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As a pretty strong conservative, I loved the show, fight me. There were tons of great moments, lines, special effects, music, and overall ideas. The one thing it didn't have much of was character development--while the side characters did seem to grow, the main characters mostly stayed pretty static.
But seriously, there were plenty of scenes that just amazed me. I find myself confused at the very tepid audience response--it did tons of cool things that to me make up for its relatively small issues.
I'd like to know which ones were most impressive so I can give them a gander.
One of the reasons I haven't started the show is because despite looking, I haven't seen any reference to a particular scene or sequence that was mindblowing and awesome and justified the whole show just by its very existence.
Like, what scene would you point to if you were trying to draw someone in?
That brings to mind 2 scenes, but the better one is a huge spoiler so I'll focus on the other (much smaller spoiler).
In short, an elvish protagonist is captured by orcs, and now he and a few other elves and a bunch of other humans are stuck working for them as slaves.
They wait until daytime, when the orcs hang out under a protective awning while the slaves labor under the sun, then start working to break their chains so that at least one can escape and notify the elves of what's happening. The orcs of course catch on quickly, but can't enter the sunlight en masse, so it turns into a battle to buy time for the escaping elves.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hXMvoApWHT0
That's the actual video, I have to confess that watching it over again I was much less impressed with it, but in the moment found it very cool.
I liked the improvisational aspect of that, but it also highlights the core of the shows problem to me -- there isn't really a story, there is a sequence of things that happened. If elves are ninjas that can use chains and twigs, how did they get caught? Why do they run into close-quarters and get disembowelled by the Warg, rather than using the spear in their hands as a spear. Arondir sometimes seems a master warrior and other times not, and the other elves mainly seem to suck (except for that one brief moment).
And then Arondir 'loses', but gets set free anyway (Adar), where he gets in a fight, but they get free anyway (running in the forest with Theo), where the Orcs surround his town and attack him (pre Mt Doom) ... but they get free anyway. It made it hard to care, because nothing that happened in one scene (Arondir captured, Bronwyn hit by an arrow, Halbrand bedridden with a gut wound, Whatsishisname blowing up boats, Mt Doom exploding, The Numenoreans going to middle earth) has no effect on the later ones.
So you can't really set any expectations or feel for a story. You can watch the pretty pictures, but that's about it.
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Oh lord.
That's one of the scenes I've already looked at because it was one of the few 'high points' anyone seemed to tout from the show.
It's not bad but nothing in there spurs me to want to watch further to find context. Some elves were captured, and there's an escape attempt, with a giant mutant dog. I'm not exactly ripe with curiosity to know how this situation was brought about. Maybe a little curious to know how it resolves, but I can safely guess that the Orcs lose, right?
I'm especially annoyed with some shoddy editing choices. At 1:45 he does the slow-mo flip (which is offputting to me anyway, but okay) and the warg flies past him and is a few mere feet from impacting the tree. Then immediately cut to a new shot that shows the warg flailing around for another full second as they're further from the tree than they just were in the previous shot.
The spatial orientation of that scene is a bit fucked.
The orcs actually win, and all of Arandor's elf friends die. Later the bad guy asks Arandor to deliver a message asking the villagers to join team Bad Guy, which is how he escapes.
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Arondir and the trench? That is so bad - did you see Fluffy, our fearsome Warg bitch (and yes, Fluffy is a she, I saw the teats on her corpse in one shot)?
The wuxia wire-work acrobatics of Arondir, the other Elves and humans digging the trench trying to fight the Warg and the Orcs with bits of sticks, everyone dies except Our Hero, the pathetic copying of Boromir's death with the Elven watch commander - it was embarrassingly bad.
I liked the Dream of the Downfall of Númenor, because it's hard to go wrong with a massive wave destroying everything in its path.
But the eruption of Mount Doom was also terrible, because everyone should be dead - there is no way you are walking away from that, before you can even flee you will be dead.
Galadriel walks face-first into a pyroclastic flow at the end of episode six and at the start of episode seven, she wakes up totally unharmed save for a coating of orange dust while around her horses and people are on fire.
All of Galadriel's fight scenes are bad, from the ice troll onwards. So we have five or six Elven warriors being smacked around by the ice troll, then Galadriel just has to do a jump off a sword blade and kills it with a twirly-twirl of her sword single handed and without even a decent fight. Every scene she is in, she wins because she is that awesome. And it's all done fast and reliant on CGI to fill in the gaps.
There's a funny, if exaggerated, analysis of the Battle of the Southlands here and I think it makes the main points clear; the show went for what it thought would look 'cool' but failed on that, as well as failing on making any kind of sense. Yeah, the Jackson movies also went for 'cool' in the face of 'this makes no sense' but they pulled it off because they were able to make the fight scenes look reasonable. The show copies the movies but gets it wrong all the time.
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Oh, there were scenes that amazed me, too. Like having Galadriel walking face-first into a pyroclastic flow and then waking up none the worse except for a coating of Cheeto dust. Or Galadriel jumping overboard and deciding to swim a couple of thousand miles back to Middle-earth. Most scenes with Galadriel, to be honest.
Sure, those were pretty unrealistic, but it also avoided plenty of modern script cliches that show up everywhere else. For example, I don't remember any characters ever having a long heartfelt scene where they explain to the audience all of their character motivations in order to make sure we understand them.
Who explained their character motivations? Galadriel? "My brother died and I am out to avenge him" - so why are you a bitch to everyone? You don't care about the men under your command, you don't use diplomacy and persuasion, you demand demand demand, and in the final episode it is shown how your manipulation of others has come around to bite you in the backside, and you still get away with it!
This thing is packed full of modern script clichés, that's the problem. They can't write the characters any other way than appealing to the clichés.
Galadriel was definitely pretty bad. Honestly the characters in general were pretty bad--none of the main ones had flaws per se, at least as far as I can tell. I mean, Galadriel was very pushy, but the show didn't present that as a flaw.
IDK if you get the situation I'm referencing exactly, where characters just come out and tell another character all of their thoughts and motivations. It's just not the sort of dialogue that happens in real life. I didn't see it in Rings of Power, and I do see it in virtually every show I watch nowadays. Much better to have passing references at motivations and otherwise watch people's actions speak for themselves. I do wish characters had made more in the way of mistakes though because there's no better way to watch character growth than to see how they handle their mistakes.
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I feel like the more overwrought "0 out of 10, stupid fat hobbit, they've RUINED IT" takes were a bit much, but in terms of quality of writing it felt much worse than similar "prestige tv" competitors/predecessors like Game of Thrones.
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If they wanted cool scenes, they could have made their own universe that doesn't really make sense and had it the way they wanted. The issue is that the writers of this series were clearly not in the headspace of Tolkien. The idea behind the lord of the rings was to create a great nordic epic and Tokien was very much in the headspace of northern Europeans in the 900s. He created a very immersive, detailed and rich world that captured deep elements of Germanic culture.
This series has a shallow world centered around the headspace of mediocre people in Hollywood while claiming to be a continuation of something much deeper.
No they couldn't. If they could, they wouldn't need to vandalize others. If you can create your own universes, you just do that. If you can't - well, you either learn to code, or do sequels, reboots, derivatives and stuff like that.
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We live in Sequel world now, no further universes are allowed.
Also, you're not allowed to not care.
New universes still come out occasionally, but they have to prove themselves as books first. Both The Martian and The Expanse started out as novels.
"You may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you."
But even though you may not be allowed not to care, you are still allowed not to watch.
Boycott people who hare you.
Or people who rabbit you, even
Very bunny.
I'm lappin' up these puns.
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Typical mottian lagos/pathos mix up.
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The Babylon Bee have been naughty again, this time about Rings of Power. I fully expect Snopes to do another fake news debunking any day now 😁
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The problem is that he succeeded too well.
It's the Brothers' Grimm/Bible problem: by gathering all these stories into a new, self-contained book, they were rendered more portable and legible to the world...but were now no longer rooted for a particular people alone and a lot of the geographic and cultural specificity is written over. Especially because Tolkien was so influential in the greater genre.
Anyone can read Tolkien. And that young non-Germanic kid doesn't need to dig into just where Tolkien got his impression of Elves, Dwarves or whatever (or recognize his own culture in it) cause we all now know that that's just part of fantasy and everyone does it cause Tolkien.
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