Go back to your books… and your armchair. Plant your trees. Watch them grow. 🍁☕️
(The whirlwind with which these two characters have cemented themselves into my psyche. I adore them so much... l'd like to think this takes place in the depths of Erebor. While they have a still moment together. Soft, shy confessions before the raging storm.) 🥲
Because I watched that scene in BotFA… and Bifur is not just comic relief.
Bifur was carving a kitten, playfully crouching as its tail swished, frozen in the moment before it pounced on a piece of string and immortalized by his clever fingers in a piece of birch wood. If they had been in Ered Luin, Fjelarun would have been the obvious recipient, fond of all animals as she was, but Fjelarun was far away, much farther than Bifur had travelled since before her birth. Around him, birds were singing to each other, invisible among the branches of trees that seemed older than any others he had seen.
Andy Serkis using AI for his next LOTR movie is just spitting on Tolkien's tomb.
The new movie will use AI
Let me explain.
Tolkien wrote about the machines that are corrupting people (Saruman and his industry, Sauron in Mordor, but also the Ring itself as a machine to gain more power)
[Selected excerpts from Tolkien's Letter 131 to Milton Waldman, 1951]
That's exactly what AI is all about: the Machine "with destructive and evil effects" and which reduces "to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect".
Of course, back then, Tolkien wasn't talking about gen AI, but about industrialisation at large... but I think that his argument can perfectly apply to gen AI. And if you can't see the similarities, then I can't do anything for you.
Using gen AI to adapt Tolkien's work is not just disrespectful, it's also offensive. It's like stepping on his legacy and the points he was trying to explore through his work.
Besides, we all know why Andy Serkis does this: because he wants the P. Jackson's cast to come back, toying with people's nostalgia to better sell his movie. It's pure marketing, manipulating the fanbase's sensible cord to better sell his movie. He isn't creating anything new, he rebrands PJ's work and uses AI to make it fit our times. (I'm not fond of the Rings of Power series, but at least it offers something new - even if it draws on PJ's work, it's a different, diverse cast, a kinda new proposition based on Tolkien's work).
Tolkien's work focuses on creativity, on the power of imagination and creation. He praises it as a highest type of magic.
Using AI is all but creation.
And don't let me start on Serkis's whitewashing discourse. He made it clear that he didn't want any actor of colour in his movie... which is basic racism.
Not only because there are mentions on brown skins in Tolkien's work, but also (mostly) because this man disregards the importance of inclusivity and representation. Middle-earth is a world in which dragons exist... How dare you say the presence of black or brown people would be "unrealistic" in that world??
So I'm going to say it once and for all: Andy Serkis is a racist, an opportunist, and someone who doesn't give a shit about Tolkien's legacy or about inclusivity at large. I don't need more to know where this man stands on the political umbrella.
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