Let’s be honest: Anya Taylor-Joy would make a great elf. If any human being could flit from tree to tree as if woven from gossamer and starlight, or appear on a moonlit branch looking as though she had just been summoned by a haunted lute, it would be the star of The Queen’s Gambit, The Witch and Furiosa. She is perfect for Lord of the Rings, and it is no surprise whatsoever that she has been cast as the elf Seren in the forthcoming Andy Serkis-directed The Hunt for Gollum, as confirmed this week by the Hollywood Reporter.
You’ll probably have heard about the movie: Serkis is back as Gollum, Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf, and the whole thing is about a barely mentioned, if crucial, section of LotR in which Aragorn is charged with chasing down the snivelling, one-time owner of the One Ring before Sauron’s forces can get to him.
There is a pretty basic, if horribly torrid, resolution to this particular narrative in the book: Frodo has the ring because Bilbo left it to him when he set off to Rivendell at the beginning of the story. Dump it in the fires of Mount Doom and job done. Some of you might think that is why Tolkien himself spent only a handful of pages detailing this episode, despite the fact that it covers the best part of two decades of actual events. But that has not stopped Serkis, Peter Jackson (now a producer) et al deciding to go all in.
This is where Taylor-Joy enters the proceedings. Seren, not mentioned in Tolkien, we are told is a “trusted, lethal agent” of the elvenking Thranduil, who will once again be portrayed by Lee Pace from the Hobbit films. She is a Sindar elf, one of the clan that decided to stay behind in Middle-earth when many of their kin set out across the ocean to live forever in the Undying Lands, which means she most likely hails from the forest of Mirkwood. In Tolkien’s stories, it is to Thranduil’s halls in the north-east of the corrupted forest that Gollum is taken by Aragorn after the ranger finally tracks him down. It is there that Gandalf arrives to interrogate him.
This, broadly, we already know, so it is the hunt itself that must compel us if this new film is to feel like anything other than a piece of expensive gap-filler. The arrival of the previously unmentioned Seren, especially in the form of a high-profile actor Taylor-Joy, might give us some clues as to how the adventure pans out. Aragorn ploughing through Mordor and its miserable outer reaches never felt like a particularly enticing prospect. But what if he had a buddy to accompany him on the way?
Enter Taylor-Joy. For what if The Hunt for Gollum is not really a Gollum movie at all, but Middle-earth’s strangest road movie about a hunky future king, a gorgeous woodland assassin, and a miserable cave gremlin who knows too much? Perhaps Seren and Aragorn begin as enemies, spend the second act bickering through the Dead Marshes like an elven Midnight Run, then slowly learn to respect one another after discovering that, beneath all the immortal woodland hauteur and mud-caked Ranger gloom, they are both trying to stop the same catastrophic information leak. Maybe Seren is Thranduil’s outrider, dispatched from Mirkwood to make sure this devious little creature does not bring the shadow of Mordor crashing through the Woodland Realm. Perhaps the whole thing becomes a moral three-hander on which the fate of Middle-earth depends.
And yet even here we would be retreading the same swampy, deathly ground that Jackson tramped through in The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Serkis would get a whole new opportunity to gargle his way through Middle-earth, McKellen would be handed one last crack at perhaps his greatest role, and Jamie Dornan would get the thankless task of stepping into Viggo Mortensen’s mud-caked boots. It could well be superbly realised, a brooding Middle-earth chase thriller, a gorgeous swamp opera, an arthouse psychodrama in blockbuster armour. But we’re still no closer to understanding quite why the whole thing actually needs to happen.