I get the parallels between the characters, but I'm not sure how that makes anything more nuanced. Seems like a reach, with kinda specious arguments. The worldbuilding is impressive in many ways, but it does lay out a fairly clear cut line of good beings and evil beings/groups. Good individuals may fall to evil through temptation, or can be misguided, and it's up to select, particularly self-sacrificing champions to fix the issue. There is also a certain factor of redemption. Tolkien was, after all, a Christian.
... and this was, after all, an early and even genre-defining work. It is fine for it to not carry all the grit and subversion of conventional morality we've gotten used to since then. In fact it's influential enough to be part of why there's anything to even subvert. I don't think there's any need to bend over backwards to find more meaning than there is: fanon from Le Guin is still fanon.
The LOTR is ultimately a good vs evil. Even if you look at it from Sauron’s perspective, Sauron is willfully defying what the gods in Middle Earth want.
That doesn’t mean the story is bad. It’s a story of individual adventure and finding hope. It’s a fantasy world with a lot of depth. But it’s certainly no deeper-meaning, social issue-solving set of novels.
Respectively, you might be oversimplifying. The Valar and their lessers the Maiar were created by Eru Ilúvatar in an act of creation AND the most complete and powerful of the Valar, Melkor, was in some sense set up to fail or fall. Melkor became Morgoth upon his fall and Sauron was his lieutenant. When the Valar finally ejected Morgoth into the void Sauron was left to do his thing. Its left ambiguous I think with regard to what Eru Ilúvatar wants because he created the whole mess; perhaps he wanted a show to watch or saw it all as a test. At any rate while the Valar are all “good” and while Sauron is definitely bad in the sense that domination is understood to be at the root of evil and Sauron is the embodiment of the will to dominate in the third age, Sauron’s very presence means that it is what Eru Ilúvatar wanted. Its not just good versus evil. Its weirder than that.
There’s another important theme that runs through Tolkien which is sub-creation. The act of creation involves depositing and depleting your power into the creation. This is why Arda is known as Morgoth’s ring; he deposited himself into the world, corrupting it in the process from the original design. The possible exception is that Eru maybe did not diminish himself in the process of creating Arda but I’m not sure. One way to think about it is that Eru did diminish himself via sub-creation and that would make Morgoth an aspect of Eru in the same way that the rest of the Valar and Maiar are. It could be entity and shadow-entity counterpart all the way down to the root, meaning sub-creation is really just dissociation and God is simultaneously good and evil the whole time.
Labyrinth, Legend, Willow, and Ladyhawke have to be on the list.
But leaving out the Conan movies, Beastmaster, the Dark Crystal, and Krull seems wrong.
And then there’s the Never-ending Story and the Princess Bride, which have to be near the top, if not the top.
But there’s Baron Munchausen as well.
Fuck.
The Princess Bride is half comedy, so calling it a true fantasy movie may not be acceptable. But, it’s the one I’ve watched the most out of all my favorites, and it stands as one of mu favorites of any genre. So I guess that is it?
How the hell is this supposed to get narrowed down?
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