The odds were against this show from the beginning. Lotr has one of the most dedicated fanbases there is, and people that know the lore inside out. It's a brilliantly created setting from a man who devoted most of his adult life to building this world, and meddling in that is not to be done lightly.
On the flipside, a lot of the worldbuilding is done for you, but there are enough gaps to make something good, and Amazon have enough money to make something of this. The flipside of the flipside is that, with so much money behind you, it becomes hard to take risks. And bland corporate committee filmmaking isn't good enough this time.
Angry fanbase diehards were against this from the start, but they always are. The first rumblings about the intimacy co-ordinator were way overblown (reducing potential for sex abuse on set, generally a good thing, and it didn't automatically mean we were getting graphic sex scenes). There was a lot of talk of Tolkien spinning in his grave, but I never trust anyone taking offense on behalf of a dead man they never knew.
I stayed away from most of the initial rumblings, because it was just standard fandom nonsense based on no actual conversation. Wheel of Time came out, and the reviews were mixed to say the least, but they were also not trustworthy. That production had a lot of issues with Covid, a lead actor disappearing in mysterious circumstances mid stream, and so on.
The first red flag that meant something was that title reveal with the practical forging. It raised my hackles, because it showed the show's priorities. Not story, not plot, not characters, but 'practical effects', pandering to that stupid meme that has been poisoning storytelling since the early 2000s. That was the first thing the showrunners wanted us to know, to the point of wasting a bunch of time and money forging the title screen.
I zoned out of a good chunk of the promo material, until bro asked me what I thought, so I hooked it all up to my veins in a short time to answer him. There was two basic strands of marketing 'practical effects', and 'diversity'. Those are both good things, but neither of them is a story. 'Practical effects', by itself is not impressive. But when you are marketing the practical effects instead of the story, something is wrong.
The actors said a bunch of stupid things, but that always happens, they're given talking points by their bosses, nothing worth holding against them. Amazon played up the (real) racist sexist backlash to deflect criticism, Youtube went insane pulling quotes out of context as it is wont to do. We got closer and closer to release day, and still no one would explain the story.
The timeline compression got out, another bad sign. They couldn't hide it, because it's not like they could conceal casting Isildur in season 1. They're 1500 years apart from the forging of the rings. They didn't have the rights to the Silmarillion, where most of the information about the second age is.
By this point I have come to terms with the fact that this is a separate continuity to the books, so I set aside my Tolkien lore hat and elected to see what it was like as an independent work. The marketing at least made that much clear.
Release day hits. The reviews, good and bad, are so widely dishonest that the only fair thing to do is watch the damn thing.
The show is...okay. Not awful, nothing special. The acting is generally good, the music is good, the action is okay, but there are gaps around the edges. There is no sense of scale, the characters use fast travel to get places, The cast is far too small. Many of the plots are cheaper knockoffs of stories elsewhere (forbidden elf/human romance, artifact of power tempting towards evil, the third age watchful peace). They start doing that Clone Wars thing where they poach lines from better scripts rather than write their own. Galadriel's story is generic female lead #425, complete with ship tease
It's not all bad by any means, but the things that make me doubletake as outliers are all on the weaker side. The show opens with Galadriel being bullied as a child in Valinor (I actually saw that in a leak, but thought it was a joke).
Galadriel has two conflicting characterisations, they want her to be the grizzled legendary hero, but also the brash youngster no one listens to. She can't be both those things. No one this impulsive and hotheaded would be given command of an army.The Commander of the Northern Armies (where are they, anyway?) would necessarily be savvy enough not to threaten the queen of numenor for no reason. That kind of thing can start wars.
Narrative shortcuts are everywhere. The elven garrison is mysteriously captured and end up on a chain gang. How? Why? Don't know, not explored. Why was Halbrand on that raft? No one knows. Why do no elves notice that their Southlands garrison has gone missing? Dunno, not explored. They take the lazy option and have everyone but Arondir killed, because that is easier to write.
Even major plot points are rife with shortcuts. Elrond didn't go to Durin's wedding. Was he sent an invitation? If not, why not? We don't get told. If he got an invite, why didn't he go?This is important, it's the foundation of one of the plotlines.
The plots that aren't lifted from other parts of story are the weakest on the whole. Adar the orc who wants a homeland, that is a great idea, but they don't have anything close to the time to do it properly, they only have eight hours plus a bunch of other plotlines to handle in the same time. It's exactly the decision a certain kind of writer would make. You want to 'fix' something about the world someone else made, so you put in this supposedly new idea to update the text, but doing it properly would require a lot of time and work to answer questions like 'What's wrong with their existing giant underground strongholds?' so better to just raise the idea and leave it there without doing the work.
The smaller combat scenes are quite good, but the big battle is poorly handled on the whole. They have trouble with basic things like whether it is daytime or nighttime. There are a lot of elementary mistakes running through this, from basic continuity like Galadriel saying she heard stories of the first orcs when she was young and then an episode later that orcs didn't exist when she was a child. They travel from Mordor to Eregion in six days, and then Celebrimbor lets some random stranger advise him on crafting.
Galadriel checks if Halbrand is the king of the Southland after she installs him as king of the Southlands. Probably should have done that first. They don't have enough screentime to do any of this properly, so it's shortcuts, shortcuts, shortcuts. On a normal show you might get away with that, but not for 470 million. The Rings of power are oddly and afterthought in the show called The Rings of Power.
I caught all the foreshadowing of who Halbrand was, but without the internet I don't know if I would have. Makes for an interesting rewatch when you imagine that in his own head he's just hysterically laughing the entire time. Charlie Vickers does a great job selling it, like most of the cast, but that finale was completely bizarre, Nothing made sense, like, at all, and I mean on a basic writing level, not in an 'aligned with booklore' way.
