Peter Jackson’s ‘Hunt for Gollum’ movie is likely a hidden Aragorn epic

polygon.com:

The news is out: Peter Jackson and his Lord of the Rings collaborators will executive produce a new movie set in Middle-earth, with Andy Serkis directing and reprising his role as Gollum, and the working title is Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum.

So there’s just one question: What, exactly, could it be about? With real experts on the text like Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh involved, there’s one thing that leaps to mind immediately — a 50 day slog during which Aragorn captured Gollum in a marsh and dragged him bodily overland for close to 900 miles until they reached the court prisons of the elven king Thranduil.

So actually there are two questions: What is The Hunt for Gollum about? and How do you make that into a great movie?

Most of what we know about this period in Aragorn and Gollum’s lives comes from the text of The Fellowship of the Ring, from some asides during the Council of Elrond about Gandalf’s long quest to verify whether Bilbo’s ring was indeed the fabled One.

Jackson’s movie shortens this period for brevity, but in Tolkien’s text 17 years elapse between Bilbo’s birthday, when Frodo gets the Ring, and the scene when Gandalf returns to see if he’s kept it secret (kept it safe). Gandalf spent a lot of that time looking for Gollum, so that he could question the creature about how he got the Ring. To that end, he recruited Aragorn’s skills as a tracker.

But finding Gollum in all of Middle-earth turned out to be a real needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing, and eventually they decided to give up. Gandalf went to Gondor, to read ancient texts, and Aragorn headed west, back to his rangers. That’s when, by complete chance, Aragorn found Gollum’s tracks in the Dead Marshes and caught him.

Then it took him over a month and a half to drag his prisoner to civilization so that Gandalf could interrogate him. You know that scene where Sam and Frodo are dragging Gollum along while he screams like hell’s own toddler? Imagine that, but for seven