Nicholas Hoult is J.R.R. Tolkien in the full-length trailer for Tolkien, a biopic about The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings creator's formative years. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings remain as popular as ever, with Amazon Studios in the midst of developing a multi-season Lord of the Rings TV series based on the author's many stories that weren't covered in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movie trilogies. With Tolkien fever going strong as ever, it's no wonder that the writer himself is getting renewed attention. A film about his life has been in the works as far back as 2013, but is finally making its way to theaters this May.
Simply titled Tolkien, the biopic explores the storyteller's early years, as he becomes friends and forms a "fellowship" with a group of outcasts at school and falls in love with his future wife, Edith Bratt (Lily Collins), before heading off to fight in WWI. Fox Searchlight Pictures kicked off the project's marketing back in January by releasing the first-look images, followed by a teaser trailer shortly after. Now, with some two months left before the movie hits theaters, a full-length trailer has been unveiled.
Related: Lord of the Rings TV Show is NOT The Silmarillion or Young Aragorn
The official Tolkien trailer is now online, ahead of its relase in theaters over the forthcoming weeks. Check it out, below.
As you would expect, the Tolkien trailer covers the broader strokes of the film, from Tolkien and Edith's courtship to young J.R.R. meeting his schoolmates-turned brothers in spirit - Christopher Wiseman (Tom Glynn-Carney), Geoffrey Bache Smith (Anthony Boyle), and Robert Quilter Gilson (Patrick Gibson) - to Tolkien and his friends heading off to war. Like the teaser, the full trailer offers a glimpse of the horrors that J.R.R. witnesses on the battlefield, as well as the nightmarish visions that he has (upon falling sick during combat), which help to inspire the darker elements of Middle-earth. No doubt, the film itself will have more than its fair share of Lord of the Rings and/or The Hobbit easter eggs for Tolkien fanatics to spot. There are at least a handful in the trailer too, including scenes where Tolkien envisions fantasy creatures like the Nazgûl and Smaug the dragon.
Written by Stephen Beresford (Pride) and David Gleeson (Don't Go) and directed by Dome Karukoski (Tom of Finland), Tolkien looks and sounds less formulaic than the average biopic so far. The wartime-fantasy sequences alone are pretty unique for this sort of biographical film, and the movie itself appears to focus on most of the same themes that dominated the author's actual work (friendship, love, war). Tolkien is slated to open against Detective Pikachu, The Hustle, and Kenneth Branagh's Shakespeare memoir All is True in theaters, but should be able to hold its own against the competition, given how different they all are. At the very least, anyone who's a fan of Middle-earth will want to give this story about the real fellowship a look at some point.
MORE: Midsommar Trailer: The New Nightmare From the Director of Hereditary
Source: Fox Searchlight Pictures