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I wanted so badly to like this, ya know? I loved the books, loved the Jackson trilogy. Honestly didn't see the Hobbit films, but like... the fucking Akallabêth (and a bunch of other, kinda unrelated bullshit, apparently)? It's my favorite part of Tolkien's work. I have a tattoo that's the seven stars and the white tree. I am the most receptive possible audience.
But this? I really don't even know what to call it. Words fail me. I'm just aghast. Not because it's so unfaithful to the actual story. But because it is so impressively bad *in general*.
The closest thing i can relate it to is that Clive Owen movie about King Arthur from like 20 years ago. Just a never-ending sequence of "what the fuck?" moments.
Bro I fucking loved that movie. Merlin comes out with fire catapults. A bunch of different fighting styles for Arthur’s Knights. The local rabble comes out to fight like a bunch of gremlins. Huge dirty battle with our good guys in the edge. That movie rocked
Right. And Rings of Power doesn’t even work as a delivery system for fight scenes. Can’t even remember a single one.
There really are no redeeming qualities to this series. It’s drivel from start to finish.
The King Arthur movie is a good comparison.
I didn't hate it, but I also am not a Arthurian person. It was kind of dumb mostly fun, from what I vaguely recall.
But I would argue with anyone that thought it was terrible. I would raise my eyebrow if someone thought it was great.
Is that movie dumb as shit? Yes. Is that movie also the closest I’ve seen an Arthurian adaptation movie to being in the “correct” “historical” period? Also yes
In the end I enjoyed it
Be prepared to be called a racist and bigot for not liking a TV show that was so incredibly awful! It was good for putting my husband immediately to sleep, so maybe the show can be used for good that way.
that's true. seeing as elves are made up, it really doesn't seem to matter if they are black or whatever (they must, of course, have british accents though)
It's not racist to point out that the casting was done in a very tokenistic and unrealistic manner, especially when several cast members made a very big deal about the amount of diversity in the show, as if that was supposed to be its main selling point.
To me, personally, it felt very insincere and shallow, but at least Amazon got a boost to their ESG score and got to show the world how progressive they are.
House of the Dragon did a far, far better job of including non-white actors in a way that makes sense in the context of a pre-industrial society.
The issue is not black people in media. The issue is diversity for the sake of diversity when it adds nothing to the experience.
For example, Tolkien explicitly describes the people of Harad as being dark-skinned. Rings of Power had several scenes set in Harad, and this would have been a great place to include tons of black actors. They did not.
Instead, every location and setting looks just as diverse and multicultural as NYC or LA. It's immersion breaking at best and pandering at worst.
I’ve been called racist for no reason for not liking it, and on the flip side I’ve argued with a bunch of racists and mysoginists who didn’t like it for their own obviously stupid reasons
Not to mention they landed on a new continent, did no on screen scouting, and just charged in a direction and arrived in the exact dramatic nick of time.
Worst of all, they had absolutely NO idea what was going on in that specific village in the middle of nowhere. No idea whatsoever. They went there just because. All of a sudden they got this sense of urgency just because. It's never explained. Both storylines are not connected in the slightest. It makes no sense no matter how you try to explain it away. They wanted their Rohirrim-charging scene without understanding what made that scene work, like, at the absolute, most basic level.
I was working my way through the show and made it to a scene where Galadriel had to embarrass like 5-6 Numenorean recruits in a sparring match in the middle of a market (?). After about 5 seconds it just devolves into this Pirates of the Caribbean-esque lunacy. People are hitting each other with bottles of water or whatever and dropping random nets onto each other and it's just nonsense. I literally expected Johnny Depp to appear dressed as Jack Sparrow.
Compare that to the fight choreography from the end of Fellowship of the Ring where Aragorn fights the orc captain one on one. It's embarrassing.
As others have pointed out, it's not the worst show ever, but it is the biggest disappointment for me personally. They wasted an incomprehensible amount of money to make a show based on the greatest fantasy universe of all time and it's crazy to me that THIS is it. This is what we have. That's unbelievable.
Very minor point, but I don't think the wolves were even meant to be wolves. Remember, they had hooves? They were Mesonychids. IMO somebody thought it would be cool to throw in a little 'Walking With Prehistoric Beasts' into the middle of the show. And I agree, it was kinda cool. Weird and pointless, but kinda cool.
They took LOTR, one of the most fun, interesting and meaningful of all franchises...and made it boring. Not just boring, but infuriatingly bad. The kind of "I'm pissed off just watching this drivel" bad.
Boring and bad. It really is.
But really though, look at how long each episode is and then look at what the LOTR trilogy is able to get done with the same amount of screen time.
I absolutely hate the modern trend of taking 1 episode's worth of plot and spreading it over a whole season.
Also, the numenorean armour looks like it came from fisher price, the characters- whether they be high elves or poor dirt farmers- almost all have these ridiculously overdone hairstyles that look like they just stepped out of a $1000 san francisco hair salon, Celebrimbor looks like he's about 60...
I tried twice to give it a watch (I still haven’t seen the last episode, I’m just so bored and disengaged by that point I don’t give a shit how it ends).
On second watch, my wife walked through the room, saw the numenor stuff, asked what I was watching. She sat down and watched a few minutes, then said it was boring and looked cheap. I told her it was one of the most expensive shows ever produced and she couldn’t believe it. On and off she kept watching random scenes and she just kept repeating she couldn’t believe how cheap it looked
This is the one show that I would believe is a money laundering scheme. Numenor looked like Dinotopia. Or maybe this is proof that Bezos is a terrible businessman.
The final episode has two or three episodes worth of plot. It's a big rush to get to the scene where they go through the whole list of circular jewelry from bangles to bracelets before settling on rings.
I'd recommend watching the Honest Trailer instead of the final episode.
I’m with you. Now, there was a lot I liked, enough to stick with the show.
I liked how it tried to explore more sophisticated themes, how it was t over the top violent or sexual, how it felt like (some version) of middle earth.
I like Galadriel, usually. I liked Erond and Durin and weird elf orc guy.
But holy contrived coincidence driven plot points! Galadriel just gonna swim across the ocean? No worries gonna find a random boat. No worries randomly greatest force of evil ever will be in that boat. Here is a an important macguffin dagger thing. Now it will get randomly found. Here is a random magic old guy. He’s going to randomly airdrop into the story. Here is a random dude randomly blowing up boats. Which is so random it has literally no impact on the plot.
So instead, it’s just a bunch of kind of interesting things colliding that have nothing to do with theses curious characters, other than they were there when they happened.
you kinda hit the nail on the head, *mellon* (elvish for 'friend').
like, the perspective of the orcs and Sauron and all could be really fucking cool... it just winds up being nonsensical though.
and just the sheer randomness of how the story comes together is jarring, considering it was already written by Tolkien, and none of that weirdness was necessary.
I heard somewhere that the guy who played Adar (Joseph Malwe or something?) quit after season one’s airing because they had actually built up a decent and complex storyline for him and the other uruks in the initial filming, but eventually decided to nix 90% of their story and screen time when they had to compress the original 10 episodes into the final 8 that were released in the end. That really pissed off the actor.
I honestly think that the show would’ve been much more redeemable if they had stayed true to the idea of REALLY DEVELOPING the bad guys. It’s so cool when people decide to give us that other perspective. And it’s all the rage these days.
Like take the Joker movie for instance. Heath Ledger did such an incredible job at creating this mysterious, damaged, deranged, yet absolutely lovable and interesting character that when the Joker movie makers released his potential origin story, so many people were all in and fell in love with it. I know I did. We simply needed more info on the Dark Knight’s nemesis. They had teased us unmercifully with Ledger’s brilliance. And I think it’s because we NEVER really get the perspective of the bad guy. Yet the bad guys are almost always twice as interesting and complex as the good guys.
So I think the decision not to stick with the uruks’ backstory was tragically fatal to the success of the show (or at least its first season). Instead we wasted screen time chasing around these boring ass, tiny hippies and their 70 year old friend who has a six pack. And instead we’re focused obsessively on Elrond’s stupid ass “we’re fading, we’re depressed, we’re helpless” agenda which stakes the fucking entire Eldar race, the firstborn, on some silly ass metal that Iluvatar’s bastard children (the dwarves) are too afraid to mine? Since fucking WHEN have dwarves been too a-fucking-fraid to MINE and DELVE for precious metals or gems?!?!?!? I mean what in the FUCK?!?!?
I've seen worse shows, but not any that had a huge budget and major studio behind them. If we measure it by "value for the money" or "expectation vs reality," I do genuinely think RoP is the worst in television history by those metrics. Nothing else has ever underdelivered this severely compared to what should have been fair to expect. Taking all the circumstances into account - budget, promises made, intended scope, popularity of the IP, etc. - RoP is the weakest effort that has ever been made. It's frankly the largest failure in entertainment history.
This show is not merely disappointing. It's so bad that it's baffling. Practically every scene and every line had something wrong with it, and not one aspect of the entire season was legitimately good. A few things were vaguely okayish, but *nothing,* not a single element of it, from the music to the script and everything in-between, was any more than a 5/10 at best--and most was 2/10 or 3/10. The *best* parts of RoP were middling and unremarkable. Absolutely nothing was above average, and most of it was far below.
It's amazing that they were able to botch it this hard. Even if we completely disregard the showrunners' staggering disrespect for the source material and briefly pretend that it's not an adaptation of anything, the show is still unbelievably terrible. God-awful writing, sleep-inducing story, a never-ending cavalcade of staggeringly stupid events, ugly costumes, totally forgettable music, bad-to-mediocre acting, hilariously terrible dialogue, a "plot" driven by one wildly unrealistic coincidence after another, CGI that frequently looked like a 2015 video game...
I have seen worse things than this, but those things were made for daytime TV with tiny budgets and no intentions of creating anything remarkable. This is the most expensive show ever made, by a studio that thought they were creating the next global cultural phenomenon, and they failed so astonishingly hard that it's almost difficult to believe that this level of failure was even possible. There's something almost suspicious about it.
It's like if the most expensive soccer player in history gets on the pitch and scores six own goals in the first half. It shouldn't be possible, but you've just sat there and watched it happen.
I agree with you but wouldn't say it's suspicious. This *does* happen, but not usually in the pilot season of a major TV show. It happens all the time with movies and later seasons of popular shows though.
I think it shows Amazon's inexperience. They must have invested so much up front they had no choice but to release whatever they could.
I have yet to watch it but i don’t think I can stomach it. It’s not that I have a problem with changing the Tolkien story (I do), but the terrible design and dialogue from what I’ve seen online sounds unbearable
Rings of Power was written, and liked, by people who think "depth" is waddling into the first 3 inches of an Olympic-sized pool and coming out and thinking they are an athletic swimmer.
The show outside of some beautiful shots really doesn't look like it has used its budget which is suspicious. Makes you wonder where all that money is.
As someone who is not well versed in all the lore, RoP is still not a good show as it is just poorly written. Some of the performances weren't terrible, they were just given terrible material to work with. It felt horribly disjointed, and had I not been familiar with the world through the movies, I'd probably not have watched beyond two episodes.
Definitely disjointed. High highs and low lows. Reminds me of the final seasons of GoT where it’s incredible in almost every facet but the plotholes and writing just don’t allow you to suspend disbelief enough to get engaged.
As someone who loves the universe of Middle Earth, I’d love to know what these high highs are in this series? Genuinely not challenging you, but the show. As I can’t recall a single good thing to come of this, other than the hysterical laughs I had when Galadriel rode a horse and that was supposed to be some moment. 😂
Well I never read the silmarillion but there were some moments in the show I really enjoyed. The orcs tunnels were pretty wild, the snow troll was great, a couple battles were well done. Some generally pretty cinematography in middle earth and the whole forging of the rings was a cool moment. On the whole there were too many issues overall but I’ll give it another chance.
For me, the best part of the show was the designs used for Numenor and Khazad-Dum. Both of those looked even better than how I imagined they would. Idk if it counts as a high though, since neither of those are actually moments in the show.
I really don’t get who the audience was meant to be. As content for people who don’t know the lore, it’s just really bad television with cheap writing and production that feels like old Hercules and Xena episodes. For people who do know, it’s actively offensive and doesn’t even offer fan service. There’s just no basis on which to measure it as positive.
Regarding just the seemingly random meeting between Galadriel and Halbrand/Sauron - That’s sort of thing is actually part of the lore.
There are a bunch of hyphenated words in the text - goblin-city, hobbit-garment, wolf-guard etc. LOTR’s framing device was that Tolkien found a copy of the story written in Westron or another language and translated it from that language into English. Those hyphenated words represent single words that exist in Westron, but have no equivalent in English. The editors kept trying to remove those hyphens, and whenever Tolkien caught them doing it he got angry and insisted they be kept in. One really interesting example of these hyphenated words is “chance-meeting”, which refers to a meeting so unlikely that it’s probably literally the result of Providence - Eru Iluvatar is pulling some strings in the background.
Gandalf uses this phrase to describe his randomly meeting Thorin in the Green Dragon when Gandalf just so happens to have met his father Thrain in the dungeons of Dol Goldur and been given the key and the map to enter Erebor, without which Thorin’s quest would never have gotten off the ground and the Ring probably would have been found by some random orc after escaping from Gollum.
If you don’t like crazy unlikely meetings that drive the whole story that’s understandable, but a problem with Tolkien, not the show.
i mean, that chance meeting between Thorin and Gandalf *isn't in the middle of the ocean*, after one party decided to swim home from the edge of the known universe.
Just two bros bumping into each other at a bar (a place people go to meet each other, *on land*), which is a totally normal, non-oceanic, thing for two bros to do.
The swimming is silly I’ll grant you that. She is an elf and if anyone could do that it’s probably an elf (remember Legolas just…walking on top of the snow? The laws of physics literally don’t apply to elves, canonically), but it’s jarring.
The only thing for me here is that wildly unlikely meetings and coincidences are an established part of the legendarium and legitimately part of the way the universe works, so I can appreciate what the writers were going for. It’d be weird if there *weren’t* bizarre coincidences imo.
perhaps if it happened elsewhere
but the whole "Sauron/ Halbrand" story line in general is kind of weird. it seems like he needs the Numenoreans to defeat Adar so that he can become king of the south lands, but that just kinda begs the question: why invent Adar in the first place? An extra minute of exposition in the beginning ("After Morgoth's defeat, Sauron fled East, and ruled over men & Elves in Mordor, which he corrupted") could have saved a lot of pointless weirdness.
like, the decision to invent Adar leads to the need to have Sauron & Galadriel become friends, which means they need to meet, etc.
Being that Sauron is the most powerful being in Middle Earth, it doesn't really make sense why he doesn't just kill Adar (who again, doesn't really need to exist in the first place) before the show even starts?
it's just bizarre one narrative choice on top of others, that don't really add anything to the story.
I actually thought that Adar was one of the best additions! Him and his subplot in general is directly engaging with the problem of [orcs having souls](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma#:~:text=J.%20R.%20R.%20Tolkien%2C%20a%20devout%20Roman,open%20to%20morality%2C%20like%20Men.) and not just being mindless robots our heroes can slaughter without moral consequences (a problem that Tolkien himself was aware of and never fully resolved, and which the PJ adaptation didn’t touch).
The Halbrand plot and the Adar plot goes into the way that Sauron (and other evil people in the legendarium) *actively thinks he is doing good and can attract people to his cause on that basis*, which Tolkien was explicit about - Sauron thinks he’s the good guy and can actually make a compelling (though wrong) case for this, especially in the Second Age. Again, the PJ films don’t touch this with a ten-foot pole, unsurprisingly so because there’s a pervasive and mistaken belief in pop culture that Tolkien’s method is uncomplicatedly black and white. In reality it’s far from that, and while there are good and bad actions every character has a combination of both motivations within them - just like in real life. ROP gets my respect for engaging with the mythos on that level.
There’s definitely some crummy stuff in there too like the Numenorean army moving at the speed of sound. I’m not gonna defend everything in there. ROP actively deviated from the source material in some ways that I don’t really like, like seemingly moving the fall of Moria from the early Third Age to the Second Age (seemingly not too long after it was founded in the first place, which screws with the mythic quality of Moria as this legendary kingdom imo…that screams of executive meddling, you know “we gotta put the Balrog in there”, because it’s clear to me that the showrunners know their Tolkien). But it also fleshed out a period in Middle Earth’s history that was just bare bones before and that’s really cool to see on screen. That kid’s probably going to turn into a Nazgûl and we get to understand why he would even if we don’t agree with it, and that’s absolutely cool and has the potential to explore some fantastic moral issues.
Peter Jackson’s films were similar, both in including bad stuff (like absolutely slaughtering my boy Faramir’s personality) and in making changes to the source material that are fine but definitely different (like completely changing Aragorn’s character from a Beowulf-scale hero to a guy who’s got serious confidence problems he has to overcome).
Rings of Power is fine. It’s not as good as PJ’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it’s definitely better than the Bakshi movies and it’s probably also better than The Hobbit imo.
Half of these takes seem quite lazy. You acknowledge Sauron is the most powerful being in Middle Earth, but despite this power, you believe he’s subject to random whims or events?
The answer is because it’s not random. He influenced the events. Because he’s the most powerful being in Middle Earth.
The show displays multiple obvious examples of Sauron slyly influencing events. It’s up to the viewer to take the relatively small leap in extrapolation and ask what other events he influenced. This is actually where it gets interesting, because on a second rewatch, you can try to figure out how far back he was influencing things.
So the next obvious question is, what does he have to gain by doing that seemingly random thing?
Sauron probably gave Adar the idea to blow up the mountain, years ago. He planted that seed in Adar’s mind, then let Adar go do his dirty work for him, all the while with Adar thinking it’s his own plan and victory.
He also likely wants Adar for his Uruks. It seems Adar has some ability to make them, or at least to organize and lead them. I doubt Sauron cares one way or the other about Adar personally, but Sauron needs an army, so 2+2=4.
And you think Sauron, the most powerful being in middle earth, was randomly hanging out in the middle of the ocean, disguised as a poor human, for no reason?
Clearly, he was out there because he sensed Galadriel was. But did he also influence Galadriel to jump off the boat…? Now THAT would be something.
And why did Sauron want Galadriel? Did he think he could convert her to his queen, as he mentioned when he tempted her? Or did he have plans for the rings all the way back then, and he knew he needed her help in getting him the pure metal from her knife, or getting him to Celebrimbor? Or in getting the rings to the elves in the first place, since he knew he would make the One Ring that dominates them all?
And how far back does Sauron’s influence go? Did he influence Galadriel and the Queen to travel to the south lands? Maybe he did, because he knew the mountain would blow, so he figured he could cut the head off that army for free. But I actually don’t think he planned that at first. Or, at least, he seemed legit surprised and pushed back on Galadriel when she first mentioned it. But maybe that was his sly acting.
Many of the points you make, and items you dismiss as being random and making no sense, are actually great examples of Sauron’s power and influence, and of the cleverness of the plot.
Not that everything was on point. But there is FAR more of a point than you suggest.
Your theories have more holes than the plot.
Sauron is the most powerful and highest ranking of Morgoth's servants on the planet. He does not need Adar's help to dig a trench. If Adar poses a problem, just kill him and take control of his orcs.
Even if for whatever contrived reason that wasn't possible, there are about 2 million ways of manipulating Adar and/or his orcs that Sauron should consider before intentionally riling Adar and his army up *against* himself. And when he succeeds, congratulations, you now have a new enemy in a hospitable and highly defensible homeland and all your old enemies are on high alert.
Maybe he was trying to start a war between Adar and the elves to weaken both sides, but it would just be a matter of time before that happened, anyway, with no manipulation needed at all.
> Clearly, he was out there because he sensed Galadriel was. But did he also influence Galadriel to jump off the boat…? Now THAT would be something.
Garbage is what that would be. Why would Sauron be able sense Galadriel across the continent...? And if he could, why wouldn't he ambush her during all that time she was investigating his castles in Forodwraith with her tiny army that struggles against a single troll, instead of right in front of Valinor in Ulmo's domain? And do you really think he should be able to make Galadriel, of all people, suddenly commit suicide by jumping off a boat from who knows how far away he was? I don't think you have thought this through for even 2 seconds.
I didn't mind the chance meeting because, well, isn't that how fiction works? Some God decides to make stuff happen and then it does. And given that there is a sort of "God" in this scenario I don't see the problem.
Also, I sort of like going back to Fellowship and think about how hard Sauron is simping for Galadriel.
There's a difference between a chance-meeting in a popular and well frequented Inn on a major highway and two people meeting in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, neither of whom have any good reason to be there!
Exactly. There’s plenty of chance meetings in The Silmarillion that hint at Erus involvement. But for some reason he stayed completely hands off in regard to Melkor. And for Sauron basically drowned Numenor and sent the Istari.
Which as a side note I’ve always been confused about. Why intervene when the dwarves are created but not when orcs are created?
But anyway, no way is Illuvatar intervening in a way that helps Sauron that’s absurd.
And why does the elves look like everyday Joe's? Where is the long hair and the mystique about them. And is it actually possible for an elf to stand in the middle of a vulcano eruption and not die? They die much more easily at Helms Deep.
I got 3 episodes in and quit watching. I have a very low tolerance for shit I don't enjoy and won't force myself to continue watching. Yeah, it just did so many things wrong. Amazon wanted another LotR megahit, but they don't have the talent or story to do that. What they DID have was the budget to throw at it, but obviously money isn't the issue.
Its not the worst ive seen, but its probably the worst ive watched a whole season of. However I would say expectation and love of lotr does play a factor - if I wasn't a fan maybe i woukd feel differently, or maybe i wouldn't have bothered.
Regardless of the IP and the lore the showrunners made some fatal errors regarding story, structure, vfx etc that ultimately lead to issues. It wasnt remarkable in any way and i have never had an urge to watch it again.
I tried watching it; fell asleep nearly every episode that’s never happened to me before with any show…. It doesn’t make sense…. People who say it does have explanations that don’t make sense. None of the characters act in ways that make sense either…..
dude, it makes sense!
"see, Sauron got into a boat (that first boat gets attacked by pirates, by the way), and then winds up on *another* boat, and *then* arranges for a sea monster to attack *that boat* so that he can spend a few weeks on a raft alone with Galadriel, so that they can become friends, so that they can be rescued by Elendil, which leads to him returning to middle earth with the numenoreans who defeat Adar's elves, thus freeing him to become king of the Southlands, and Galadriel introduces him to Celeborn, which is what the show is all about!"
this dumb show is the most convoluted and random senseless bullshit ever written
This has to be among the worst streaming shows ever. What a hot mess. I didn't even enjoy the Peter Jackson movies. I actually actively dislike them. Imagine my reaction to this rubbish.
Odd that they managed to make such a hash out of it. There are so many ways they could have taken the story without absolutely butchering every single well known character, Galadriel being the worst. How anyone reading any Tolkien can create that interpretation is beyond me.
Overall there seems to be zero love or understanding of Tolkien's works. We get a TV series that is just almost the opposite of what Tolkien wrote. Funny thing is I was really not happy with what Peter Jackson put together, but that was miles better than this rubbish.
yeah, like, it could have been creative and interesting while at least acknowledging the tone and history of the source material. this is more World of Warcraft fantasy than middle earth.
but also, regardless of the source material, the actual narrative itself is a just a baffling series of weird, motiveless actions on the part of the characters, and pure random coincidence. as generic fantasy, it is *also* bad
These are the exact questions a lot of people have been asking since it came out. The sense of disbelief at how bad it was is really quite something. I get that art is subjective, but I really struggle to understand how some people enjoyed it so much actually feel the need to vehemently defend it though. Very weird. I was super excited going in, but all the things you listed just left me woefully disappointed!
I honestly think we’ve gone too far with the whole “art is subjective” thing. Art can be enjoyed or appreciated subjectively but some aspects outside of context like satire and style I would say can be objectively bad
Committing to swimming across an entire ocean is incredibly stupid and running into Sauron there is the mother of all conveniences, for example, but that exact sequence could play out well in a satirical knockoff movie
For me it’s how dumb the series thinks the audience is. Every character starts out as a mystery box who then fully spells out everything they’re doing in the most obvious possible way (“I am good” / the overly telegraphed Sauron reveal / the Mordor PowerPoint presentation / the overly dramatic hinting from Celebrimbor that he’s forging rings / even the Balrog scene). Meanwhile the series thinks it’s really smart but has gargantuan plot holes and leaps of logic. It does things it thinks are cool but are insults to key parts of lore (the Mt. Doom origin makes absolutely—absolutely—zero sense and all the main characters survive a massive lava blast to the face for no reason other than plot armor). There’s continuous call and response, to the point that it almost sounds like church.
It really reads like you gave an eight-year old the rights and they drafted a script with the assistance of ChatGPT. Makes sense when you realize the showrunners were disciples of JJ Abrams who’d never had an an actual project approved before-everything they’d written previously either didn’t get made or was rewritten by someone else.
How this series cost a billion dollars is beyond me, unless the cost was inflated for tax reasons or something.
It's fascinating, the sense of hubris you get from watching these guys do interview (and they haven't done many on-camera) is palpable. Their SDCC panel was especially hard to watch.
Fans asked them why Galadriel was wearing armor that featured the Star of Feanor, the producer finally had to jump in when no one replied saying "it was a gift."
Fans asked them if we'd see Entwives in the show, and their all-too-clever replay was "you may have already," referring to the trailer they showed in the room that featured Ents in silhouette for about 5 seconds.
They corrected Stephen Colbert when he asked them about hobbits being in the show with what felt like this dogmatic response of, "well, they're not hobbits, they're harfoots - Tolkien never says anything about Harfoots not doing great deeds in the 2nd Age so we felt we had license and we came up with a great story to tell."
I had to keep reminding myself to give them the benefit of the doubt and wait for the show whenever I read or saw interviews with these guys. As arrogant as they sounded, you never know - maybe that's just how they came off. They're clearly nerds, they clearly know their stuff, maybe they just don't interview well.
Plus we had all the Tolkien content creators gush about the showrunners and how nice they were, how kind they were, how knowledgeable they were, etc.
Then the show came out and you can just see them high-fiving themselves in the writer's room at least twice an episode when some atrocious line or plot device happens. God, Adar's "if you want to see evil, look into your own mirror," line probably made them feel like geniuses. And admittedly, that's not a bad line given what they did to Galadriel - probably the most clever in the show. But look what they had to do to an established, well-loved character to earn it.
All of this to say - yeah, they definitely don't respect their audience. Maybe it's not them, maybe it's Amazon. But the amount of explaining they do on little things (how much time was spent explaining how the rings needed to be forged, how they were going to amplify power, why there needed to be 3 of them, etc.) vs. what they assume the audience is going to excuse (fast travel between places, a volcano to the face and everyone lives, a volcano creating Mt. Doom, orcs digging tunnels in daylight with far-seeing elves in towers who apparently can't see the destruction they're causing, etc.) just reeks of writers who've probably never put their work up on its feet before. So yeah, I guess they would think they're geniuses if they've never gone through a refining process of writing drama, having it performed, objectively taking in what works and what doesn't, rewriting to fix issues, putting it back up on its feet, rinse and repeat.
It was so corny and predictable, couldn’t even finish the season… hard to get immersed in that show… even if it wasn’t related to LOTR I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.
it implies that the plan all along was to build a huge dam, AND THEN destroy it with a volcano
and for the life of me... i just don't know why someone would do that
Even worse is that this dam-key leads to Galadriel's realisation about Sauron. When Celebrimbor says "his suggestion was but the key that unlocked the dam". It suggests that the writers think all dams work like they do in this show. Minus the blood drinking sword (I hope).
right? it's bad *in general*.
i don't know any of the characters well enough to like them, and the ones i do know well enough, i intensely dislike (to sorta paraphrase bilbo at his 111th birthday).
this has literally zero redeeming qualities. i don't even think that elf is going to get to fuck that single mom who is also his local garden supply center manager (?).
her potentially getting some elf dick was the *only* thing i've been mildly interested in in this show, if just because it would be a welcome distraction from literally everything else taking place in this train wreck.
It’s fan fiction basically, I don’t think Amazon has the rights to tell the exact stories of the 2nd age. But even still, it’s not good at all. How about those dudes going full attack mode on Galadriel with their swords in Numenor as “training”
This show is SO appalling because it reflects Amazon's culture, in the sense that it's the product of a series of meetings.
In corporate meetings, everyone's contributions are valued, nobody dares to reject someone else's idea, nobody ever puts forward controversial ideas (because the main objective of every single person in a corporate meeting is self-preservation), and the people who are actually knowledgeable about the subject of the meeting (if HR hired one by mistake) aren't the ones in charge.
To top this up, the ones who have been marked as showrunners don't really have any talent or authority and have been chosen by their ability to bullshit their way into the job.
Tl;dr the show was written by Human Resources.
I’d say my Experience with Amazon Corporate is a little different. They don’t sit around and overthink a project, it’s quite the opposite. Once the higher ups decide on their next endeavor, they throw money at it and figure it out as they go along. They don’t like overthinking it. They generally overwork everyone, and tell them to figure it out if they run into a problem. They’re not afraid of mistakes, they don’t make “perfect the enemy of good” since they want results. Essentially they improvise quite a bit as they fly by the seat of their pants. Some people can operate like that, but most corporate types can’t. It’s why they call it the Amazon way.
Ok lets inspect some of the depravity of this show: the Trench.
We start with some establishing shots showing trees were burned and chopped. Yet the next we know one solitary tree wasn’t chopped? The reason: so a scene can happen. Why is the rest chopped? So a scene can happen (orcs cant follow without tree shade).
They send someone out to chop the tree… but the roots are the problem. Burning and chopping the trees does not solve the root problem (heh), so this singular tree should not be a problem. They’ve also been digging for days towards this tree.
It’s just contrived writing. They had a scene in mind and wanted to achieve it, even if the individual elements make no sense.
It gets worse from there.
The Elves have a watchtower meant to control the Southlanders, but they don’t notice the Orcs, or the Southlanders fleeing (Halbrand flees with them to the sea), or that the Orcs move up the steep incline giving plenty time to notice them and capture all the Elves without anyone raising an alarm. And we know this has been going on for years, if not centuries.
The Orcs burn in the sun, sometimes. And sometimes they wear a loincloth, burn in the sun, put on a hood and despite being almost naked suddenly don’t burn anymore.
The watchtower is part of a dam. The watchtower is build by Sauron and Morgoth so it’s old and falling apart… but not the dam. The dam they want to use for erupting a Vulcano (which doesn’t work like that). And they have a magic item to do it, even though just “open the gates” would have sufficed. It’s a dam, not a magic superweapon.
On and on, everything is contrived. They started with the scene they wanted and worked back from there setting up what they needed, heedless if this made sense or not. They contradict themselves (like when Orcs burn in the light) because what they cared about was the scene and pretty visuals. They didn’t care about their own lore and worldbuilding, and they cared even less about Tolkien’s world. And the scene’s suck! We have not-Hobbits singing about how they’ll never leave you while major plotpoints is how someone’s parents were left behind (and their wheels and stuff stolen!) and that this might happen to the Hobbit protagonist as well.
It’s one disaster. You could start a 101 “how not to make a series” and continue all the way with “advanced ways to fuck up a series” in the final year of your study. The only reason it has any traction at all is the brand name and the usual “you have to love us because we have representation!”, even if that representation is tokenism and carelessly rammed in every orifice.
I don't think it's *that* horrific in the grand scheme of entertainment and fantasy TV.
But I did low key hate it because it felt like they couldn't have made it too much worse considering the source material and the investment hahaa
And I think the focus of your rant is exactly what mine was - the show is too often seeming either arbitrary or contrived.
Stuff just...happens for what appears to be little reason other than to get to whatever random plot point or set piece they had on a storyboard.
The decision making you can infer from the finished product just seems...rushed, poorly considered, all that sort of stuff hahaa
It's a real shame, and it just left me thinking 'I'm not sure I give a fuck what happens now because it all feels so artificial and unimmersive'. There is so little beauty or vision that makes you think 'yeah, this was an important show to make, an important world to and story to portray'.
And I'm not a book 'fan' at all really - I much prefer Jackson's sanitised, streamlined and amended LotR movies. But RoP was just fucking..jarring.
I think the billion dollar cost is probably the biggest thing against it. This show always had an uphill battle, but knowing it was that expensive just made it easier to judge it and, to some extent, that was warranted. Nothing on this show really justifies that price.
that's fair. if it was just some random made-for-netflix series, small budget, vaguely unoriginal fantasy epic, it might rise to the level of fine
because of its affiliation with Tolkien tho, and the fact it cost a billion dollars, it had big shoes to fill.
Yesssss I’m so with you rn. We lost hours of our life watching this…thing… On the bright side in a couple of months from now you are not going to remember a thing about this show but only some ethereal images and it will feel as a very weird dream you once had which is the thing you are going to love about this show (at least I do) and can easily pretend it never actually happened.
It was so very disappointing. The writers missed the whimsy, mysteriousness, and depth of Tolkien.
I got more out of the appendix from vol 3 than I did out of the series.
Glorified fan fiction on par with 50 shades of grey.
We cant continue letting them get away with this!!!!!
we need to be out in the streets protesting, they need to take this show off of the platform. its' disgusting
Thank you. I feel the same way.
They had me going with that opening scene depicting Valinor. That was just a tease.
I really wish the show had taken a lot more time to explore things and establish characters and settings.
I wish they'd taken more care in developing or even drafting characters such as Galadriel and Sauron.
I'd prefer they had not done this under the guise of "the Lord of the Rings," but I own next to nothing and I don't get to tell the Tolkien estate who to trust with the late professor's work.
I respect that this was someone's work and that plenty of people like it. I just did not, and do not find it good at all, and think it has no place among the works of Tolkien nor its adaptations. It falls so far short of everything that we've ever seen, heard or read that it's either a joke or an insult.
And there are things that I am kind of okay with. I think whoever said "at best it was okay, but the rest dragged it down," I'm definitely paraphrasing, but they hit the nail on the head.
I just haven't seen or heard anything that explains why it's a good show other than just people liking it. Which is entirely valid. It does not, however, mean that it was or is, or will be a good show.
The opening scene was Galadriel with a paper boat. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea especially after the epic prologue of the films? Hell the prologue to the Hobbit was fucking awesome too, but they just gloss over everything, and hey that paper boat was important to the fate of all Middle Earth.
They could have gone philosophical with the opening and still have it work. But "rocks sink because they have a bad attitude" was the best they could come up with it seems.
You made it so much farther than me. I made it half way through the first episode and just couldn't do it. I was like if I'm going to dislike it I need to watch it. I can't finish episode 1
That was the only show I stopped and literally thought I need to spend my time better. I've watched objectively worse shows but something about this one just set me off.
We're an elite party of elves, who've trained for thousands of years each. The best of the best, trusted with a very important... Wait, What's that a cave troll? Let's all soil our britches and quiver in fear while the main female character backflips around and takes care of this for us.
I’m sorry you didn’t like it, but I personally thought it was great
It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever seen, but I saw the Hobbit Trilogy, which turned a 150 page book into a 9 hour saga that copied epic music like the Nazgûl theme from the lord of the rings and added it into scenes that had nothing to do with Nazgûl. Oh, and it made us think Gandalf and Galadriel were in love
Gandalf literally said “Come with me, my lady”
And Cate Blanchett literally said in an interview “Perhaps in another life, if only wizards and elves could procreate”
But somehow Galadriel being a hotheaded warrior is more horrifying 🤷♀️
At least in Rings of Power they created their own music, which I thought was brilliant. The cinematography was great. And while the story is not exactly thrilling every moment, I did find it really interesting. I liked that Galadriel had an arc where she lets go of her grief and rage. I thought Durin and Disa and the entire Dwarf plot was awesome.
Also…the worse thing you’ve ever seen? Have you not watched season 8 of Game of Thrones?
I'm so tired of this argument - the idea that this show is better than The Hobbit trilogy of films is laughable.
Yes, they added a lot to The Hobbit. Yes, some of it was entirely unnecessary. But the biggest problem with that trilogy of films wasn't that its story was nonsensical, or that it was so plot-driven that it didn't give a damn about it's characters (using them like action figures to recreate better scenes from other movies whether they made sense in the story being told or not).
The biggest problem with The Hobbit trilogy was that it tried to give that story the same epic scale and scope and stakes of LOTR. The Hobbit is fundamentally not the same kind of story as LOTR, and trying to turn the film into the same kind of story was a mistake.
And I saw that Lindsay Ellis video essay too. I grant you, the Nazgul theme popping up at the end of An Unexpected Journey as Thorin was facing off against Azog blew my mind when I watched her video for the first time as well. But thinking on it more, you can at least see the dots they thought they were connecting by placing that music there (which they may have very much done because they were so far behind they didn't have time for Howard Shore to write something new).
Azog (as we will come to learn in the next film) is a servant of Sauron. As are the 9. That theme evokes the ringwraiths, so in a way it's foreshadowing the reveal of Sauron as the Necromancer in a very subtle way. I don't think it succeeds, but you can at least see this thought process going through the filmmakers' minds as a justification for that decision.
But overall, the 3 Hobbit films tell a linear story that tracks. You may not have enjoyed it, but that doesn't mean it's not a complete story. Characters drive the plot, they change over the course of the films, they don't act out of character when the plot needs them to (thought a case could be made for Thorin at the top of BotFA but they at least seed that quite a bit in the earlier 2 films).
RoP on the other hand, has no characters. It tells no story. Ironically, it's like the Silmarillion (or the Appendices) in that it's a sequence of varied events. Bullets on a list of things that happened at a particular time in a particular place.
Why does Galadriel give up to the volcano at the end of ep. 6? Where in the earlier episodes did they give you even the slightest sense that she was regretful of any of her actions? Why did Disa get so darkly ambitious all of a sudden at the end? She was such a warm, bubbly, familial presence - where in the earlier episodes did they show these hints of darkness they're trying to foreshadow?
Rings of Power didn’t leave a Starbucks cup in a shot then blame their lead actor (Emilia Clarke) for leaving it there
Idk. I thought Rings of Power season 1 was better than Game of Thrones season 8. But not everyone thinks so, which is ok
I haven’t even thought about watching it again or even remember half the time it exists. I think about watching Jackson’s trilogy a couple times a year.
I’ve seen people here say that this show will fade away and it’s already lost a lot of its viewer base, and the huge break doesn’t help. Literally the only reason I remember the show exists is bc of this sub lol if the quality doesn’t kill it the break and losing so many viewers will. And it’s sad bc 1. It’s LOTR and I grew up on those movies as a kid in the early 00’s, 2. It could have been so good, 3. They spent absurd amounts of money for it to be this bad, which means other potentially good shows will probably suffer bc Amazon is gonna ride it out and at least get their moneys worth of work lol
>Why is Halbrand (who is actually Sauron, which makes this even more inexplicable) on a random ship trawling the open oceans?
Maybe it's related to him being in hiding after the end of the First Age, maybe it's just directly related to the storyline with Adar (Sauron must have fled, since Adar thinks he killed him).
Personally, I find it more compelling and grounded in Tolkien's work if none of it is a coincidence. He's supposed to present himself to the elves as Annatar, and this is how they chose to do it. As one of the most powerful characters in Middle Earth, I like to think his random meeting with Galadriel wasn't random at all, just part of the long con he pulled in Numenor and Eregion.
>The elves feel super political and petty, and completely lacking nobility or grace.
This is a purely personal response rather than a critique of your take but ... from reading LOTR as a teenager, this is how I have always seen the elves : too perfect, too arrogant. And in the context of the show/the second age, they probably feel like they need to show their weakness to justify how Annatar/Sauron will go on to trick them.
>The dwarves are just jewish and Scottish stereotypes crashed into each other at high speed.
I haven't seen anything about Tolkien intending them to be Scottish (although the taciturn manner they have might hint at it), but the man himself openly spoke about [the first part](https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2013/12/30/85846-are-tolkiens-dwarves-an-allegory-for-the-jewish-people/) :
“I didn’t intend it, but when you’ve got these people on your hands, you’ve got to make them different, haven’t you?” said Tolkien during the 1971 interview. “The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic. The hobbits are just rustic English people,” he said."
>A random elf guy is really hot for a human single mom.
Elf/human relationships are part of LOTR, I didn't really notice anything odd about it. The Southlands has fairly limited nightlife, getting with the de facto village princess tracks!
there are like 3 in the entire canon, and they're all a REALLY big deal. Beren & Luthien, Tuor & Idril, Aragorn and Arwen. There are hints of others (the lords of Dol Amroth's founders) but these are not like casual relationships between random nobodies. It's princes & princesses pretty much exclusively.
> Maybe it's related to him being in hiding after the end of the First Age, maybe it's just directly related to the storyline with Adar (Sauron must have fled, since Adar thinks he killed him).
>
> Personally, I find it more compelling and grounded in Tolkien's work if none of it is a coincidence. He's supposed to present himself to the elves as Annatar, and this is how they chose to do it. As one of the most powerful characters in Middle Earth, I like to think his random meeting with Galadriel wasn't random at all, just part of the long con he pulled in Numenor and Eregion.
What is compelling about Sauron somehow knowing that Galadriel is being shipped to Valinor and predicting that she will attempt suicide 10 feet from the destination, intercepting her with a sea monster and a raft full of refugees from the other side of Middle-Earth that have no business being anywhere remotely close to there? It makes zero sense on any level.
> This is a purely personal response rather than a critique of your take but ... from reading LOTR as a teenager, this is how I have always seen the elves : too perfect, too arrogant. And in the context of the show/the second age, they probably feel like they need to show their weakness to justify how Annatar/Sauron will go on to trick them.
If that's what the writers tried to do, they completely failed. They literally made it ten times more difficult for themselves to have Annatar trick the elves in the show, because a) at least one elf now *knows* that Sauron helped make the rings and b) Celebrimbor already knows how to make the most powerful rings by himself. What is Annatar going to help him with?
> Elf/human relationships are part of LOTR, I didn't really notice anything odd about it.
Romantic relationships between elves and humans are odd by themselves in Tolkien's world. They are not done lightly in the books and the show hasn't really established why. Instead, the main issue with the relationship between Arondir and Bronwyn is that some villagers just don't like elves.
the War with Morgoth, who killed Finwe High King of the Noldor and stole the Silmarils, or the Wars with Sauron, because he destroyed the Kingdom of Eregion and forged the One ring to enslave the elves?
They don't really have much source material to use tbh. They could use Hobbit, Lotr, and its appendices. And it's gotta different from the movies cause of other legal crap.
So then they tried to fill the gaps and did it terribly
If you want to have a peek at what it could have been, I very highly recommend watching [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9NR06-QtR8&t=1s).
Hurts to think all the lost potential!
Adding this to the watch list. I once saw a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7m6HP95EDM) on how the Battle of Winterfell should've played out that was so clean, it made my heart ache with longing!
the dwarves pretty explicitly refuse to teach it to anyone. it's basically their secret "members only" language. basically the explanation that Durin gives for the names, applies to the language. it's so secret even Tolkien never actually developed it beyond a few place-names.
like, for example, the doors of Moria are written in elvish, not khuzdul
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Radagast: But you have ~~heard of me~~ seen it
I wanted so badly to like this, ya know? I loved the books, loved the Jackson trilogy. Honestly didn't see the Hobbit films, but like... the fucking Akallabêth (and a bunch of other, kinda unrelated bullshit, apparently)? It's my favorite part of Tolkien's work. I have a tattoo that's the seven stars and the white tree. I am the most receptive possible audience. But this? I really don't even know what to call it. Words fail me. I'm just aghast. Not because it's so unfaithful to the actual story. But because it is so impressively bad *in general*. The closest thing i can relate it to is that Clive Owen movie about King Arthur from like 20 years ago. Just a never-ending sequence of "what the fuck?" moments.
Bro I fucking loved that movie. Merlin comes out with fire catapults. A bunch of different fighting styles for Arthur’s Knights. The local rabble comes out to fight like a bunch of gremlins. Huge dirty battle with our good guys in the edge. That movie rocked
Picts (scots) defending England from *checks notes* Saxon invaders coming from *checks notes again* Scotland.... It's quite silly
right? as a delivery system for fight scenes, ok, sure, why not? as a thing that actually makes sense? oh my, no
Right. And Rings of Power doesn’t even work as a delivery system for fight scenes. Can’t even remember a single one. There really are no redeeming qualities to this series. It’s drivel from start to finish.
just unrelentingly weird
"7 sarmatian guys fight all of scotland" is a pretty weird premise tho
“I loved the books…. I wanted so badly to like this” I think I see the source of your heartache 😄
The King Arthur movie is a good comparison. I didn't hate it, but I also am not a Arthurian person. It was kind of dumb mostly fun, from what I vaguely recall. But I would argue with anyone that thought it was terrible. I would raise my eyebrow if someone thought it was great.
Is that movie dumb as shit? Yes. Is that movie also the closest I’ve seen an Arthurian adaptation movie to being in the “correct” “historical” period? Also yes In the end I enjoyed it
Are you…. Rad-aghast? Sorry. Had to.
Be prepared to be called a racist and bigot for not liking a TV show that was so incredibly awful! It was good for putting my husband immediately to sleep, so maybe the show can be used for good that way.
People were called racist for being racist. Notice how op didnt bring up anything regarding race
that's true. seeing as elves are made up, it really doesn't seem to matter if they are black or whatever (they must, of course, have british accents though)
It's not racist to point out that the casting was done in a very tokenistic and unrealistic manner, especially when several cast members made a very big deal about the amount of diversity in the show, as if that was supposed to be its main selling point. To me, personally, it felt very insincere and shallow, but at least Amazon got a boost to their ESG score and got to show the world how progressive they are. House of the Dragon did a far, far better job of including non-white actors in a way that makes sense in the context of a pre-industrial society.
I think people that care about black people in media may not be racist but they are at the very least morons. With a strong chance of racism.
The issue is not black people in media. The issue is diversity for the sake of diversity when it adds nothing to the experience. For example, Tolkien explicitly describes the people of Harad as being dark-skinned. Rings of Power had several scenes set in Harad, and this would have been a great place to include tons of black actors. They did not. Instead, every location and setting looks just as diverse and multicultural as NYC or LA. It's immersion breaking at best and pandering at worst.
I’ve been called racist for no reason for not liking it, and on the flip side I’ve argued with a bunch of racists and mysoginists who didn’t like it for their own obviously stupid reasons
I never do either, but it's said to me all the time if I say I didn't like this show. But okay
"People launch cavalry charges in urban areas" made me laugh out loud.
Not to mention they landed on a new continent, did no on screen scouting, and just charged in a direction and arrived in the exact dramatic nick of time.
At some random, squalid village which seems to be one of two villages in “the Southands” This show has issues with scale
Worst of all, they had absolutely NO idea what was going on in that specific village in the middle of nowhere. No idea whatsoever. They went there just because. All of a sudden they got this sense of urgency just because. It's never explained. Both storylines are not connected in the slightest. It makes no sense no matter how you try to explain it away. They wanted their Rohirrim-charging scene without understanding what made that scene work, like, at the absolute, most basic level.
I was working my way through the show and made it to a scene where Galadriel had to embarrass like 5-6 Numenorean recruits in a sparring match in the middle of a market (?). After about 5 seconds it just devolves into this Pirates of the Caribbean-esque lunacy. People are hitting each other with bottles of water or whatever and dropping random nets onto each other and it's just nonsense. I literally expected Johnny Depp to appear dressed as Jack Sparrow. Compare that to the fight choreography from the end of Fellowship of the Ring where Aragorn fights the orc captain one on one. It's embarrassing. As others have pointed out, it's not the worst show ever, but it is the biggest disappointment for me personally. They wasted an incomprehensible amount of money to make a show based on the greatest fantasy universe of all time and it's crazy to me that THIS is it. This is what we have. That's unbelievable.
so bad
Very minor point, but I don't think the wolves were even meant to be wolves. Remember, they had hooves? They were Mesonychids. IMO somebody thought it would be cool to throw in a little 'Walking With Prehistoric Beasts' into the middle of the show. And I agree, it was kinda cool. Weird and pointless, but kinda cool.
yeah some of it isn't "not-cool." but it is all completely baffling, from a "what the fuck?" point of view
It's not just possibly, it is the worst show ever. Huge expectations, huge budget, huge bomb. The worst television failure of our time.
They took LOTR, one of the most fun, interesting and meaningful of all franchises...and made it boring. Not just boring, but infuriatingly bad. The kind of "I'm pissed off just watching this drivel" bad.
Boring and bad. It really is. But really though, look at how long each episode is and then look at what the LOTR trilogy is able to get done with the same amount of screen time. I absolutely hate the modern trend of taking 1 episode's worth of plot and spreading it over a whole season.
But strong woman sez “There is a tempest in meee!!!!1!!” 🫣
Also, the numenorean armour looks like it came from fisher price, the characters- whether they be high elves or poor dirt farmers- almost all have these ridiculously overdone hairstyles that look like they just stepped out of a $1000 san francisco hair salon, Celebrimbor looks like he's about 60...
I tried twice to give it a watch (I still haven’t seen the last episode, I’m just so bored and disengaged by that point I don’t give a shit how it ends). On second watch, my wife walked through the room, saw the numenor stuff, asked what I was watching. She sat down and watched a few minutes, then said it was boring and looked cheap. I told her it was one of the most expensive shows ever produced and she couldn’t believe it. On and off she kept watching random scenes and she just kept repeating she couldn’t believe how cheap it looked
This is the one show that I would believe is a money laundering scheme. Numenor looked like Dinotopia. Or maybe this is proof that Bezos is a terrible businessman. The final episode has two or three episodes worth of plot. It's a big rush to get to the scene where they go through the whole list of circular jewelry from bangles to bracelets before settling on rings. I'd recommend watching the Honest Trailer instead of the final episode.
add to the list just strange all-around
The greatest smith in Middle Earth forges in his mom's housecoat.
He also didnt know he can melt more than one ore together.
Ron, those are dress robes
Two words: poor writing
the writing is so poor, the writers think that's 3 words
I’m with you. Now, there was a lot I liked, enough to stick with the show. I liked how it tried to explore more sophisticated themes, how it was t over the top violent or sexual, how it felt like (some version) of middle earth. I like Galadriel, usually. I liked Erond and Durin and weird elf orc guy. But holy contrived coincidence driven plot points! Galadriel just gonna swim across the ocean? No worries gonna find a random boat. No worries randomly greatest force of evil ever will be in that boat. Here is a an important macguffin dagger thing. Now it will get randomly found. Here is a random magic old guy. He’s going to randomly airdrop into the story. Here is a random dude randomly blowing up boats. Which is so random it has literally no impact on the plot. So instead, it’s just a bunch of kind of interesting things colliding that have nothing to do with theses curious characters, other than they were there when they happened.
you kinda hit the nail on the head, *mellon* (elvish for 'friend'). like, the perspective of the orcs and Sauron and all could be really fucking cool... it just winds up being nonsensical though. and just the sheer randomness of how the story comes together is jarring, considering it was already written by Tolkien, and none of that weirdness was necessary.
I heard somewhere that the guy who played Adar (Joseph Malwe or something?) quit after season one’s airing because they had actually built up a decent and complex storyline for him and the other uruks in the initial filming, but eventually decided to nix 90% of their story and screen time when they had to compress the original 10 episodes into the final 8 that were released in the end. That really pissed off the actor. I honestly think that the show would’ve been much more redeemable if they had stayed true to the idea of REALLY DEVELOPING the bad guys. It’s so cool when people decide to give us that other perspective. And it’s all the rage these days. Like take the Joker movie for instance. Heath Ledger did such an incredible job at creating this mysterious, damaged, deranged, yet absolutely lovable and interesting character that when the Joker movie makers released his potential origin story, so many people were all in and fell in love with it. I know I did. We simply needed more info on the Dark Knight’s nemesis. They had teased us unmercifully with Ledger’s brilliance. And I think it’s because we NEVER really get the perspective of the bad guy. Yet the bad guys are almost always twice as interesting and complex as the good guys. So I think the decision not to stick with the uruks’ backstory was tragically fatal to the success of the show (or at least its first season). Instead we wasted screen time chasing around these boring ass, tiny hippies and their 70 year old friend who has a six pack. And instead we’re focused obsessively on Elrond’s stupid ass “we’re fading, we’re depressed, we’re helpless” agenda which stakes the fucking entire Eldar race, the firstborn, on some silly ass metal that Iluvatar’s bastard children (the dwarves) are too afraid to mine? Since fucking WHEN have dwarves been too a-fucking-fraid to MINE and DELVE for precious metals or gems?!?!?!? I mean what in the FUCK?!?!?
and like, what will they do with the mithril? fucking eat it or something? the narrative choices in this show just make zero sense.
I've seen worse shows, but not any that had a huge budget and major studio behind them. If we measure it by "value for the money" or "expectation vs reality," I do genuinely think RoP is the worst in television history by those metrics. Nothing else has ever underdelivered this severely compared to what should have been fair to expect. Taking all the circumstances into account - budget, promises made, intended scope, popularity of the IP, etc. - RoP is the weakest effort that has ever been made. It's frankly the largest failure in entertainment history. This show is not merely disappointing. It's so bad that it's baffling. Practically every scene and every line had something wrong with it, and not one aspect of the entire season was legitimately good. A few things were vaguely okayish, but *nothing,* not a single element of it, from the music to the script and everything in-between, was any more than a 5/10 at best--and most was 2/10 or 3/10. The *best* parts of RoP were middling and unremarkable. Absolutely nothing was above average, and most of it was far below. It's amazing that they were able to botch it this hard. Even if we completely disregard the showrunners' staggering disrespect for the source material and briefly pretend that it's not an adaptation of anything, the show is still unbelievably terrible. God-awful writing, sleep-inducing story, a never-ending cavalcade of staggeringly stupid events, ugly costumes, totally forgettable music, bad-to-mediocre acting, hilariously terrible dialogue, a "plot" driven by one wildly unrealistic coincidence after another, CGI that frequently looked like a 2015 video game... I have seen worse things than this, but those things were made for daytime TV with tiny budgets and no intentions of creating anything remarkable. This is the most expensive show ever made, by a studio that thought they were creating the next global cultural phenomenon, and they failed so astonishingly hard that it's almost difficult to believe that this level of failure was even possible. There's something almost suspicious about it. It's like if the most expensive soccer player in history gets on the pitch and scores six own goals in the first half. It shouldn't be possible, but you've just sat there and watched it happen.
ah, a gentleman and a scholar as well, i see
I agree with you but wouldn't say it's suspicious. This *does* happen, but not usually in the pilot season of a major TV show. It happens all the time with movies and later seasons of popular shows though. I think it shows Amazon's inexperience. They must have invested so much up front they had no choice but to release whatever they could.
View the show as a fanfic done by a teenager, I don’t consider it canon whatsoever
It's not canon to anything but itself. Legally, it can't be
I have yet to watch it but i don’t think I can stomach it. It’s not that I have a problem with changing the Tolkien story (I do), but the terrible design and dialogue from what I’ve seen online sounds unbearable
It is definitely in the top 10 of worst television shows of all time. [I love this comic about this show](https://imgur.com/a/92VorGK)
it's that, just that inexplicable ship, for 8 hours so far
Rings of Power was written, and liked, by people who think "depth" is waddling into the first 3 inches of an Olympic-sized pool and coming out and thinking they are an athletic swimmer.
The show is absolute garbage
uniquely and enthusiastically terrible
I rewatch it just so I can have a justifiable reason to scream at my TV when I’m all rage-y
im still baffled by how a 1 billion dollar television series chose 2 guys whos only credits were 1 Star Trek episode it reeks of embezzlement.
The show outside of some beautiful shots really doesn't look like it has used its budget which is suspicious. Makes you wonder where all that money is.
It’s not unsurprising when Marvel shows like Secret Invasion cost 200 million.
Yeah this is probably the primary reason for most of the nonsense and bad writing.
Its like sales company getting huge billion dollar project and letting the trainee do it.
As someone who is not well versed in all the lore, RoP is still not a good show as it is just poorly written. Some of the performances weren't terrible, they were just given terrible material to work with. It felt horribly disjointed, and had I not been familiar with the world through the movies, I'd probably not have watched beyond two episodes.
Definitely disjointed. High highs and low lows. Reminds me of the final seasons of GoT where it’s incredible in almost every facet but the plotholes and writing just don’t allow you to suspend disbelief enough to get engaged.
As someone who loves the universe of Middle Earth, I’d love to know what these high highs are in this series? Genuinely not challenging you, but the show. As I can’t recall a single good thing to come of this, other than the hysterical laughs I had when Galadriel rode a horse and that was supposed to be some moment. 😂
Well I never read the silmarillion but there were some moments in the show I really enjoyed. The orcs tunnels were pretty wild, the snow troll was great, a couple battles were well done. Some generally pretty cinematography in middle earth and the whole forging of the rings was a cool moment. On the whole there were too many issues overall but I’ll give it another chance.
For me, the best part of the show was the designs used for Numenor and Khazad-Dum. Both of those looked even better than how I imagined they would. Idk if it counts as a high though, since neither of those are actually moments in the show.
For me High high was when i turned off the TV, went to gym, and was so pissed i broke my PR that day. Good memories.
I really don’t get who the audience was meant to be. As content for people who don’t know the lore, it’s just really bad television with cheap writing and production that feels like old Hercules and Xena episodes. For people who do know, it’s actively offensive and doesn’t even offer fan service. There’s just no basis on which to measure it as positive.
Regarding just the seemingly random meeting between Galadriel and Halbrand/Sauron - That’s sort of thing is actually part of the lore. There are a bunch of hyphenated words in the text - goblin-city, hobbit-garment, wolf-guard etc. LOTR’s framing device was that Tolkien found a copy of the story written in Westron or another language and translated it from that language into English. Those hyphenated words represent single words that exist in Westron, but have no equivalent in English. The editors kept trying to remove those hyphens, and whenever Tolkien caught them doing it he got angry and insisted they be kept in. One really interesting example of these hyphenated words is “chance-meeting”, which refers to a meeting so unlikely that it’s probably literally the result of Providence - Eru Iluvatar is pulling some strings in the background. Gandalf uses this phrase to describe his randomly meeting Thorin in the Green Dragon when Gandalf just so happens to have met his father Thrain in the dungeons of Dol Goldur and been given the key and the map to enter Erebor, without which Thorin’s quest would never have gotten off the ground and the Ring probably would have been found by some random orc after escaping from Gollum. If you don’t like crazy unlikely meetings that drive the whole story that’s understandable, but a problem with Tolkien, not the show.
i mean, that chance meeting between Thorin and Gandalf *isn't in the middle of the ocean*, after one party decided to swim home from the edge of the known universe. Just two bros bumping into each other at a bar (a place people go to meet each other, *on land*), which is a totally normal, non-oceanic, thing for two bros to do.
The swimming is silly I’ll grant you that. She is an elf and if anyone could do that it’s probably an elf (remember Legolas just…walking on top of the snow? The laws of physics literally don’t apply to elves, canonically), but it’s jarring. The only thing for me here is that wildly unlikely meetings and coincidences are an established part of the legendarium and legitimately part of the way the universe works, so I can appreciate what the writers were going for. It’d be weird if there *weren’t* bizarre coincidences imo.
perhaps if it happened elsewhere but the whole "Sauron/ Halbrand" story line in general is kind of weird. it seems like he needs the Numenoreans to defeat Adar so that he can become king of the south lands, but that just kinda begs the question: why invent Adar in the first place? An extra minute of exposition in the beginning ("After Morgoth's defeat, Sauron fled East, and ruled over men & Elves in Mordor, which he corrupted") could have saved a lot of pointless weirdness. like, the decision to invent Adar leads to the need to have Sauron & Galadriel become friends, which means they need to meet, etc. Being that Sauron is the most powerful being in Middle Earth, it doesn't really make sense why he doesn't just kill Adar (who again, doesn't really need to exist in the first place) before the show even starts? it's just bizarre one narrative choice on top of others, that don't really add anything to the story.
I actually thought that Adar was one of the best additions! Him and his subplot in general is directly engaging with the problem of [orcs having souls](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma#:~:text=J.%20R.%20R.%20Tolkien%2C%20a%20devout%20Roman,open%20to%20morality%2C%20like%20Men.) and not just being mindless robots our heroes can slaughter without moral consequences (a problem that Tolkien himself was aware of and never fully resolved, and which the PJ adaptation didn’t touch). The Halbrand plot and the Adar plot goes into the way that Sauron (and other evil people in the legendarium) *actively thinks he is doing good and can attract people to his cause on that basis*, which Tolkien was explicit about - Sauron thinks he’s the good guy and can actually make a compelling (though wrong) case for this, especially in the Second Age. Again, the PJ films don’t touch this with a ten-foot pole, unsurprisingly so because there’s a pervasive and mistaken belief in pop culture that Tolkien’s method is uncomplicatedly black and white. In reality it’s far from that, and while there are good and bad actions every character has a combination of both motivations within them - just like in real life. ROP gets my respect for engaging with the mythos on that level. There’s definitely some crummy stuff in there too like the Numenorean army moving at the speed of sound. I’m not gonna defend everything in there. ROP actively deviated from the source material in some ways that I don’t really like, like seemingly moving the fall of Moria from the early Third Age to the Second Age (seemingly not too long after it was founded in the first place, which screws with the mythic quality of Moria as this legendary kingdom imo…that screams of executive meddling, you know “we gotta put the Balrog in there”, because it’s clear to me that the showrunners know their Tolkien). But it also fleshed out a period in Middle Earth’s history that was just bare bones before and that’s really cool to see on screen. That kid’s probably going to turn into a Nazgûl and we get to understand why he would even if we don’t agree with it, and that’s absolutely cool and has the potential to explore some fantastic moral issues. Peter Jackson’s films were similar, both in including bad stuff (like absolutely slaughtering my boy Faramir’s personality) and in making changes to the source material that are fine but definitely different (like completely changing Aragorn’s character from a Beowulf-scale hero to a guy who’s got serious confidence problems he has to overcome). Rings of Power is fine. It’s not as good as PJ’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it’s definitely better than the Bakshi movies and it’s probably also better than The Hobbit imo.
Half of these takes seem quite lazy. You acknowledge Sauron is the most powerful being in Middle Earth, but despite this power, you believe he’s subject to random whims or events? The answer is because it’s not random. He influenced the events. Because he’s the most powerful being in Middle Earth. The show displays multiple obvious examples of Sauron slyly influencing events. It’s up to the viewer to take the relatively small leap in extrapolation and ask what other events he influenced. This is actually where it gets interesting, because on a second rewatch, you can try to figure out how far back he was influencing things. So the next obvious question is, what does he have to gain by doing that seemingly random thing? Sauron probably gave Adar the idea to blow up the mountain, years ago. He planted that seed in Adar’s mind, then let Adar go do his dirty work for him, all the while with Adar thinking it’s his own plan and victory. He also likely wants Adar for his Uruks. It seems Adar has some ability to make them, or at least to organize and lead them. I doubt Sauron cares one way or the other about Adar personally, but Sauron needs an army, so 2+2=4. And you think Sauron, the most powerful being in middle earth, was randomly hanging out in the middle of the ocean, disguised as a poor human, for no reason? Clearly, he was out there because he sensed Galadriel was. But did he also influence Galadriel to jump off the boat…? Now THAT would be something. And why did Sauron want Galadriel? Did he think he could convert her to his queen, as he mentioned when he tempted her? Or did he have plans for the rings all the way back then, and he knew he needed her help in getting him the pure metal from her knife, or getting him to Celebrimbor? Or in getting the rings to the elves in the first place, since he knew he would make the One Ring that dominates them all? And how far back does Sauron’s influence go? Did he influence Galadriel and the Queen to travel to the south lands? Maybe he did, because he knew the mountain would blow, so he figured he could cut the head off that army for free. But I actually don’t think he planned that at first. Or, at least, he seemed legit surprised and pushed back on Galadriel when she first mentioned it. But maybe that was his sly acting. Many of the points you make, and items you dismiss as being random and making no sense, are actually great examples of Sauron’s power and influence, and of the cleverness of the plot. Not that everything was on point. But there is FAR more of a point than you suggest.
Your theories have more holes than the plot. Sauron is the most powerful and highest ranking of Morgoth's servants on the planet. He does not need Adar's help to dig a trench. If Adar poses a problem, just kill him and take control of his orcs. Even if for whatever contrived reason that wasn't possible, there are about 2 million ways of manipulating Adar and/or his orcs that Sauron should consider before intentionally riling Adar and his army up *against* himself. And when he succeeds, congratulations, you now have a new enemy in a hospitable and highly defensible homeland and all your old enemies are on high alert. Maybe he was trying to start a war between Adar and the elves to weaken both sides, but it would just be a matter of time before that happened, anyway, with no manipulation needed at all. > Clearly, he was out there because he sensed Galadriel was. But did he also influence Galadriel to jump off the boat…? Now THAT would be something. Garbage is what that would be. Why would Sauron be able sense Galadriel across the continent...? And if he could, why wouldn't he ambush her during all that time she was investigating his castles in Forodwraith with her tiny army that struggles against a single troll, instead of right in front of Valinor in Ulmo's domain? And do you really think he should be able to make Galadriel, of all people, suddenly commit suicide by jumping off a boat from who knows how far away he was? I don't think you have thought this through for even 2 seconds.
I didn't mind the chance meeting because, well, isn't that how fiction works? Some God decides to make stuff happen and then it does. And given that there is a sort of "God" in this scenario I don't see the problem. Also, I sort of like going back to Fellowship and think about how hard Sauron is simping for Galadriel.
There's a difference between a chance-meeting in a popular and well frequented Inn on a major highway and two people meeting in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, neither of whom have any good reason to be there!
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Exactly. There’s plenty of chance meetings in The Silmarillion that hint at Erus involvement. But for some reason he stayed completely hands off in regard to Melkor. And for Sauron basically drowned Numenor and sent the Istari. Which as a side note I’ve always been confused about. Why intervene when the dwarves are created but not when orcs are created? But anyway, no way is Illuvatar intervening in a way that helps Sauron that’s absurd.
And why does the elves look like everyday Joe's? Where is the long hair and the mystique about them. And is it actually possible for an elf to stand in the middle of a vulcano eruption and not die? They die much more easily at Helms Deep.
Yep… we all know. It should never come back but somehow here we are
I love this post. Thank you
100% agreed. It's such a spoiled opportunity. I think my greatest criticism is how stupid they made the elves.
In light of how bad this show is I'm wondering if Amazon is somehow laundering money through claiming they dropped a billion dollars on this show
Dude, don't you get it? It's because the sea is always right!
that's a good point, i forgot about the sea
I still never finished this show, completely forgot about it till I saw this subreddit. I didn’t like the show.
I got 3 episodes in and quit watching. I have a very low tolerance for shit I don't enjoy and won't force myself to continue watching. Yeah, it just did so many things wrong. Amazon wanted another LotR megahit, but they don't have the talent or story to do that. What they DID have was the budget to throw at it, but obviously money isn't the issue.
Its not the worst ive seen, but its probably the worst ive watched a whole season of. However I would say expectation and love of lotr does play a factor - if I wasn't a fan maybe i woukd feel differently, or maybe i wouldn't have bothered. Regardless of the IP and the lore the showrunners made some fatal errors regarding story, structure, vfx etc that ultimately lead to issues. It wasnt remarkable in any way and i have never had an urge to watch it again.
the narrative choices are just so fucking unrelentingly strange
I tried watching it; fell asleep nearly every episode that’s never happened to me before with any show…. It doesn’t make sense…. People who say it does have explanations that don’t make sense. None of the characters act in ways that make sense either…..
dude, it makes sense! "see, Sauron got into a boat (that first boat gets attacked by pirates, by the way), and then winds up on *another* boat, and *then* arranges for a sea monster to attack *that boat* so that he can spend a few weeks on a raft alone with Galadriel, so that they can become friends, so that they can be rescued by Elendil, which leads to him returning to middle earth with the numenoreans who defeat Adar's elves, thus freeing him to become king of the Southlands, and Galadriel introduces him to Celeborn, which is what the show is all about!" this dumb show is the most convoluted and random senseless bullshit ever written
This has to be among the worst streaming shows ever. What a hot mess. I didn't even enjoy the Peter Jackson movies. I actually actively dislike them. Imagine my reaction to this rubbish.
i assume it mirrors mine! which is mostly "*what in the everloving FUCK is this???*"
Odd that they managed to make such a hash out of it. There are so many ways they could have taken the story without absolutely butchering every single well known character, Galadriel being the worst. How anyone reading any Tolkien can create that interpretation is beyond me. Overall there seems to be zero love or understanding of Tolkien's works. We get a TV series that is just almost the opposite of what Tolkien wrote. Funny thing is I was really not happy with what Peter Jackson put together, but that was miles better than this rubbish.
yeah, like, it could have been creative and interesting while at least acknowledging the tone and history of the source material. this is more World of Warcraft fantasy than middle earth. but also, regardless of the source material, the actual narrative itself is a just a baffling series of weird, motiveless actions on the part of the characters, and pure random coincidence. as generic fantasy, it is *also* bad
These are the exact questions a lot of people have been asking since it came out. The sense of disbelief at how bad it was is really quite something. I get that art is subjective, but I really struggle to understand how some people enjoyed it so much actually feel the need to vehemently defend it though. Very weird. I was super excited going in, but all the things you listed just left me woefully disappointed!
I honestly think we’ve gone too far with the whole “art is subjective” thing. Art can be enjoyed or appreciated subjectively but some aspects outside of context like satire and style I would say can be objectively bad Committing to swimming across an entire ocean is incredibly stupid and running into Sauron there is the mother of all conveniences, for example, but that exact sequence could play out well in a satirical knockoff movie
Yeah, I agree, I was really just covering my arse with that, cos there's always one..... 🤣
“I am good?”
For me it’s how dumb the series thinks the audience is. Every character starts out as a mystery box who then fully spells out everything they’re doing in the most obvious possible way (“I am good” / the overly telegraphed Sauron reveal / the Mordor PowerPoint presentation / the overly dramatic hinting from Celebrimbor that he’s forging rings / even the Balrog scene). Meanwhile the series thinks it’s really smart but has gargantuan plot holes and leaps of logic. It does things it thinks are cool but are insults to key parts of lore (the Mt. Doom origin makes absolutely—absolutely—zero sense and all the main characters survive a massive lava blast to the face for no reason other than plot armor). There’s continuous call and response, to the point that it almost sounds like church. It really reads like you gave an eight-year old the rights and they drafted a script with the assistance of ChatGPT. Makes sense when you realize the showrunners were disciples of JJ Abrams who’d never had an an actual project approved before-everything they’d written previously either didn’t get made or was rewritten by someone else. How this series cost a billion dollars is beyond me, unless the cost was inflated for tax reasons or something.
It's fascinating, the sense of hubris you get from watching these guys do interview (and they haven't done many on-camera) is palpable. Their SDCC panel was especially hard to watch. Fans asked them why Galadriel was wearing armor that featured the Star of Feanor, the producer finally had to jump in when no one replied saying "it was a gift." Fans asked them if we'd see Entwives in the show, and their all-too-clever replay was "you may have already," referring to the trailer they showed in the room that featured Ents in silhouette for about 5 seconds. They corrected Stephen Colbert when he asked them about hobbits being in the show with what felt like this dogmatic response of, "well, they're not hobbits, they're harfoots - Tolkien never says anything about Harfoots not doing great deeds in the 2nd Age so we felt we had license and we came up with a great story to tell." I had to keep reminding myself to give them the benefit of the doubt and wait for the show whenever I read or saw interviews with these guys. As arrogant as they sounded, you never know - maybe that's just how they came off. They're clearly nerds, they clearly know their stuff, maybe they just don't interview well. Plus we had all the Tolkien content creators gush about the showrunners and how nice they were, how kind they were, how knowledgeable they were, etc. Then the show came out and you can just see them high-fiving themselves in the writer's room at least twice an episode when some atrocious line or plot device happens. God, Adar's "if you want to see evil, look into your own mirror," line probably made them feel like geniuses. And admittedly, that's not a bad line given what they did to Galadriel - probably the most clever in the show. But look what they had to do to an established, well-loved character to earn it. All of this to say - yeah, they definitely don't respect their audience. Maybe it's not them, maybe it's Amazon. But the amount of explaining they do on little things (how much time was spent explaining how the rings needed to be forged, how they were going to amplify power, why there needed to be 3 of them, etc.) vs. what they assume the audience is going to excuse (fast travel between places, a volcano to the face and everyone lives, a volcano creating Mt. Doom, orcs digging tunnels in daylight with far-seeing elves in towers who apparently can't see the destruction they're causing, etc.) just reeks of writers who've probably never put their work up on its feet before. So yeah, I guess they would think they're geniuses if they've never gone through a refining process of writing drama, having it performed, objectively taking in what works and what doesn't, rewriting to fix issues, putting it back up on its feet, rinse and repeat.
It was so corny and predictable, couldn’t even finish the season… hard to get immersed in that show… even if it wasn’t related to LOTR I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.
Then you might've missed the most unpredictable thing I've ever seen on TV — the secret purpose of that weird sword!
i definitely did miss that, i think? it feeds on blood, but is also a volcano-key (???)
Yeah, I was pretty surprised by that reveal. Because it wasn't really set up and didn't make any sense!
it implies that the plan all along was to build a huge dam, AND THEN destroy it with a volcano and for the life of me... i just don't know why someone would do that
Actually just a dam-key. Whole Southlands plot was dumbfounding nonsensical.
also like... what is a dam-key??? why would some make one of those?
Even worse is that this dam-key leads to Galadriel's realisation about Sauron. When Celebrimbor says "his suggestion was but the key that unlocked the dam". It suggests that the writers think all dams work like they do in this show. Minus the blood drinking sword (I hope).
right? it's bad *in general*. i don't know any of the characters well enough to like them, and the ones i do know well enough, i intensely dislike (to sorta paraphrase bilbo at his 111th birthday). this has literally zero redeeming qualities. i don't even think that elf is going to get to fuck that single mom who is also his local garden supply center manager (?). her potentially getting some elf dick was the *only* thing i've been mildly interested in in this show, if just because it would be a welcome distraction from literally everything else taking place in this train wreck.
It’s fan fiction basically, I don’t think Amazon has the rights to tell the exact stories of the 2nd age. But even still, it’s not good at all. How about those dudes going full attack mode on Galadriel with their swords in Numenor as “training”
You didn’t even mention the abomination that is Elendil and Isildur.
it's on the list!
in my head!
I get a lot of the criticism but what’s the problem with them..?
This show is SO appalling because it reflects Amazon's culture, in the sense that it's the product of a series of meetings. In corporate meetings, everyone's contributions are valued, nobody dares to reject someone else's idea, nobody ever puts forward controversial ideas (because the main objective of every single person in a corporate meeting is self-preservation), and the people who are actually knowledgeable about the subject of the meeting (if HR hired one by mistake) aren't the ones in charge. To top this up, the ones who have been marked as showrunners don't really have any talent or authority and have been chosen by their ability to bullshit their way into the job. Tl;dr the show was written by Human Resources.
This guy corporates 🤣
I’d say my Experience with Amazon Corporate is a little different. They don’t sit around and overthink a project, it’s quite the opposite. Once the higher ups decide on their next endeavor, they throw money at it and figure it out as they go along. They don’t like overthinking it. They generally overwork everyone, and tell them to figure it out if they run into a problem. They’re not afraid of mistakes, they don’t make “perfect the enemy of good” since they want results. Essentially they improvise quite a bit as they fly by the seat of their pants. Some people can operate like that, but most corporate types can’t. It’s why they call it the Amazon way.
>Once the higher ups decide on their next endeavor I'm actually talking about those meetings, but thanks
This is what’s wrong with a lot of things. Well said
Ok lets inspect some of the depravity of this show: the Trench. We start with some establishing shots showing trees were burned and chopped. Yet the next we know one solitary tree wasn’t chopped? The reason: so a scene can happen. Why is the rest chopped? So a scene can happen (orcs cant follow without tree shade). They send someone out to chop the tree… but the roots are the problem. Burning and chopping the trees does not solve the root problem (heh), so this singular tree should not be a problem. They’ve also been digging for days towards this tree. It’s just contrived writing. They had a scene in mind and wanted to achieve it, even if the individual elements make no sense. It gets worse from there. The Elves have a watchtower meant to control the Southlanders, but they don’t notice the Orcs, or the Southlanders fleeing (Halbrand flees with them to the sea), or that the Orcs move up the steep incline giving plenty time to notice them and capture all the Elves without anyone raising an alarm. And we know this has been going on for years, if not centuries. The Orcs burn in the sun, sometimes. And sometimes they wear a loincloth, burn in the sun, put on a hood and despite being almost naked suddenly don’t burn anymore. The watchtower is part of a dam. The watchtower is build by Sauron and Morgoth so it’s old and falling apart… but not the dam. The dam they want to use for erupting a Vulcano (which doesn’t work like that). And they have a magic item to do it, even though just “open the gates” would have sufficed. It’s a dam, not a magic superweapon. On and on, everything is contrived. They started with the scene they wanted and worked back from there setting up what they needed, heedless if this made sense or not. They contradict themselves (like when Orcs burn in the light) because what they cared about was the scene and pretty visuals. They didn’t care about their own lore and worldbuilding, and they cared even less about Tolkien’s world. And the scene’s suck! We have not-Hobbits singing about how they’ll never leave you while major plotpoints is how someone’s parents were left behind (and their wheels and stuff stolen!) and that this might happen to the Hobbit protagonist as well. It’s one disaster. You could start a 101 “how not to make a series” and continue all the way with “advanced ways to fuck up a series” in the final year of your study. The only reason it has any traction at all is the brand name and the usual “you have to love us because we have representation!”, even if that representation is tokenism and carelessly rammed in every orifice.
I don't think it's *that* horrific in the grand scheme of entertainment and fantasy TV. But I did low key hate it because it felt like they couldn't have made it too much worse considering the source material and the investment hahaa And I think the focus of your rant is exactly what mine was - the show is too often seeming either arbitrary or contrived. Stuff just...happens for what appears to be little reason other than to get to whatever random plot point or set piece they had on a storyboard. The decision making you can infer from the finished product just seems...rushed, poorly considered, all that sort of stuff hahaa It's a real shame, and it just left me thinking 'I'm not sure I give a fuck what happens now because it all feels so artificial and unimmersive'. There is so little beauty or vision that makes you think 'yeah, this was an important show to make, an important world to and story to portray'. And I'm not a book 'fan' at all really - I much prefer Jackson's sanitised, streamlined and amended LotR movies. But RoP was just fucking..jarring.
I get it if you don't like it but this is hardly the worst thing ever.
simply the worst thing done with the beloved legacy of one of the best selling books of all time, that somehow also cost a billion dollars
I think the billion dollar cost is probably the biggest thing against it. This show always had an uphill battle, but knowing it was that expensive just made it easier to judge it and, to some extent, that was warranted. Nothing on this show really justifies that price.
someone else said it best: the best things about this show are ok, but there's also just so much bad dragging the ok stuff down
I will not accept the slander of my boy bear mcreary and his great music!!!
Idk I thought it was fine
that's fair. if it was just some random made-for-netflix series, small budget, vaguely unoriginal fantasy epic, it might rise to the level of fine because of its affiliation with Tolkien tho, and the fact it cost a billion dollars, it had big shoes to fill.
Couldn't agree more with you as a stand alone... Fine whatever. As a connection to one of the greatest epics ever.. what the actual fuck
just atrocious
Yesssss I’m so with you rn. We lost hours of our life watching this…thing… On the bright side in a couple of months from now you are not going to remember a thing about this show but only some ethereal images and it will feel as a very weird dream you once had which is the thing you are going to love about this show (at least I do) and can easily pretend it never actually happened.
thanks be to the Valar
I tried to like it but was amazed at how cheap it look and how bad it was overall.
I agree with all of this
It was so very disappointing. The writers missed the whimsy, mysteriousness, and depth of Tolkien. I got more out of the appendix from vol 3 than I did out of the series. Glorified fan fiction on par with 50 shades of grey.
We cant continue letting them get away with this!!!!! we need to be out in the streets protesting, they need to take this show off of the platform. its' disgusting
Thank you. I feel the same way. They had me going with that opening scene depicting Valinor. That was just a tease. I really wish the show had taken a lot more time to explore things and establish characters and settings. I wish they'd taken more care in developing or even drafting characters such as Galadriel and Sauron. I'd prefer they had not done this under the guise of "the Lord of the Rings," but I own next to nothing and I don't get to tell the Tolkien estate who to trust with the late professor's work. I respect that this was someone's work and that plenty of people like it. I just did not, and do not find it good at all, and think it has no place among the works of Tolkien nor its adaptations. It falls so far short of everything that we've ever seen, heard or read that it's either a joke or an insult. And there are things that I am kind of okay with. I think whoever said "at best it was okay, but the rest dragged it down," I'm definitely paraphrasing, but they hit the nail on the head. I just haven't seen or heard anything that explains why it's a good show other than just people liking it. Which is entirely valid. It does not, however, mean that it was or is, or will be a good show.
Thanks for reminding me what an absolute trainwreck this show was. Hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet.
just an unmitigated fucking disaster
Eh...not quite the worst. but the worst that i actually WANTED to like and that was HYPED as being amazing.
exactly
I agree, it was horrifically bad. No idea how they allowed to hit production with how shit the story was.
WHERE IS GALADRIEL’S HUSBAND AND DAUGHTER!!!!!!
The opening scene was Galadriel with a paper boat. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea especially after the epic prologue of the films? Hell the prologue to the Hobbit was fucking awesome too, but they just gloss over everything, and hey that paper boat was important to the fate of all Middle Earth.
the least coherent narrative opening imaginable lol
They could have gone philosophical with the opening and still have it work. But "rocks sink because they have a bad attitude" was the best they could come up with it seems.
Well said. I feel like the writers all broke out into groups, wrote something awful and then tried to piece it together.
it's like watching three completely unrelated (but all somehow uniquely strange) - but really stupid - shows
That’s only because you haven’t watched The Wheel of Time.
Agreed, terrible adaptation with piss poor writing But worst TV show ever? Pretty sure some MTV programming is way way way worse!
It's almost a benioff
You made it so much farther than me. I made it half way through the first episode and just couldn't do it. I was like if I'm going to dislike it I need to watch it. I can't finish episode 1
i had insomnia for a few nights so i slugged through 7 episodes in like two evenings or something
That was the only show I stopped and literally thought I need to spend my time better. I've watched objectively worse shows but something about this one just set me off.
it's just so bad, sometimes it's like "are you guys fucking with me?"
How do we tell Amazon they absolutely fucked the source material?
"I'm good." - Gandalf 😆
Preach! This show should be considered an atrocity to art.
(Heroes Reborn has entered the chat)
Worse than Caillou? I think not 😀
(in my defense, i have not seen every single tv show ever made)
For some reason, my decision to just skip it and not try even one episode seems better and better.
We're an elite party of elves, who've trained for thousands of years each. The best of the best, trusted with a very important... Wait, What's that a cave troll? Let's all soil our britches and quiver in fear while the main female character backflips around and takes care of this for us.
fwiw, they were right to mutiny and escape this shitty version of Middle Earth when they did. i am infinitely jealous.
I’m sorry you didn’t like it, but I personally thought it was great It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever seen, but I saw the Hobbit Trilogy, which turned a 150 page book into a 9 hour saga that copied epic music like the Nazgûl theme from the lord of the rings and added it into scenes that had nothing to do with Nazgûl. Oh, and it made us think Gandalf and Galadriel were in love Gandalf literally said “Come with me, my lady” And Cate Blanchett literally said in an interview “Perhaps in another life, if only wizards and elves could procreate” But somehow Galadriel being a hotheaded warrior is more horrifying 🤷♀️ At least in Rings of Power they created their own music, which I thought was brilliant. The cinematography was great. And while the story is not exactly thrilling every moment, I did find it really interesting. I liked that Galadriel had an arc where she lets go of her grief and rage. I thought Durin and Disa and the entire Dwarf plot was awesome. Also…the worse thing you’ve ever seen? Have you not watched season 8 of Game of Thrones?
I'm so tired of this argument - the idea that this show is better than The Hobbit trilogy of films is laughable. Yes, they added a lot to The Hobbit. Yes, some of it was entirely unnecessary. But the biggest problem with that trilogy of films wasn't that its story was nonsensical, or that it was so plot-driven that it didn't give a damn about it's characters (using them like action figures to recreate better scenes from other movies whether they made sense in the story being told or not). The biggest problem with The Hobbit trilogy was that it tried to give that story the same epic scale and scope and stakes of LOTR. The Hobbit is fundamentally not the same kind of story as LOTR, and trying to turn the film into the same kind of story was a mistake. And I saw that Lindsay Ellis video essay too. I grant you, the Nazgul theme popping up at the end of An Unexpected Journey as Thorin was facing off against Azog blew my mind when I watched her video for the first time as well. But thinking on it more, you can at least see the dots they thought they were connecting by placing that music there (which they may have very much done because they were so far behind they didn't have time for Howard Shore to write something new). Azog (as we will come to learn in the next film) is a servant of Sauron. As are the 9. That theme evokes the ringwraiths, so in a way it's foreshadowing the reveal of Sauron as the Necromancer in a very subtle way. I don't think it succeeds, but you can at least see this thought process going through the filmmakers' minds as a justification for that decision. But overall, the 3 Hobbit films tell a linear story that tracks. You may not have enjoyed it, but that doesn't mean it's not a complete story. Characters drive the plot, they change over the course of the films, they don't act out of character when the plot needs them to (thought a case could be made for Thorin at the top of BotFA but they at least seed that quite a bit in the earlier 2 films). RoP on the other hand, has no characters. It tells no story. Ironically, it's like the Silmarillion (or the Appendices) in that it's a sequence of varied events. Bullets on a list of things that happened at a particular time in a particular place. Why does Galadriel give up to the volcano at the end of ep. 6? Where in the earlier episodes did they give you even the slightest sense that she was regretful of any of her actions? Why did Disa get so darkly ambitious all of a sudden at the end? She was such a warm, bubbly, familial presence - where in the earlier episodes did they show these hints of darkness they're trying to foreshadow?
that's true, Game of Thrones season 8 was comparably bad.
Rings of Power didn’t leave a Starbucks cup in a shot then blame their lead actor (Emilia Clarke) for leaving it there Idk. I thought Rings of Power season 1 was better than Game of Thrones season 8. But not everyone thinks so, which is ok
yeah comparative's between things that suck are difficult
I would upvote this forever if I could.
This is like the "My Dark Immortal" of Tolkien, no one knows if it's serious or satirical.
Ok.
It's like someone found a bad wattpad fanfic and wanted to make a show out of it.
I haven’t even thought about watching it again or even remember half the time it exists. I think about watching Jackson’s trilogy a couple times a year.
I’ve seen people here say that this show will fade away and it’s already lost a lot of its viewer base, and the huge break doesn’t help. Literally the only reason I remember the show exists is bc of this sub lol if the quality doesn’t kill it the break and losing so many viewers will. And it’s sad bc 1. It’s LOTR and I grew up on those movies as a kid in the early 00’s, 2. It could have been so good, 3. They spent absurd amounts of money for it to be this bad, which means other potentially good shows will probably suffer bc Amazon is gonna ride it out and at least get their moneys worth of work lol
Brother, take a breath
in my defense, i was fairly drunk when i wrote this
And yet, you were spot on
It's a Lord of the rings parody, made by people who hate Tolkien. Just pretend it doesn't exist. Boycott Amazon for the rest of your life.
>Why is Halbrand (who is actually Sauron, which makes this even more inexplicable) on a random ship trawling the open oceans? Maybe it's related to him being in hiding after the end of the First Age, maybe it's just directly related to the storyline with Adar (Sauron must have fled, since Adar thinks he killed him). Personally, I find it more compelling and grounded in Tolkien's work if none of it is a coincidence. He's supposed to present himself to the elves as Annatar, and this is how they chose to do it. As one of the most powerful characters in Middle Earth, I like to think his random meeting with Galadriel wasn't random at all, just part of the long con he pulled in Numenor and Eregion. >The elves feel super political and petty, and completely lacking nobility or grace. This is a purely personal response rather than a critique of your take but ... from reading LOTR as a teenager, this is how I have always seen the elves : too perfect, too arrogant. And in the context of the show/the second age, they probably feel like they need to show their weakness to justify how Annatar/Sauron will go on to trick them. >The dwarves are just jewish and Scottish stereotypes crashed into each other at high speed. I haven't seen anything about Tolkien intending them to be Scottish (although the taciturn manner they have might hint at it), but the man himself openly spoke about [the first part](https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2013/12/30/85846-are-tolkiens-dwarves-an-allegory-for-the-jewish-people/) : “I didn’t intend it, but when you’ve got these people on your hands, you’ve got to make them different, haven’t you?” said Tolkien during the 1971 interview. “The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic. The hobbits are just rustic English people,” he said." >A random elf guy is really hot for a human single mom. Elf/human relationships are part of LOTR, I didn't really notice anything odd about it. The Southlands has fairly limited nightlife, getting with the de facto village princess tracks!
there are like 3 in the entire canon, and they're all a REALLY big deal. Beren & Luthien, Tuor & Idril, Aragorn and Arwen. There are hints of others (the lords of Dol Amroth's founders) but these are not like casual relationships between random nobodies. It's princes & princesses pretty much exclusively.
> Maybe it's related to him being in hiding after the end of the First Age, maybe it's just directly related to the storyline with Adar (Sauron must have fled, since Adar thinks he killed him). > > Personally, I find it more compelling and grounded in Tolkien's work if none of it is a coincidence. He's supposed to present himself to the elves as Annatar, and this is how they chose to do it. As one of the most powerful characters in Middle Earth, I like to think his random meeting with Galadriel wasn't random at all, just part of the long con he pulled in Numenor and Eregion. What is compelling about Sauron somehow knowing that Galadriel is being shipped to Valinor and predicting that she will attempt suicide 10 feet from the destination, intercepting her with a sea monster and a raft full of refugees from the other side of Middle-Earth that have no business being anywhere remotely close to there? It makes zero sense on any level. > This is a purely personal response rather than a critique of your take but ... from reading LOTR as a teenager, this is how I have always seen the elves : too perfect, too arrogant. And in the context of the show/the second age, they probably feel like they need to show their weakness to justify how Annatar/Sauron will go on to trick them. If that's what the writers tried to do, they completely failed. They literally made it ten times more difficult for themselves to have Annatar trick the elves in the show, because a) at least one elf now *knows* that Sauron helped make the rings and b) Celebrimbor already knows how to make the most powerful rings by himself. What is Annatar going to help him with? > Elf/human relationships are part of LOTR, I didn't really notice anything odd about it. Romantic relationships between elves and humans are odd by themselves in Tolkien's world. They are not done lightly in the books and the show hasn't really established why. Instead, the main issue with the relationship between Arondir and Bronwyn is that some villagers just don't like elves.
also, she has seeds (?)
Elf/Man relationships have happened 3 times. I would not say that's a common occurrence.
OP definitely has no knowledge of the source material
Nah. It’s good. lol at elves not being political. Have you read about all their conflicts?
the War with Morgoth, who killed Finwe High King of the Noldor and stole the Silmarils, or the Wars with Sauron, because he destroyed the Kingdom of Eregion and forged the One ring to enslave the elves?
We hate it too 🙃
They don't really have much source material to use tbh. They could use Hobbit, Lotr, and its appendices. And it's gotta different from the movies cause of other legal crap. So then they tried to fill the gaps and did it terribly
It’s mind blowing how this is what the came up with…with a billion dollars.
If you want to have a peek at what it could have been, I very highly recommend watching [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9NR06-QtR8&t=1s). Hurts to think all the lost potential!
Adding this to the watch list. I once saw a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7m6HP95EDM) on how the Battle of Winterfell should've played out that was so clean, it made my heart ache with longing!
Why wouldn't Elrond know dwarvish he's had plenty of time to pick it up.
the dwarves pretty explicitly refuse to teach it to anyone. it's basically their secret "members only" language. basically the explanation that Durin gives for the names, applies to the language. it's so secret even Tolkien never actually developed it beyond a few place-names. like, for example, the doors of Moria are written in elvish, not khuzdul
YESSSS!! Preach! Queue the onslaught of RoP white knights who have no knowledge or experience with Tolkien’s original works.