In the end, mankind chooses technology

Every family has its holiday traditions. One of ours is binge-watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In between opening presents and devouring the Christmas ham, we spend 12 hours with Frodo Baggins as he struggles to take the ring of power to Mount Doom and his friends battle Uruk-hai and Orcs.

As we watched this last Christmas I was struck again by an irony at the heart of these magical movies. They use sophisticated modern technology to romanticize a simpler, low-technology past.

And we, my family but also the wider audience, are unconcerned about the irony. We admire the technology; we wallow in the righteousness of the anti-technological message.

JRR Tolkien, the English author who wrote the novels the movies are based on, came of age as automobiles and tractors were starting to replace horses. That distressed him. Tolkien has been described as a man who loved trees and hated technology.

Director Peter Jackson’s movies are faithful to Tolkien. Horses and trees are revered, manufactured things disdained. At one point in the second film, “The Two Towers,” walking, talking trees called Ents destroy an evil wizard’s primitive factory.

Subtler expressions of anti-technology sentiment abound. The good guys are swordsmen and archers, hand-to-hand warriors who triumph through skill and heroism. Only the bad guys wage war with machines – catapults, battering rams and siege towers.

Yet to bring the war for Middle Earth to life, Jackson used computer-generated imagery, motion capture and other state-of-the-art filmmaking technology. The three movies were ahead of their time; they hold up well today despite all the technological progress filmmakers have made in the decades since.

Had Tolkien