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The new lords of fantasy

Peter Jackson directs Ian McKellen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy
  • Posted at 11:10am
  • 26 September 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

In Hollywood, sci-fi and fantasy are king. Titanic may still head the top 20 all-time worldwide box-office list, but it's the only film there that's based in fact.

Below it, you will find a variety of marauding dinosaurs, invading aliens, undead pirates, broom-riding schoolchildren, and, of course, a particular galaxy "far, far away".

Peter Jackson's remarkable Lord of the Rings trilogy, has now put the Star Wars saga into the shade. This surely makes him the king of fantasy.

He took an imagined world – albeit one that existed in literature – and gave it life.

More amazingly, he convinced half the world to come and see it, in vast, wordy, plot-heavy three-hour chunks, with a year's wait between each one.

That takes a certain degree of storytelling skill. There's no point in just chucking a load of dragons at the screen and sitting back. Good fantasy cinema is about great mythic narrative.

But Jackson's throne is not surrounded by some kind of impenetrable force field.

At the gates is another bearded geek, and that man is Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican-born make-up supervisor-turned-writer/director/producer, who's been deftly straddling Hollywood and Spanish-language cinema for years.

And, although it missed out on the best foreign film Oscar last year, his period fantasy Pan's Labyrinth is widely regarded as a modern classic, with its fairy tale of mazes and monsters set against a brutal depiction of fascist Spain in 1944.

It was never going to appeal to as big an audience as Lord of the Rings – it's arguably too violent for that – but as the vision of one man, it is head-spinning.

Meanwhile, his Hellboy franchise has become a mainstream multiplex success.

But is the Mexican really a match for the Kiwi in our imagined, CGI-assisted clash of the titans?

Actually, whoever's got the edge is now irrelevant. The Hobbit, based on the Tolkien book that precedes Lord of the Rings, is due to go into production next year.

It will be produced by Jackson, directed by del Toro, and co-written by the duo. If you can't beat them . . . collaborate with them.

It should be massive.

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