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Notes -
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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