I continue to be impressed with how adamant the internet is to tell me I need to not like this show. I’m a middling LOTR geek and I’m just happy to have more on screen adaptations that aren’t the Hobbit. I really enjoy it. Sorry internet!
My main frustration is how they did not have Durin as a reincarnated figure, but as part of just a lineage who happened to name themselves the same, like an English king. Thats pretty central to the dwarven situation in The Hobbit and LotR, and it feels incredibly dumb they left that out. I would love for an adaptation of the Children of Hurin, or the struggles of Fingolfin leading to his final battle with Morgoth, or something...but no, they decided to write their own lore in.
I have not watched it for the same reason that I avoided Shadow of Mordor. What I know is from the articles and reviews of the show surrounding its release. But the fact that they did not have the rights to the Silmarillion bewilders me why they would try to appeal to fans who have already read it. Tolkien and his son spent near a century working on the lore, and it feels wrong to have a corporation decide to throw it all out for a quick buck.
If they wanted a fantasy show to fight Game of Thrones, they should have had an original work. I mean, look at Invincible! Outside of the hardcore comic book scene, nobody has heard of that. Because it was such a good story, people spread the word like wildfire. They can create something original, and that original work can succeed. They are Amazon. They have the marketing to put it in the public's eye, and the money to make it good. Instead they rode the coattails of an author, and even claimed "it was the story he never wrote" as though any of that was based on his works.
They had to. They didn't have the rights to Children of Hurin, or the Silmarillion. And they're never going to get them, because the Tolkien estate is never going to sell those. (And I'm frankly surprised that they let the LotR rights get so far out of their control as to make The Hobbit and this possible. Plenty of authors these days want more control over what happens with their story.)
They only had the rights of the Appendix to LotR. There's tons of material in there, but not a complete story. So they took the events from the Second Age to write a story about (though they already seem to be mixing some events from the Third Age into the mix). They could have made this a grand multi-millennia epic, but instead they decided to mix the events of 2000 (or even 4000?) years together into one big soup.
Like, imagine if I wrote a story where everyone who died in Hunger Games duked it out as zombies, then claimed it was Suzanne Collins because I have the rights to the characters but not the books. I would rightfully be mocked, even though the story was loosely based off of the original story.
Rings of Power should have been its original world. Not a ripoff of an author that people love dearly, because they wanted the name recognition without the rights.
Sauron the flaming eyeball? Denethor smacking his lips and dribbling food down his chin so that even the last person in the audience understands that he's a "bad guy". Faramir getting tempted by the ring? It's quite interesting how some people treat it as some sort of gold standard of faithful adaption...
Personally, while I loved the LotR movies, I also feel like they were the worst thing to happen to the books. Ever since the movies came out every studio has wanted a piece of it for nostalgias sake. I remember when the first two Narnia movies came out I was sad that not as many people liked it since I love Lewis every bit as much as Tolkien, and I wanted my enjoyment of the books to spread. Prince Caspian had inaccuracy problems, but the core story was there. After the abomination that was 2010s Dawn Treader, and seeing how corporatized Middle Earth has become, that seems like a mercy in hindsight.
But they do have the rights. They have the rights to this.
The problem is that they're mixing everything up into a nonsensical story and telling it poorly. And I really don't understand why, because with their budget, they should have been able to get the best writers in existence.
> Rings of Power should have been its original world.
I don't think it would have been able to stand on its own without Tolkien's name attached. Certainly not with this kind of budget.
Same here. The pacing is inconsistent, and some of the characters seem pretty off. The pacing is not as inconsistent, and the characters not as off, as The Hobbit. Therefore whatever, it's fine. Is it going to be my favorite show? No. Will I watch it? Yeah.
Still, low bars everywhere. Why can't these sort of shows be made by people who simultaneously love and understand the source material, but also know how to write a good story?
I can definitely relate to this. I didn't mind the first two at all, but the last one was not enjoyable at all for me. I'm the type of person who usually has absolutely no interest in cinematography as an art form (tending to roll my eyes a bit internally when someone actively makes sure to use the term "films" instead of "movies"), but watching The Rise of Skywalker was the first time I ever felt strong negative feelings towards a movie purely based on, well, film-making reasons. I was almost overwhelmed by how quickly the camera shots were changing; at one point I started counting how many seconds each shot lasted, and it took several minutes before I counted one over four seconds. The dialogue also felt extremely stilted; I remember reading beforehand that they had used existing footage of Carrie Fischer due to her dying beforehand, and it seemed like their solution to shoe-horning in the lines of hers they had without making them stick out was just to edit it so that all dialogue in the entire movie felt spliced together rather than the actors actually being on set together.'
The Rise of Skywalker may have done a better job of catering to people's nostalgia in terms of where they expected the plot to go after the original movies, but I don't think that doing what people expected is what made the original movies good in the first place.
Given these constraints, I probably won't be too upset by any liberties they take once I get around to watching the show - never mind that by now, I've probably forgotten most of the lore anyway ;)
That said, I'd have preferred a taller Galadriel and bearded dwarf ladies would have been fun...
When I read this review, the author's complaints are all trivial. The three examples of the show being terrible are: 1. Elron and Durin are really good friends, 2. Galadriel looks suspiciously strong, and 3. the Hobbits aren't reacting the right way to a broken ankle.
I'm sure this type of article plays well to a person with a disposition, or someone who has been steeped too deeply into certain internet subcultures.