, but as someone reacting anxiously to modernity. He compensates. He is responding to a world that is complex, fractured, industrialized, and morally unstable by constructing a system that aggressively eliminates those features.

That’s not archaic - it’s defensively modernist.

He fears the loss of shared meaning, so he constructs with excessive detail to ensure the only meaning is the one he wants to deliver.

By the early 20th century, the conditions that made myth function organically were gone: no shared cosmology, no stable moral hierarchy, no common symbolic language, no authority that tradition could simply assert.

Other writers (Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Beckett) responded by embracing fragmentation, ambiguity, and internalization: meaning is provisional and reader-dependent.

Tolkien cannot tolerate this. His response is not to engage complexity, but to seal it off.

He reacts to the anxiety of this through world-building so he can control every detail.

Middle-earth is not expansive because Tolkien loves freedom. It is expansive because he is terrified of indeterminacy.

Every anxiety modernity introduces gets neutralized: language drift is frozen by invented etymology, moral ambiguity is replaced by simplistic good and evil, history is stabilized through exhaustive chronologies, cultural difference is aesthetic, not epistemic (this should be offensive to anyone today), change is always decline, never transformation (also offensive).

Nothing important is allowed to be unresolved. That’s not mythos, it’s closing off.

Calling this juvenile doesn’t mean childish prose or simple vocabulary - it means he rcan’t stand the discomfort of ambiguity. It requires an external authority vs negotiation over meaning, moral certainty instead of self-analysis.

He relies on massive scale and accumulation as substitutes for insight.

This is no different than any other escapist writing - romance, power fantasy, etc. Different content, same structure - the reader isn’t asked, “What do you think this means?”, instead they are told what it means and merely asked to agree “Is this not magnificent?!”

Tolkien doesn’t trust the reader. He doesn’t even trust his own fiction to stand unaided, so he creates glossaries, appendices of everything, some as long as many novels; repetitive songs, narration to explain everything just in case you missed the significance.

That’s not generosity. It’s preemption of reader cognition.

He’s terrified of misreading, disagreement, loss of authority.

Tolkien lived through World War I with it’s previously unimaginable mechanized slaughter, breakneck industrialization, worlds order upending, with the collapse of traditional imperialism/monarchic certainty, major erosion of religious authority.

Instead of directly confronting these issues, he retreats into a moralized agrarian fantasy and assumes technology is corrupting by definition, power is evil unless inherited (what could be more archaic? Anyone today should be put off by this), social hierarchy is natural (again, in today’s world, people want to embrace this in their fantasy reading??).

He also sees history as a single tragic arc.

This isn’t subtle engagement with the reader, it’s refusal of the reader as an independent mind.

Tolkien merely offers relief from the reader being troubled do any work. Everything has a place. Everything has a name. Everything has already been decided.

He offers nothing more than comfort (in 100,000 words or more). But he’s also infantilizing his reader, by spoon-feeding every last detail. Snooze-fest.

People who just love Tolkien get defensive because if they acknowledge he’s just a reactionary system-builder rather than a mythic genius, then his authority collapses. He becomes one aesthetic option among many, not the yardstick. And many readers don’t want an option. They want a refuge.

In the end, Tolkien didn’t recreate myth - he simulated myth under laboratory conditions: he removed the danger, the contradiction, and the resistance: the very things that make myth compelling, and lasting.

What remains is not ancient wisdom but curated certainty.

And curated certainty is one of the most recognizably modern responses to a world that refuses to behave.

I watched it for the first time this year. Abd i have to say it was way better than i expected.

Ooo…I hadn’t thought of that. That’s a good one.

I’ve seen it 3 times, I’ve read the book twice (probably 20 years apart).

Meh. If I need a nap I’ll just turn down the lights.

Not to say your opinion is wrong, at all. Visually it’s a stunning movie. Clearly you see something I don’t.

But story? As I said I’ve read it, twice (maybe 3 times, and the second book too), and never found the story to be very compelling.

I really wanted to get what people like you see (which explains why I’ve seen/read it so much). Frankly, there’s little there in the story other than a semi- sentient computer having a breakdown from being given conflicting orders.

Then the whole star-child thing comes across as Clark needing a McGuffin.

Edit: Had to go find a paper I wrote a long, long time ago on the impact of 2001:

Within the SF community of the 1950s and 60s, nothing in 2001 was new. Not non-anthropocentrism. Not guided evolution. Not cosmic indifference. Not the idea that intelligence is instrumental rather than sacred. Stapledon, Lem, Hoyle, Blish, even earlier pulp had already explored all of this, often with far more intellectual honesty. So when people later claim 2001 was “ahead of its time,” that only works if you pretend the genre’s own internal conversation did not exist.

That is where the post-hoc rationalization creeps in. The book’s reputation was inflated retroactively, largely because of the film’s cultural impact and the aura of “seriousness” that surrounded it. The novel inherited that gravity without actually earning it on the page.

Clarke does not eliminate meaning. He relocates it. Meaning still exists, but only for minds capable of having it - reiterating that sentient meaning is the only meaning. The universe itself is mechanical and purposeless, and the Overlords, monolith builders, whatever name you give them, are not bearers of cosmic wisdom. They are engineers optimizing a process. That is not profound; it is almost banal. The universe as an inexorable mechanism was already a default assumption for scientifically literate SF readers.

Even the Star Child reinforces this. It is not a revelation of higher truth. It is a termination condition. Bowman ceases to be a locus of meaning because he ceases to be human. The book ends not because something meaningful has happened, but because meaning has exited the narrative. That is a perfectly coherent move, but it is not insightful. It is just stopping the story when the author no longer wants to engage with subjectivity.

This is why 2001 often feels hollow rather than challenging. Clarke refuses to anthropomorphize the cosmos, but he also refuses to examine what that refusal costs.

There is no tragedy, no tension, no ethical residue. Compare that to Lem, who insists on showing how the collapse of human-centered meaning destabilizes language, science, and selfhood. Clarke simply shrugs and moves on.

2001 wants the authority of hard materialism without doing the philosophical work of materialism. It gestures at cosmic mechanism but does not interrogate consciousness, value, or epistemology in any serious way.

Good choice!

I was going through DVDs at the thrift store at the end of November, I found Lawrence of Arabia, and was surprised that I didn’t already have it in my Emby server.

I feel like Die Hard doesn’t reach epic status.

Great movie, but I don’t think it has the depth of story that an epic needs.

I think it shows the difference between an epic and a blockbuster. Die Hard was definitely a blockbuster.

When I think of an epic, I’m thinking of something that goes beyond just a great movie: Gone With the Wind, Dr. Zhivago, How the West Was Won, etc. Something that makes you feel like you lived a life while watching it.

Oh, that’s different than RRRrrrr!!! which is a pretty dumb but occasionally funny movie.

Interesting. Added to my list!