Anya Taylor-Joy is going to be a fantastic elf assassin in Hunt for Gollum. But it’s a movie we don’t need film

toLet’s be honest: Anya Taylor-Joy would make a great elf. If any man could fly from tree to tree as if woven of thin thread and starlight, or appear on a moonlit branch as if he had just been summoned by a haunted stick, he would be the star of the Queen’s Gambit, the Witch, and Furiosa. She’s perfect for Lord of the Rings, and it’s not at all surprising that she’s been chosen to play the dwarf Siren in Andy Serkis’ upcoming The Hunt for Gollum, as confirmed this week by The Hollywood Reporter.

You may have heard about the movie: Serkis is back as Gollum, Ian McKellen is back as Gandalf, and the whole thing revolves around a barely mentioned, if important, part of LotR in which Aragorn is tasked with hunting down the grumbling, one-time owner of the One Ring, before Sauron’s forces can get to him.

There’s a very basic, if terribly contrived, solution to this particular story in the book: Frodo has the ring because Bilbo left it to him when he set off for Rivendell at the beginning of the story. Throw it into the fires of Mount Doom and get the job done. Some of you may think that this is why Tolkien himself spent so few pages detailing this episode, even though it covers the better part of two decades of the actual events. But that didn’t stop Serkis, Peter Jackson (now the producer) and others from deciding to move on.

This is where Taylor-Joy enters the proceedings. We’re told that Siren, who is not mentioned in Tolkien, is a “trusted assassin agent” of King Thranduil, who will be played again by Lee Pace from The Hobbit films. She’s the elf of Sindar, one of a clan that decided to stay in Middle-earth when many of their kin set out across the ocean to live forever in the Undying Lands, meaning she likely hails from the forest of Mirkwood. In Tolkien’s stories, Aragorn takes Gollum to Thranduil’s halls in the northeast of the Corrupt Forest after the ranger finally tracks him down. There Gandalf arrived to question him.

We already know this extensively, so it’s the research process itself that will have to compel us if we want this new film to feel like anything other than an expensive, gap-filling piece. The arrival of a previously unmentioned Seren, especially in the form of lead actor Taylor-Joy, may give us some clues as to how the adventure will play out. Aragorn plowing through Mordor and its miserable outer reaches had never seemed like a particularly enticing prospect. But what if he had a friend to accompany him on the road?

Enter Taylor Joy. So what if The Hunt for Gollum isn’t a Gollum movie at all, but the weirdest Middle-earth road movie about a great future king, a great forest slayer, and a wretched cave monster who knows too much? Seren and Aragorn may start out as enemies, spend the second act bickering across the Dead Marshes like midnight elves, and then slowly learn to respect each other after discovering that, beneath all the Forest Eternal’s arrogance and the Ranger’s mud-covered gloom, they’re both trying to stop the same disastrous information leak. Siren may be Thranduil’s outsider, sent from Mirkwood to make sure this devious little creature doesn’t bring the shadow of Mordor into the forest realm. Perhaps the whole thing becomes a three-way morality game on which the fate of Middle-earth depends.

Yet even here we are treading the same deadly swampy ground that Jackson walked in The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Serkis will get a whole new chance to make his way through Middle-earth, McKellen will get one last shot at his greatest role, and Jamie Dornan will get the thankless task of playing a mud-covered Viggo Mortensen. It could be wonderfully realized, as a thrilling Middle-earth haunting thriller, a brilliant swamp opera, or an artistic psychodrama in massive armor. But we’re still no closer to understanding why the whole thing had to happen.