demonic spectacle

Rating: 1/10 (4 May 2008)

I dislike these films. I dislike all this films with witches an wizards and other inhuman beings which are demonstrated to be good and the demons are mostly primitive. Humans should not turn to such kind of supernatural forces and produce fairy stories for entertainment. I went into one of the three "ring"- films with my children, who were already half grown up. After half of the film I left the cinema because I could not stand any longer this high quality-nonsense. In spite of the vast occult imagery, these movies and their literary counterparts are being praised by some professing Christians to be an allegory for the Bible story in which the good prevails in the end over the bad. World magazine's review is titled "Powerful Rings" and says that the "movie version of Tolkien's book speaks to today's culture." Unfortunately the today's culture is a very doubtful sort of thing. What about the increasing preference of our Youth for the occult, for violence and obsessions? Is the Lord of the Rings harmless fantasy or even a wholesome Christian allegory? I think neither nor. If the film or the books contained Bible truths it would not attract so many atheists. If they attract Christians it is apparently because these sort of Christians have a liking for the belief that wizards, hobbits, dragons and the kind could be of the good buddies, maybe also a liking for pagan contents which also had the author Tolkien. His books are filled with occult imagery, such as witches, goblins, warlocks, wizards, fairies, and such things; and though these are strongly and unconditionally condemned in the Bible, they are often portrayed as good and desirable by Tolkien. Many of the heroes of the Lord of the Rings, in fact, are of doubtful nature. The books became in the sixties and seventies popular with the generation of drug headed hippies. When Tolkien was eight years old, his mother converted to Roman Catholicism, and he remained a Catholic throughout his life. In his last interview, two years before his death, he unhesitatingly testified, "I'm a devout Roman Catholic." Catholics have a different approach to the Bible as Protestants as well as a different approach to pagan symbols and cults. As a professor of literature at Oxford University, Tolkien specialized in Old and Middle English and loved ancient pagan mythology. His first fantasy novel, The Hobbit, appeared in 1937, and The Lord of the Rings, in 1954-55. Several others were published later, some posthumously. Like Tolkien Lewis and perhaps most of the so called Christians they did not accept the Bible as the infallible Word of God and he picked and chose what he would believe about the New Testament, rejecting it in parts. And like Tolkien, C.S. Lewis loved at least some things about Catholicism. He believed in purgatory, confessed his sins to a priest, and had the last rites performed by a Catholic priest.
The books depict the calling up of the dead to assist the living, which is plainly condemned in the Scriptures of the Bible as every Protestant knows. Sympathy with the devilish is not so much fostered and demonstrated as in the dominant occult Harry Potter series but Tolkien's fantasies are certainly not of a Christian spirit. Some Christians regard them as potential dangerous message. Films are to a younger unexperienced audience always a strong influencer. In a film review this should also be taken in consideration. For agnostics the films should be rejected as they depict the bad as something too less subtle. The enemy of man is not outside him, it is inside him and everybody should know this. In US schools young students massacre their fellows, there are no Hobbits who come to give the defenders of the right and good a helping hand, no flying by of Harry Potters. The bad is inside man and we have to take means to keep it down and promote the good. Films like that are not helpful. In his last interview in 1971, Tolkien stated that he did not intend The Lord of the Rings as a Christian allegory and that Christ is not depicted in his fantasy novels. Tolkien said, "But that seems I suppose more like an allegory of the human race. ... they (the humans) struggle on, almost blindly in a way" A blind struggle? It is going to be a blind struggle if we do not take care to which direction our offspring goes! Survival of the fittest? Are the good the fittest? May be, maybe not! Tolkien also said: "I dislike allegory whenever I smell it." He had definitely no Christian aims.
Fantasy role-playing games are very influential today. Dungeons and Dragons, which appeared in the early 1970s, was based on Tolkien's fantasy novels. Tolkien certainly did get his ideas from pagan religions, and the message promoted in his fantasy books is strictly pagan. And so do the films. The morals in the books and films is of a very doubtful nature, it is primitive and not endurable. It can carry nobody to nowhere.