After the LOTR and The Hobbit prequel, the Tolkien universe is going even further behind, telling the story of Galadriel, retconned from chick-turned warrior into straight up Xena Warrior Princess.
While the cinematography looks nice and the orcs look decent, the characters are pretty boring, the casting is mostly a miss, the actors are bland, flat, and soul-less. I couldn’t empathize with Galadriel, Elrond got downgraded from Hugo Weaving to discount Neil Patrick Harris, and the hobbits are annoying as fuck, so annoying that they can be used as advertising for condoms. And they have dark-skin elves, dwarves and hobbits, but not in main roles, duh. They’re just there to tick the diversity boxes. Everything else is just filler. Watching the first two episodes, it mostly feels like a fantasy-themed soap opera.
While the original Peter Jackson trilogy became a classic because of its great outdoors, casting, acting, music, writing, directing, none of these are successfully done in the tv show with almost the longest name in history.
None of the original magic feeling is captured in this series. This show will either change a lot, or won’t get past season one. Because it is what it is: another money-grab failure from a big company in hope for huge profits. I wonder if the actors had to pee in bottles and do 16-hours shooting days.
Oh, and if you see a bazillion articles like “7 Reasons to Ignore the negative reviews for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” and “Amazon’s putting a three-day pause on reviews for The Rings of Power” it means that the marketing department is working heavy on damage control.
Two popcorns and the title for “most expensive flop”.
Update: Third episode is out. The show really looks amazing, but the story is all over the place, you don’t know what’s flashback, what’s dream, and what is present time. It’s decent to watch if you don’t have anything else to see.
