The Amazon series is not about making a good LOTR movie. It's about making money for the studios and also removing any/all sympathy for the striking writers. Its incredibly insidious in that way.
You will find those that trip over themselves to defend ROP (and new Star Trek, et. al.). This is the target audience. I am not sure what convinced this audience that the new content is good - Part of me suspects it's mostly Stockholm syndrome. Those without the courage to adopt a more stoic attitude towards life.
I feel like if more people would quit consuming pointless shit all the time, we might wind up with better pointless shit. As it stands, anything will generate some amount of revenue when you launch it on Netflix. This is really bad game theory for high quality content producers and the risk/reward tradeoff they have to negotiate with publishers.
"We need 2 years to run the traps on lore" and "casting will be an on-going and convoluted process" == you are kicked out of the Netflix green light meeting without any additional courtesy.
The opening theme alone represents the music of the ainur so well, I never skip it.
The tragedy is that the source material for the second age is so great yet they chose to take the show in a baffling and arbitrary direction, almost completely decoupled from the existing lore.
That’s the silliest thing I read today.
For instance attention to detail was a pretty important theme in Tolkien’s works. He was pretty strict about timeframes, military planning etc. in Amazon’s show everyone seems to have a teleportation device, boat hulls breaks the law of physics considering how much stuff you can fit into them and “Galadriel” is the best swimmer in history multiplied by 100…
It pretty much a cheap 90s fantasy tv show with an inflated budget that takes itself way to seriously than it has any right to.