Hacker Cinema
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
2022 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Patrick McKay, John D. Payne
ActionAdventureScience FictionFantasy
Beginning in a time of relative peace, we follow an ensemble cast of characters as they confront the re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.
5 positive18 negative5 mixed14 neutralfrom 42 commenters
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44 comments on Hacker News
Rings of Power, an amazing show that manages to truly capture the feeling and atmosphere of the books, gets so much hate online. Yet all these garbage prequels and spinoffs get a pass. The Hobbit as 3 films? Really?
> This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it.
That's funny, because that's very much not what happened with those movies. Remember the character assassination of Faramir? I recall Jackson (or perhaps Fran Walsh) saying in an interview that they deliberately broke from Tolkien's story with that one, because the way Tolkien wrote it didn't fit the story they were trying to tell. They felt that having someone set the One Ring aside when tempted undermined the idea of building up the Ring as a threat in the minds of the audience. In other words, they chose to go with the story they wanted to tell rather than honoring the story Tolkien told.
Certainly the LOTR movies weren't as flagrant as Rings of Power with the liberties they took. And some of the changes were indeed due to the constraints of adapting to the medium of film, rather than a book. But even so, they chose to disrespect the source material pretty blatantly at times.
Related trivia (he mentions he worked on low budget shows prior to this), 650 million dollar budget for show's two seasons or 26-27 million per episode: https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/andor-tony-gilroy-genocide-pretty-effortless-1235127755/
For reference, Rings of Power, Jupiter's Legacy and Citadel (US version) cost about twice as much per episode on Amazon, and Game of Thrones on HBO started at five to six million per episode and went up to 15 million by the final season.
I think most rage bait about the Warhammer series is manufactured by content farm channels to generate clicks - the series wasn’t even officially in development until a few weeks ago.
There’s an entire subgenre of YouTube channels that consist solely of creators updating videos promising that they have inside information on the creative conflicts at Lucasfilm/Amazon/etc, all of which happen to align perfectly with whatever the fandom is outraged with that week.
https://youtube.com/@mikezeroh
This guys channel is a great example - most of the channels discussing “female custodes Henry cavil warhammer 40k tv series” Amazon follow a similar format.
Edit:
I’d also add that I don’t think Rings of Power is bad because they cast minorities - most of the actors are fine, really. The plotting and pacing is just horrendous. In a show that has 5+ active plot lines and threads scattered all over the world, they’ve spent a quarter of their screen time on a plot line that’s completely disconnected not just from the lore but from the wider story being told and doesn’t look like it’s going to connect anytime soon. Which is funny, because I’d imagine Amazon execs felt that they were obligated to include that plot line (the Hobbit one) to appease viewers.
This sort of exists, but unfortunately only as slow trainwrecks. It is how Bobby Kotick was finally ousted from Activision-Blizzard, and similarly with Amazon's Rings of Power, and Boeing's 737-Max, and also with the crap Disney puts out in the last 25 years (new star wars movies). With Kotick however, I fear he was just replaced with more competent bean-grubbers.
Per their email:
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Follow-up to my previous reply: after looking through what's available online about The Rings of Power, I realized that this is the series where (a) Galadriel takes a ship back to Valinor, but then changes her mind and jumps overboard just before it arrives, and swims back towards Middle-Earth; and (b) Galadriel is picked up by Elendil and taken to Numenor, meaning that the whole story of the Rings of Power now happens near the end of the Second Age. (And don't even get me started about a "Stranger" falling to Middle-Earth on a meteor who is obviously intended to be Gandalf.)
I had heard of those things before, and my reaction was "ick", and it still is. (a) is completely inconsistent with everything Tolkien wrote about Galadriel. (b) is a huge change in the timeline of the Second Age, for no good reason that I can see except that TV audiences are not supposed to be able to follow a story that covers such a long expanse of time. Which I think Tolkien would have had the same "ick" reaction to that I have. (I'm not sure what to make of Christopher Tolkien's reaction, but I suspect his reaction was much more nuanced, or else he didn't see enough of the preproduction.)
I get that people like to, so to speak, play around with an imaginary world they like. I have no objection whatever to people watching Jackson's films and liking them, or watching this series and liking it. I just don't think the world they are seeing portrayed in Jackson's films is the same world that Tolkien imagined and wrote about. And based on the above, I suspect I would feel the same about The Rings of Power.
As far as loving Tolkien's writing goes, there are many different ways of doing that. I have no doubt that Jackson sincerely loves Tolkien's work. He just doesn't in the same way I do, since what he did with it is nothing like what I would have done. And again, based on the above, I suspect I would feel the same about the people who made The Rings of Power.
I skimmed over your blog post, and I think you should give The Rings of Power a look despite your feelings about Jackson's films. It's a polarizing series, and you might end up not liking it, but it's very different from the films. The visual style is heavily influenced by them, but the storytelling is much more nuanced and surprising IMO.
I can't really provide details without spoiling the series for you, but if you watch the first season to the end[1] and then review your own blog post, I think you'll at least understand why I thought you might really like it.
FWIW, although he didn't live to see the finished work, apparently Christopher Tolkien liked what he saw of the preproduction, despite his dislike of Jackson's films.
[1] This is important, but again, spoilers. Even if you end up disliking it, or disagreeing with some of the choices they made, I'm confident you'll agree that the writers love Tolkien's writing as much as you obviously do.
When talking about new, great content, parent mentioned only sci-fi and fantasy content: Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc
So, it seemed that if you are into that stuff, you have some amazing content. But what if you are not?
What do you mean by “new”?
Superman and Batman have been around for almost 80+ years. Pokémon is approaching 30 years.
Hollywood movies made in the 1920s were remade in the 1930s which were remade in the 1940s which were remade in the 1950s and so on.
People have also been writing articles that mention this “new” normal for decades. But when does it stop being “new” lol?
How were those new-ish Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings shows marketed? (I didn’t watch them.)
> One thing Amazon could do is adapt the Lord of the Rings into a TV show. 60 one hour episodes could be interesting.
Presumably Amazon decided on an original prequel series for reasons; perhaps that they didn't see a need for an LOTR series after the Peter Jackson films (and other adaptations), or perhaps there were rights/exclusivity issues.
I found the first season of Rings of Power visually stunning, and some of the characters and environments were appealing as well, but it's hard to beat the original material. On the other hand, I feel like Wheel of Time could turn out great by cherry-picking the best parts of its source material.
>> The article also noted that a minority of the viewers who started The Rings of Power, Amazon’s most expensive project ever, finished the series.
>It’s funny how something is so bad people won’t even watch it for free.
By contrast, ratings for The Last of Us on HBO rose steadily through every episode <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(TV_series)#Ratings>.
Terrible example- Amazon has nothing AAA.
Rings of power looks and is written like a cheap SyFy series. No-name actors, shoddy costumes, horrendous writing. I have no idea where their money went, but money!=quality.
The boys was good and went to shit.
Invincible was alright, supposedly season 2 is coming 'some day'.
By the time they bought The Expanse it had fallen off a cliff.
Netflix and amazon are not worth the subscription to me and haven't been for a long while.
Oh please, lots of great cultural creations had a profit motive. You think "Blade Runner" was made without any desire for profit? Or "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Or Peter Jackson's LotR movies? Those were enormously profitable.
And Rings of Power was not that bad. It's not as great as the LotR movies, sure, but it's better than the Hobbit movies. (But not as good as some of the Hobbit fan edits.) And it's a LOT better than the new Netflix show "The Ark". What a turd, and a huge disappointment coming from some of the people behind Stargate.
>E.g. the directing skillset is somewhat related but ultimately very different.
Certainly. That's why the showrunner mostly doesn't direct episodes and film directors mostly didn't write the script (though they probably influenced it).
The difference is that films can go through a multi-year development process with things hopefully largely nailed down before production starts--because that's when the bills really start mounting fast.
TV, on the other hand, historically had a lot more writing and production values were often a lot lower. So writing was important (and had to happen relatively quickly) while a solid journeyman director was probably fine. Certainly their name was mostly not a draw for audiences.
(Obviously something like Rings of Power is a lot different from a season of Law and Order.)
>I could agree the average quality has dropped. But surely you agree that the sheer volume of high-quality content has ballooned. How many high-quality TV shows can you name from the 90s?
Perhaps I didn't watch that much content in the 90s :-) or there is some other factor. For example existence of really good content puts the bar higher, or the fact we had few really high value productions many had high hopes for flops? (like the recent "The Rings of Power")
However, there is one thing I'm eagerly waiting for. AI and other software led improvements to the ability to "remaster" some productions by fans. Perhaps then the entire series of "the rings of power" can be turned into a really good 30min short? Who knows.
They aren't necessarily. Rings of Power season one had a budget of almost $500 million. That's almost 3x what Top Gun: Maverick cost and twice what Black Panther: Wakanda Forever cost.
I think that Rings of Power bangs up against this timeline compression a lot. It feels weird to us that no one is concerned about Sauron - he was just there! But in the canon timeline there were long stretches of time where nothing very interesting happened.
That being said, I would gladly watch a TV series about day-to-day shire life in the third age.
It is really funny to hear these types of statements when if you could go back and look at what fans were saying about the Peter Jackson movies, they are largely the same. People complaining about deviations from the source material.
The benefit the movies had was just that they were executed very well. As you mention, so much of Rings of Power is just bad execution (or really odd pacing/writing choices).
My sons and I were looking forward to The Rings of Power so much. In contrast after season 8 of GoT I was not looking forward to House of Dragon.
Things have totally flipped. I’m actually enjoying HoD. Not perfect but really engaging story.
I literally hate RoP. It has the story, direction and acting quality of a badly done high school musical. It has literally no redeeming qualities.
Coming up with an origin story for mithril was stupid enough but the stupidity of the story isn’t even consistent. It’s an absolutely terrible show.
> I haven't encountered anything that has made me think this was a different "universe," but the general "feel" of the show is vastly different from Tolkien's writing.
I don't 100% agree on your take that Tolkein's stories were outright chauvanistic, but I do agree that the tone of the show is different to the books and the movies to its detriment. Rings of Power does not feel like an Epic in the genre sense, like Beowulf, which was a genre and style that Tolkein knew very well. The show feels far too...casual, the dialogue too sitcom-y at times (the dwarf scenes are brutal), and the world too clean and empty. When there are "epic" scenes, they end up feeling more like Disney or power rangers stuff (akin to Legolas riding the shield down the steps, I must admit).
While the effects are, at times, fairly incredible,I also think the writing has been an obvious weakness. The show is just kind of floating along in permanent exposition land. Only when a certain "dark land" is finally created does it actually start to have any stakes at all, but that is 5/6s of the way through the season already. By focusing on 5 distinct storylines for most of the show they keep everything in the shallows.
Every other Saturday is different right now. On the Saturdays where I have the house to myself, I usually plan to write and sometimes it even happens.
Sometimes I write in a cafe, other times at home. Other times I spend too much time fiddling with formatting and catching up on plotting that I waste the day and don't end up writing much at all.
Today, I woke up at 9am. Put on my sunscreen, made the bed, fed the cats. Took one of my cats out for a morning walk. It is autumn and it's beautiful outside, perfect for a chilly scenic walk. Then, I got home and made instant coffee. Now I'm in my office trying to write, but instead fiddling with my writing software and writing this comment. I hope I'll get there.
On the Saturdays when I don't have the house to myself, usually my boyfriend and I have been biking or walking to a cafe. Last Saturday we spent some time working on our laptops (writing in my case), and then watched several episodes of Rings of Power. These Saturdays are less planned for me because it also depends on what he wants to do. This is our first time trying to live together, and I'm still a little less comfortable with these Saturdays. I'm uncertain in my planning of the day: not wanting to waste our time together by just being lazy every weekend, but also not wanting to feel a bunch of pressure to plan some big outing or something.
On the Saturdays like this one, where I'm alone and either finished writing or given up on trying to write, I'll probably watch some YouTube or a show on HBO, basically laze around and relax. I also hope to do some reading in the evening, if I can manage to put away the laptop.
Haven't seen Rings of Power yet, but I'm probably going to be fine with it - Tolkien fan-fiction still scratches the itch. I found what they did to the Hobbit far more upsetting, and had a friend who absolutely hated the original movie trilogy back in the day: In contrast to Rings of Power, where the writers just make shit up, there was detailed source material available, making any deviation far more jarring.
Sauron the flaming eyeball? Denethor smacking his lips and dribbling food down his chin so that even the last person in the audience understands that he's a "bad guy". Faramir getting tempted by the ring? It's quite interesting how some people treat it as some sort of gold standard of faithful adaption...
> bad writing
There are examples of bad writing in here. But you're right; it's not all bad. And effects, acting, etc are generally pretty good. Though not great. (Except Disa; she's great.)
> I can't see this as anything else than sexism
The complaints about Galadriel aren't sexism. At least, the legitimate complaints aren't. If anything, the show undersells her. She should be one of the three most powerful elves in Middle-Earth right now. She ruled Lindon and rules Eregion, and yet her nephew the high-king dismisses her like she's a nobody. And she acts rather irrationally much of the time.
I think the main complaint about the troll fight isn't that she's the one to kill it (because of course she is), but that the other elves are so completely useless.
> LOTR films were not as Tolkien wrote. I recently re-watched them and they're not perfect either, to heap praise on the films but scorn the TV series is looking back with rose tinted glasses at best.
The LotR films are really pretty good. By no means perfect, you're right about that, but they treat the source material with a lot more respect than The Hobbit or the Rings of Power did, and the result is a much better story. It was made with love, and you can tell. I can forgive Osgiliath (even if I still miss the Scouring of the Shire).
Because then it's a concrete, immutable, fact and anyone who disagrees is flawed.
The reciprocal of this in comedy is claphter. When people clap or laugh because they hear something they agree with, whether it's funny or not. Usually not.
People say things like "It's/They're not funny" if they don't agree with the person, sentiment, message a lot now.. Which, doesn't work. My favorite thing to do is give comedians, any comedian, at least 5 minutes after the end of their first joke to see if they can make me laugh. There are comics out there who really rubbed me the wrong way at first but had me laughing before time ran out. Can't make me laugh in 5 minutes, your special is over. If I'm giggling before then I'm watching the whole hour, don't care who you are.
I'm not really digging Rings of Power but She-Hulk is the current "show that is bad™" that I really like. I was a huge Marvel kid but I've been sick of the MCU since about Iron Man 3. [0] She-Hulk gets the comedy structure right (the show runner wrote for a bunch of Adult Swim shows and Silicon Valley) and doesn't feel like it was written exclusively for ten-year-olds. Feels like they'll get their footing by season 2.
I've been reading a lot of articles saying things like "the men are unrealistic in She-Hulk." But, I've heard guys say some of the lines from She-Hulk verbatim. The dialog can be an exaggeration.. But it's not that inaccurate. I'm guessing parts of the scripts were transcribed more than written.
The best part about She-Hulk is that you have people who are good at what they do but are still pathetic playing off pathetic people who aren't good at what they do. It's funny.
[0]: And yet, I still watch every single one of them. WHY? I don't know, hope? Hawkweye was pretty good. And, that's from a guy who would say "Shut up Hawkeye" to his girlfriend every time Jeremy Renner opened his mouth.
Amazon may as well have attempted to rewrite chapters of the Bible and sell it to the south. "Just give it a chance!"
Given the licensing constraints I truly don't know why they didn't just remake Lord of the Rings into a TV show. Rewriting background stories for established characters is a fools errand.
I'm curious about the differing fortunes between "Rings of Power" and "House of the Dragon." The "Rings of Power" peaked at episode 1 (7.4) on IMDB, and has been declining with every new episode. Compare this to "House of the Dragon" which seems to be picking up momentum, and the most recent episode was rated extremely well (9.1). Both of these shows cater to audiences with strong opinions set in established worlds.
Apparently a thing that is frequently done in TV shows nowadays is "scrapbooking": shooting a whole bunch of scenes for several different storylines, picking the ones they like or which test well, and editing those into a rough approximation of a single story. Rumor has it some of the Disney+ Marvel and Star Wars series are made this way. I can't say I've heard anything about Rings of Power, but scrapbooking does appear to be a cause if the aggressive badness in streaming shows today, especially "triple A" major studio productions that are bad.
The most interesting aspect of Fan-baiting, is how Hollywood executives have weaponized actors and other people involved in movies for profit. They're basically using them as shields against the fans, with promises of leading roles and paychecks.
Recent examples of this are Rings of Power, Ariel, Pinocchio, She-Hulk, and several other shows and movies. Look beyond the racism, which is a vocal minority, and look at how they use these said vocal minorities, to counter valid criticism. Look at how Hollywood utilized Moses Ingram (Reva Sevander) from Kenobi as a shield, to dismiss the very valid criticism of how her character was written and directed, by grasping on to the few racist comments. Suddenly, if you criticized her character, you were a racist.
Think about every single time a show comes out, and a handful of tweets, screenshots from places like 4chan, or some Discord servers, are used as excuses to invalidated any and all criticism a show is getting. All the while the controversy generates buzz, with the media acting like ravenous dogs putting out article after article for weeks and months (look at Batgirl's cancellation and how they milked it for a month without knowing if it was a good movie or not), all the while having the actors take a stand as shields, and the fans who act like knights in shining armor, come to their defense, oblivious to the exploitation by the Hollywood executives.
Again, is there "isms"? Without a shadow of a doubt. Is it the majority of the criticism these shows and movies get? Not even close.
Now think about the professional critics, and Youtubers and such, and how they walk on egg-shells. Look at how shows are getting perfect scores because of their diverse cast, all the while being panned by the fans who are actually consuming the shows. You can't voice your criticism without fear of getting cancelled, getting your access revoke, or worse, people actively going after your job.
A little off topic but it’s really surprising how so few of the shows and movies these days give off any vibe of sincerity. From the acting to the writing to the CGI, everything seems to be winking at the audience and trying to tell them that they are all actors and its all make believe.
The perfect example is Lord of the Rings vs The Rings of Power. I had no problems believing that Aragorn really lived in Middle Earth. But every single actor in Rings of Power feels like…an actor - just someone playing a part.
Maybe its the overuse of bad CGI, but so few of the worlds feel “lived in”.
The writer didn't even need to read the entire book mentioned in the first paragraph, quite sure Tolkien explicitly said Bombadil was always meant to be an enigma, all powerful and yet completely aloof from the world.
As cliche as it is to say, utterly disappointed he was left out of Peter Jackson's movies, re-watching the entire 12 hours of the extended cuts, he clearly could have had some screentime amongst all the filler. Haven't watched Rings of Power but hope they drop him in somewhere, a character that well-loved surely deserves some fan service.
Compare it to the first to episodes of Game of Thrones, House of Dragon, Breaking Bad, Firefly or any number other good shows.
Its also not really a good slow burn either. If you want to see that done expertly check out True Detective Season 1. That story draws you in.
And this episodes were very long and all the story lines are slow.
- A Story: Galadriel wanders around without doing much in the first episodes and swims around not doing much in the second episode. She has basically 1 expression, her motivation is the most basic revenge story plot ever and its totally clear that she is right and everybody else is dumb. The scene of going to Valinor standing on boat in full armor looked dumb and it was totally clear she would not go, but I guess show runners wanted to drop a couple million on special effect.
- B Story: Hartfoots mostly slice of life and some interaction with a mysterious wizard that amount to nothing so far. Kind of cute but not interesting and totally different tone then everything else. Including with slap stick humor.
- C Story: Basic Elf-Human love story with neither of the characters being very interesting and they have little chemistry. Also evil is rising, but I don't really care about those characters so I don't really care, for now its just random orcs. Nothing to connect to, no large conflict or the other characters. This is even worse then the love-story the added to the hobbit.
- D Story: Elron goes to the dwarfs and we get lots of exposition about (mostly nonsensical) backstory that is required for the current plot to make sense and some character setups for the dwarfs. Honestly maybe the most interesting part of the first 2 episodes, but not actually that interesting.
The tournament/birth sequence in the first episode of House of Dragon had more interesting character moments, character development, story progression then all of the Rings of Power had in the first 2h.
Or compare it with the story that happen in the first 2h of Lord of the Rings (~10h) total vs Rings of Power (10h).
...they even use fake text length error messages to prevent you from submitting negative reviews. What I did:
1.) I wrote a review with 5 stars and tried to submit it. There was a red error message saying the text would be below 600 characters so I couldn't submit it.
2.) I copied a lengthy random text into the submission field so it was 1000 characters++ - still the same error message
3.) I switched to a 6 star rating. Suddenly the error message magically disappeared and I could submit it.
4.) I toggled back and forth between 4, 5, 6 and 7 stars. After a few tries I could submit the review with 5/10 on Sept 5th.
5.) I even got a confirmation email with a link where I can track my contribution. Text said "Thank you for your contribution - this item is awaiting processing by our data editors. Estimated processing date - 6 September 2022"
6.) You can guess yourself if my review has been processed... Like all other reviews below 6/10, it doesn't show up on the review page. 6/10 is still the lowest reviews available: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/reviews?sort=userRating&dir=asc&ratingFilter=0 =>>> Try by yourselves if you experience the same stuff. We've had reports of deleted reviews, too. I guess it's clear that they're manipulating on a large scale. I wouldn't be surprised if the 6.7 overall rating is manipulated, too.
I think you have to get to episode 4 (the attack on the Donniger) before The Expanse really starts taking off. I was hooked on the first episode, but that's because I'm a sucker for hard sci-fi and I like Noir (Miller's storyline). Most people don't get the show until episode 4.
Rings of Power is so far turning into an interesting show. I would say give it a shot. The second episode is definitely better than the first. Hopefully it will improve from here.
It's not really based on the books at all. Amazon has rights to the Lord of the Rings only, but not the stuff that was used to make the Peter Jackson films. Rather than remake The Lord of the Rings (can you imagine the outrage?), they decided to focus on the brief summary of the history of the rings of power given as an appendix to the last book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Basically a couple of paragraphs in the epilogue where Tolkien says "btw, 6,000 years earlier such-and-such happened and that's how the rings were made." Amazon invented this entire show out of those couple of paragraphs.
There are larger bodies of work (The Silmarillion, The History of Middle Earth, etc.) which go into great detail about this era and the conflict which involved, incidentally, the crafting of the rings of power. But Amazon doesn't have the rights to those books. So they're creating a storyline out of what little scraps were provided in the appendices of Return of the King, while reusing some of the characters in the Lord of the Rings which would have been around back then--Elrond, Galadriel, etc.
And I agree. Forget about the books and watch it as high fantasy on TV, and you'll be enjoyed. It is well made, and so far is following a couple of interesting plot lines.
> “The Rings of Power” has been fending off trolls for months, especially ones who take issue with the decision to cast actors of color as elves, dwarves, harfoots and other folk of Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth.
This article feels a bit quick to write off the negative reviews as being from racist “trolls”. A quick look of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes [1] shows a lot of negative reviews that seem legitimate to me.
I personally enjoyed the first two episodes, but the show is far from perfect.
[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_rings_of_power/s01/reviews?type=user
I managed to read all 11,898 page across 14 books of Wheel of Time but thought the Rings of Power was much more interesting than the first couple of episodes of Wheel of Time I made it through.
My position, for what it's worth, is that it doesn't matter one inch what the actors are, if the quality in general is good. They could be cats and dogs and I would enjoy it if it was Good. That some of them are black is so irrelevant that it's, frankly, fucking absurd to even talk about it.
Rings of Power, as far as I can tell after watching a single episode, wouldn't be good even if every single detail was exactly as Tolkien imagined it. Because the quality is just not there.
I'll be watching it to the end though, it's not impossible that it might become good.
> Tolkien is culture, Amazon's rings of power is not.
Funny. Culture is almost everything. If we like it or not, if it's high or low culture, that's a huge discussion. But for sure the TV series is culture.
* * *
Cool link! True, the association with light is strong, universally.
Actually, there was also the social class factor in any culture where tanning is highly visible: aristocrats vs everyone else, who had to work outside. No tan = upper class.
I would argue that the problem is less due to franchise fatigue than it is to low quality and needlessly confrontational writing. Classic drama tends to have a universal quality to it that transcends any particular time, place and culture, and it's this quality that has been lacking in woke entertainments from the last five or so years.
Take Squid Game for example. I don't speak Korean and know next to nothing about Korean society, yet its core story about a group of people in desperate circumstances being forced to constantly reevaluate what they're willing to do to survive resonates with me just as well as if the show had been set in any other country.
Compare that with The Rings of Power, where Galadriel is portrayed as a perfect warrior woman whose biggest source of antagonism is the weak and unprincipled men around her. Or She-Hulk, who has to explain to Bruce Banner that men telling her how to do her job makes her a better Hulk than him.
Young progressives lap this stuff up but it leaves everyone else cold, including many women. In years to come, these stories are not going to be loved. These films and TV shows are not going to top any polls. The characters are rotten, unlikable and will not live on in anyone's hearts.
I choose to ignore user reviews/ratings altogether. On IMDB right now 60% of the ratings (not reviews) are either 1 or 10 [1], and that's completely ridicolous.
I much prefer the critics' scores - and right now they're 84% on RT [2] and 71 on Metacritics [3]. Which are reasonable numbers.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt [2] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_rings_of_power/s01 [3] https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power/season-1
Not sure if IMDb has a history of deleting negative user reviews made in good faith, but worth noting that IMDb and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (TV series) are both owned by Amazon.
Yeah, things should get interesting when the first model makes use of Rings of Power or House of the Dragon footage or whatever the latest superhero movie is.
I wonder if we'll see a "Hollywood vs Silicon Valley" lobbying battle. Or possibly "Amazon media division vs Amazon AI division"...
I agree with you that the Legendarium is worthy of respect and that it's even sacred to a degree. I also found the Hobbit movies disappointing. That said:
> Amazon's upcoming show does away with the Elvish languages
This is not accurate.
> In the first of five planned seasons for The Rings of Power, the show makes heavy use of Elvish, Dwarvish, and Orcish, in addition to English flavored with British and Irish palettes.
https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/amazon-lord-of-the-rings-rings-of-power-dialect-coach-leith-mcpherson
The show has a dialect coach: https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/the-rings-of-power-dialect-coach-explains-the-difference-between-elvish-and-orcish-languages/
> the established appearance of the universe.
Is this about the brown-skinned male Elf and the brown-skinned and beardless female Dwarf? This horse has been beaten to death and back on YouTube and Reddit, and the consensus is that it's fine and faithful to the texts.
> where Wheel of Time and Rings of Power did not?
So far, Rings of Power has pulled in Infinity dollars per episode. Probably won't stay that way, but that seems pretty successful to me.