Lord of the Rings TV Show [Amazon]

Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
A young whippersnapper of 3000 ish. Elrond's younger. We can't have a female lead with power who commands respect, can we? Got to give the generic plot of princess rebelling against society's constraints, even if we have to demote her from queen to do it... Goddamnit, show, please don't do what I think you're going to do, anything but that.

Edit: This has been a weird journey, I started out interested, and with every new piece of promo material I have lower expectations. It doesn't look outright bad, but it does look very generic.
 
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Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
Something of a battle of principles now... I don't want to support something I have such low expectations for... but I don't want to dislike something without watching it, and I don't like supporting Amazon, but I don't expect most reviews to be fair. What to do, what to do...
 

ultima786

Pro Adventurer
AKA
ultima
Something of a battle of principles now... I don't want to support something I have such low expectations for... but I don't want to dislike something without watching it, and I don't like supporting Amazon, but I don't expect most reviews to be fair. What to do, what to do...
Watch it. The first episode was excellent
 

Roger

He/him
AKA
Minato
I like what's they've done with the Harfoots and the Dwarves, the Men storyline has potential, but boy did they make some decisions with the High Elves. I really don't think they needed to throw out quite as much lore to turn Galadriel into an adventurer.
 

Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
I lost the battle of wills to stay away from this. With all the one star review bombing and five star review bombing, it was difficult to find perspectives I could trust, and I didn't want my perspective to be corrupted by Endlessly Angry Youtube, want to get my thought down while they're relatively uninfluenced. Also, none of this is from a 'didn't follow the lore' perspective, because I went in with no expectation that they were following the book lore.
Composer is fantastic.

Visuals are great, but unfortunately, I don't care about visuals unless they make it difficult to understand what's happening.

Very disappointed with Galadriel's story, they did the thing I didn't want them to do, where they took away all her power in the name of empowering women. Very regressive, even though done with the best of intentions. I couldn't believe it when we had random Galadriel bullying in the first scene.

There's also that Fantasy Accents dilemma, where using British accents is very generic, but using any other kind of accent immediately leads to people drawing parallels with the world. So we have the Dwarves with Scottish accents with the drinky fighty culture, and Irish accented Harfoots with bucolic childlike creatures doing slapstick gags with no knowledge of the wider world. Obviously not intended, but that's basically a pick your poison situation.

Bronwyn also has a 'why won't anyone listen to me?' plot, which is honestly among the easiest most undemanding things to write on a mechanical level, I was hoping they'd do more than the most obvious plot available.

The worldbuilding is strange, it's as though no one acts except the PCs. Khazad Dum has no contact with the neighbouring kingdom of Eregion for some reason. If you want Elrond at your wedding, send him an invitation, it's not like he's unreachable.

Why would that be? Also the elves patrol the Southlands for decades but only Arondir has any friends, because Bronwyn is pretty. It's a world without a history where people don't interact until the script tells them to, no matter how close their neighbours are.

Many of the designs end up caught between the story they're trying to tell and the movies, where it sometimes hews close to the movie depictions which it can't legally follow, but doesn't create its own so gets stuck in ' similar to the movies, but legally distinct' territory. Most of the dramatic trailer shots are already in Eps 1 and 2, only exception being the Numenor stuff.

Elrond is a very good diplomat, and I was pleasantly surprised that they actually did start setting up things about the Rings of Power, I thought they wouldn't do that until Season 3.

I also apppreciate that they are okay with slowburning plots and they didn't try to write it like the Clone Wars, with cameos and winks and nods in every third sentence.

On a nitpicky level, Bronwyn wears the same dress when she's in her own apothecary chopping herbs as she does on a cross country mission to save a village, which they didn't notice any smoke from until they went up the hill even though it was on fire. Give her traveling clothes, costuming.

And did they CGI that cow? Mr Villager, if you can see your cow's ribcage, you're doing farming wrong.

It comes in below my expectations, but it's still on the level of ' below average to okay' rather than 'bad'. Seems very unambitious for such a giant project, they went with low hanging fruit in terms of creative choices.
 

Tetsujin

he/they
AKA
Tets
Me when I see Galadriel in armor

swoon-lust.gif
 

Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
Not a fan of the new origin of mithril, and I'm not really sure why. It actually does make sense if you assume that what they mean is Celebrimbor needs mithril to make the rings. I find it disagreeable and can't figure out why.
 
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Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
There's a whole narrative shifting game now, where the showrunners are calling out abusive fans while not saying but implying they're the root of all the criticism, while the Youtubers are carefully taking offence on behalf of the fanbase and Tolkien himself.

Amazon's PR machine vs the Internet, a battle of the ages. The whole conversation has become even more unsavoury.

The show itself... is not awful, but not great. It's kind of weird how little all that money and time was worth in the end, surely they could do better than this.

Edit: Episode 7 is fairly good.
 
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Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
Just finished. Holy crap, I don't believe it. My thoughts are complex, I don't have time for them now, but.... in summary 'You maniacs! You did it! You actually did it! You blew it up!" I'll be back when I've sorted through them, because I want to get this down somewhere. I'm just... stunned.
 

Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
This is either going to be very long even by my standards, or I'm going to get sick of it and give up quickly.
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
with goddamned Sauron!

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.
 

Eerie

Fire and Blood
I've watched the two first episodes personally and think it could have been a good idea, writing a story that could be. However, reading the critics of further episodes, it seems like a waste; they did not pick up the plot threads they started, and there are a few incoherences along the way that may make it too hard for me to swallow. I don't really have the time to pick up the other episodes right now, so I'm not sure whether I should do or it should just join my too big list of "one day when I'll have the time for this".
 

Tetsujin

he/they
AKA
Tets
Thought the series was okay. Kind of a slow start. Gorgeous visuals though. There are movies that don't look this expensive.
But yeah, it's just okay. It being an adaptation of basically just lore means it feels very different from LotR. It lacks that charm of going on an adventurous quest and shit. Characters forming bonds and all that. It's just a lot of back and forth between different groups and storylines.
Speaking of bonds, I do like the friendship between Elrond and Durin. That's good stuff.

Not sure how to feel about Galadriel essentially being the one that brought Sauron back lmao
Dude seemed genuine about trying to just be left the fuck alone until she sparked the fire in him. His speech to her in the season finale...I dunno, he sounded pretty convincing, maybe Galadriel should consider the whole dark queen thing after all? I'm not saying I ship it but...

they're both hot and stuff and y'know

...maybe I ship it a little


Oh yeah, the activation of Mt. Doom earlier was kind of a neat sequence

Adar is an intriguing character actually. I liked the scene between him and Galadriel where she was the one who came off as genocidal and unhinged.

I guess Gandalf is in this. I feel like I keep hearing conflicting statements from Tolkien nerds over when the wizards first appeared. "UHM AKSHUALLY, in the appendices of the books, he said they didn't arrive until the Third Age!" "UHM AKSHUALLY, in the secret letters of Tolkien published by his grandniece, he mentioned some arrived earlier!" "UHM AKSHUALLY, in a post-it note he scribbled and stuck on his fridge, it was mentioned that Gandalf did your mom!" and so on :monster:

Guess we can look forward to the origin story of Gandalf getting high with proto-Hobbits for the first time
 

Wol

None Shall Remember Those Who Do Not Fight
AKA
Rosarian Shield
I guess the series is relatively good, just not enough to be worthy of Tolkien's legacy and the millions behind it. That's what happens when you hire newcomers to carry a gigantic production like this one.
 
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Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
Relative to what, is I suppose the question. What standard should this story be compared to?

feel like I keep hearing conflicting statements from Tolkien nerds over when the wizards first appeared. "UHM AKSHUALLY, in the appendices of the books, he said they didn't arrive until the Third Age!" "UHM AKSHUALLY, in the secret letters of Tolkien published by his grandniece, he mentioned some arrived earlier!" "UHM AKSHUALLY, in a post-it note he scribbled and stuck on his fridge, it was mentioned that Gandalf did your mom!" and so on :monster:

They're all correct, because the thing about publishing all of someone's notes is you get conflicting concepts in development. So you just got to pick something and go with it. The thing about this production is, they keep making all the lazy choices, because recreating the wizard/hobbit dynamic is easier than putting thought into writing something new.

Taking the easy path is a short term gain, but it comes back to bite you in the long run.

Edit: I will roll back on 'Lazy' because there was obviously a lot of work involved, but for parts of this there seems to be an active effort to be uncreative. Like, Halbrand's story is set up as Aragorn's but WITH A TWIST, instead of building something new from the ground up. The new things are

Adar, which is probably the strongest part, even if they haven't done the legwork, and the mithril being distilled Silmaril, which doesn't make much sense even within the confines of the show.
 
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