Cinema of Swords
A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes)
By Lawrence Ellsworth
Welcome to the Cinema of Swords Substack! This series is a companion and expansion to the Cinema of Swords hardcover (Applause Books, 2023), which collects over 400 tasty mini-reviews of screen swashbucklers from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.
This Substack builds on that foundation, continuing forward with reviews of swordplay movies and TV shows from the ‘90s to the present. Every week I’ll present two to four illustrated reviews on a common theme written both to inform and to entertain.
If you enjoyed the contents of the book, this weekly series will give you plenty more of the same. (And if you haven’t seen the book, ask about it wherever you do your book shopping!)
And My Axe!
Some of us waited a very long time for this movie—or at least, that’s how it felt. I grew up in the 1960s reading science fiction and fantasy; my father had read pulps like Weird Tales back in the ‘30s, and when those stories were republished as postwar paperbacks, he bought them and then passed them on to me. But I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy on my own in my junior high school library, pristine copies of the Houghton Mifflin hardcovers with those two-color foldout maps bound into the endpapers. I can still picture exactly where those volumes stood on those library shelves. I read them cover to cover … and then I read them again. When Dungeons & Dragons came along a few years later, giving us all the ability to tell such stories to ourselves, the course of my life was set. And here I am, 55 years after pulling The Fellowship of the Ring down from that shelf, still telling stories of heroic fantasy—and writing about them also, it seems.
So, to those of us who grew up treading in our imaginations the weed-grown paths of Middle-earth, a world to us almost as real as that of the asphalt roads and concrete pavement where we led our physical lives, the gift of Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring was unexpected and kind of a miracle. Jackson was one of us, he saw the same visions we did, and he had the talent and drive to put them on the screen, in a depiction as vivid and real as what we saw in our minds when we read the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And if that act of respectful and dedicated creation isn’t inspiring, I don’t know what would be.
Lord of the Rings 1: The Fellowship of the Ring
Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: New Zealand/USA, 2001
Director: Peter Jackson
Source: New Line DVD
This landmark film has become a cultural touchstone, and there’s no point in giving it regular coverage here because it’s almost inconceivable that anyone reading this review hasn’t seen it. But we can go into its cinematic swordplay and edged-weapon combat, because there are several interesting things to say about that.
In his LotR trilogy, Peter Jackson set out to bring Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth to life, approaching it as far more than a generic fantasy, giving the films the context and depth of the author’s richly imagined story setting. To accomplish that, one of the things Jackson did was to hire Tony Wolf, an expert in various pre-modern martial arts, to act as the “cultural fighting styles designer” on the trilogy. Wolf studied each major fantasy culture depicted in the films—Elves, Goblins, Dwarves, the Men of Gondor and Rohan, and the Uruk-hai Orcs—and considered, not just their combatants’ arms and armor, meticulously designed in Jackson’s prop workshops, but the societies they came from and how those origins shaped their approach to combat. For each culture, Wolf invented a particular fighting style, based in part on historical models but not beholden to our world’s history.
And then Wolf personally and painstakingly trained the actors representing each culture’s warriors on how to fight to best represent their particular fantasy. He did this with the lead actors, but also, and perhaps most importantly, with the extras playing the parts of Middle-earth’s rank and file soldiers. Moreover, he didn’t teach them just how to wield their weapons in a particular style, but also to adopt certain postures and silhouettes, to stand and move like warriors of the cultures they represented, both alone and in combat order with their cohorts. This brings to each of Middle-earth’s martial races a distinctive behavior and a remarkable specificity—one would be tempted to use the word “authenticity” if it wasn’t such an astounding exercise in, well, deliberate inauthenticity.
The other aspect that makes the best fight scenes in Fellowship so hard-hitting and memorable is the way the action is filmed and then treated. These aren’t the human-scaled sword duels of historical adventures, the kind of scraps fight director William Hobbs did so well, these are fantasy combats between larger-than-life opponents whose capabilities transcend the merely human. To convey this, every fight is a careful mix of grounded, realistic moves that flow naturally into exaggeration, superhuman dodges and attacks that make the larger-than-life actions convincing. Moreover, movement speed changes smoothly from slow-motion, for clarity in setting up positioning and attacks, directly into sped-up fast-motion to convey more-than-human power, reflexes, and speed.
This is particularly clear in the movie’s best action scene, the attack of the Goblins and the cave troll on the Fellowship in Balin’s tomb. The speed changes almost frame-to-frame to give the combat both physical impact and emotional resonance—as examples, the blinding speed of Legolas’ archery, and the slo-mo on Frodo’s agonized facial expressions after he’s wounded. Most crucially, the effect is applied with a light hand, subtly—you might not even notice it if you weren’t looking for it, you just sense that this fight feels really intense. Yet Jackson holds back and never lets the speed changes make the action cartoonish.
This speed-change technique has its roots in Asian martial arts movies—and if you want to see how bad it can look when it’s overdone, there are plenty of examples there. But in Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson shows himself to have a masterful grasp of modern action filmmaking. (That is, when he doesn’t forgo restraint and go totally over the top: I’m looking at you, 2005’s King Kong.)
Next Week: Xena Passes the Torch, the final bizarre season of the Warrior Princess. Don’t miss it!
About Lawrence Ellsworth
Lawrence Ellsworth is the historical fiction nom de plume of Lawrence Schick, author of The Rose Knight’s Crucifixion and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. See my website at swashbucklingadventure.net.
My current ongoing project is compiling and translating new, contemporary editions of all the books in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, a series that when complete will fill nine volumes. Book 8, Shadow of the Bastille, is currently being published in serial form on the Substack platform, and Book 9, The Man in the Iron Mask, is forthcoming. Check out the series at musketeerscycle.substack.com.
As Lawrence Schick, I’m a writer and game designer primarily associated with narrative or role-playing games, a career I’ve pursued for over forty years, starting in the late 1970s working for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, moving into video games in the ‘80s and then online role-playing games in the ‘90s. I was lead writer and “loremaster” for The Elder Scrolls Online for over nine years, and recently I returned to D&D as Principal Narrative Designer for Larian Studios’ smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3.