This is something I was blown away by too; for a 750 million dollar show, there sure are a lot of scenes where nothing happens.
By far, my favorite example is the scene where Elrond challenges a mountain dwarf to a rock-splitting competition. As viewers (even ones unfamiliar with LOTR), we know the outcome of this contest. The only thing they need to show us are these two characters after the competition, breaking down their relationships as begrudging friends. Instead, we spend more than a minute-and-a-half watching a rock splitting montage. Completely pointless from a storyboarding and writing perspective, especially considering that the outcome doesn't circumvent our expectations.
My second favorite example is even dumber; the third episode has another pointless 90-second scene of Galadriel riding a horse and smiling in slow-motion. I'm not joking, the entire scene looks like one of those HDR demo shots you'd see on a TV at Best Buy.
The show is genuinely difficult to watch, but don't take my word for it. Watch the first episode for yourself and take a shot every time you audibly sigh, you'll never want to watch an Amazon original again.
Another great example is the end of the third episode, start of the fourth. Arondir and the other elves make an escape attempt. They fail, Arondir is about to be killed, but for some reason he wasn't. They took him to their leader instead, who just lets him go with a "message".
- Why did the orc leader wait until the escape attempt to send someone with a message to the humans?
- Why would he believe an elf would relay his message, that humans could surrender and join him? Aren't the elves trying to prevent humans from being corrupted?
- Why did he give him back his weapons?
- Why are other orcs attacking him? Did Adar not even care if Arondir made back to the humans alive?
It makes more sense if you consider that the plot was written that Arondir would get captured, meet the bad guy, save the kid, and go back to the woman he's in love with to face the bad guy with the humans. Once that was decided they just threw together some scenes to fill in the blanks. No consideration was given as to whether the characters decisions made sense in the moment, only that they move the plot to where it was supposed to go.
Exactly. Mind you, I like Arondir, I like his relation with Bronwyn, I love how they did the Orcs, and I can't help but enjoy those spectacular leaps the elves make. The individual parts are fine. It's just how they tie everything together, dragging characters by their hair to wherever the plot wants them to be, that makes the whole thing make no sense.
And I don't see why any of this is necessary. Couldn't they have Arondir meet Adar before the escape attempt, make the escape attempt succeed, and when the Orcs pursue him, he manages to steal some weapons from the first Orcs he defeats with his bare hands. It wouldn't be the most inspired writing, but at least the decisions the characters make, would make more sense.
This is one of very few series where I've watched each episode at least twice while waiting for the next. Yes, it's slow, but it's also stunning.
I liked the scene with Galadriel riding. Until then she'd been shown as a hardened, argumentative and strident warrior except in the very start as a child. The scene shows a different side of her, which makes her happy; she's not entirely broken even after centuries searching for Sauron.
The films were really annoying to see end to end, the long version are unbearable. Music is better in RoP, every character and place has their theme, and they blend superbly like in Wagner or Monteverdi, unlike in the films. I also feel like dialogs are better in RoP, and the whole thing feels less "heavyweight" in everything... in a way, closer to the books.
One thing distinctive in Tolkien universe is evil inside familiar things, and this is definately there in RoP, almost everywhere.
If they skipped the rock splitting contest they would play exactly to your expectations. By showing the actual events you might believe Elrond has a plan or a way to win. I didn't know what would happen. And that made that scene better for me.
The entire story of this show is well known in advance. If you know anything about LOTR you will know who Isildur is and what's going to happen. So should they just skip the entire show?
It's the characters and their interactions, atop the beautiful visuals, that this show can establish itself with.
Yeah, I have no problem with the rock-splitting scene. For me it's the boat to Valinor. Just that one boat trip already has at least half a dozen things wrong with it. A few I could have ignored, but it just keeps getting worse and worse.
There's still many great scenes too. I love Elrond's friendship with Durin, Durin & Disa's relationship, the Harfoots, the Orcs, how Numenor Looks, how everyone in Numenor looks, how their ships look. I even enjoy the spectacular action scenes with insane leaps by the elves. There's lots of good stuff in there, but it's all held together why really awkward plot twists that make no sense.
I feel you, if you enjoyed that then I don't want to take it away from you. It's frustrating to me because the best part of that episode was the negotiations they held immediately afterwards. I would have happily traded in the contest scene for the opportunity for the writers to really explore Elrond's relationship with the dwarves. It seemed like the sort of thing a Lord of the Rings adaptation might do, rather than succumbing to spectacle when it fits the pacing of the show best. But I guess everybody is looking for something different, I'll concede that I mostly wanted this to be Game of Thrones with less sex/violence and more interpersonal development & worldbuildiong.
The rock-splitting contest is exploring Elrond's relationship with the elves.
It isn't about smashing rocks. It's about Elrond submitting to a Dwarvish custom and making a not-terrible showing (for an elf). It demonstrates the respect he has for them and shows the half-measure of respect he earns from them.
That is the key scene of the episode. The reconciliation would not have been possible without it.
Totally agreed. As a LotR fan who read all the other books as well, I have difficulty understanding what everyone’s problem is - either you know the story and enjoy the fantastic visuals of what you always had in your head or you don’t and you then you might also enjoy to learn some of the deep mythology behind LotR.
I have read all his books back to back several times since I was a teen, each reading contributing more details to my head cannon… where elves don't have pointy ears, dwarves are not humans afflicted with achondroplasia, Galadriel is not an impulsive warrior shorter than every human she meets, etc. Somehow, that cannon of mine has survived my RPG years AND decades of memes extracted from Peter Jackson's movies but woah… watching that show with my daughter is painful.
She doesn't have the same kind of relationship I have with the original material, though, so she loves it so far.
but I imagine, as a purist, PJ's movies were then painful as well, or weren't they? personally I respect that opinion, but it's not quite how I see the LotR universe - to me, the 'mass market' entertainment aspect of it is fine. I'd rather have more people to be inspired in any form, than to lock it down to a small group of purists like e.g. Christopher Tolkien.
> but I imagine, as a purist, PJ's movies were then painful as well, or weren't they?
I didn't watch them.
> personally I respect that opinion, but it's not quite how I see the LotR universe - to me, the 'mass market' entertainment aspect of it is fine.
I'm fine with it too. How it is adapted is just not my cup of tea. Besides, I wholeheartedly agree with William Gibson, here:
> The assumption that a film adaption is the final and/or highest state, for a novel, is as woefully wrong as any assumption can be.
I like to watch movies, but I like to read novels more and the original material is more than fine as-is. Tolkien's estate and William Gibson are just as much entitled to accept colossal cheques as "we" (this includes the authors themselves) are to reject what comes out of it.
> I'd rather have more people to be inspired in any form, than to lock it down to a small group of purists like e.g. Christopher Tolkien.
Well, I'd rather see the milking stop and have more people creating original stuff. If only because expectations would be low to non-existent.
This is really fascinating to me that someone would not watch the movies but is watching Rings of Power. Would you tell your story a bit for how that happened?
As a lifelong Tolkien fan, I tend to at least check out everything even if I don’t read or watch it. And I don’t have the self control to avoid the movies. Especially ones as great as Jackson’s (Return of the King has the most Oscar’s ever awarded to a film, tied with Ben Hur).
Well, as I mentioned in my comment, I have no interest for movie adaptations in general. I like movies (and I'm even somewhat of a film buff) but I don't think of them as a superior art form at all and I literally never hope for a movie adaptation of anything I read. In my opinion, a novel isn't enhanced or magnified or whatever when it is adapted for the screen. Quite the opposite, and I would prefer "Hollywood" to work on original ideas rather than whatever their current strategy is.
There are, of course, plenty of cases of good adaptations that can live side-by-side with the original material, Blade Runner comes to mind, but they tend to be outliers.
The movies were direct adaptations of the original material and the trailers I watched at the time were too off-base for me and I preferred my own head cannon to Peter Jackson's so I skipped the whole thing.
On the other hand, the series was sold more like an ad-lib inspired by the annexes of The Lord of the Rings, which are as fuzzy as it gets, so it was supposed to be less tied to the original story and, in theory, less off-base with my head cannon. It turned out to be even worse than the little I now know of the movies so I will stop here. Some of it certainly is pretty but, as hinted above, I tend to value stories and characters more than visuals.
In fact, the delta between my head cannon and the series is far greater than with the movies so I might as well watch them one of these days.
I actually liked Thor: Love and Thunder. It works for me because they're explicitly poking fun at themselves. It's not a serious movie, so it gets away with the stupid stuff because it's part of the joke.
I’ve never read The Silmarillion, and other than the hobbit cartoon back in the day, the LOTR movies are my only real connection with JRRT. I read the first book, but found it to be a forgettable slog largely due to a weird musical wizard that (thankfully) never showed up in the movies.
Regarding the rock-splitting competition spoiler - I thought he was going to win. I’m only two eps in, but I’ve enjoyed the show so far. It’s much better than I expected, particularly given everything I’ve read about it being so poorly executed. I had much lower expectations. I’m not raving about it, but I’m not panning it either.
I imagine that if you’re much closer to the source material, then there’s no way this show could have possibly met your expectations. On the other hand, if you want to catch a decent LOTR spin-off, and you’re neither a film student nor a die-hard JRRT fan, I’d say give it a shot.
- There is no build up, nothing is at stake, they are just travelling to the setting for the next scene.
- The gratuitous close ups of the horse.
- Its one of the three ways people get places, why would the millennia old Galadriel be so ecstatic? There has been no
hint that Galadriel is really into riding horses.
- The music and slow motion are so comically over the top.
I don't mind a slow pace. It's when the humans (unusually pale compared to the rest of the show's diversity) started complaining about elves taking their jobs that I checked out.
Right! When they unironically take the "Dey took 'er jerbs!!" line from South Park with zero awareness of how ridiculous it was in context. Why would the Men of Numenor be worried about elves stealing their jobs when no elf had set foot there for many, many years?
It's not a movie, it's a TV show that will have a run time of ~40 hours.
The scenes where no story development happen also serve a purpose: allowing the viewer to not be drowned in over-information.
The show is easy to follow because of that reason, even for someone who hasn't watched anything LOTR related before.
All the comments about the development being too slow or some scenes being just for spectacle are nonsensical. The ones mentioning the budget as if it had been allocated to the first 4 episodes are even worse.
> It's not a movie, it's a TV show that will have a run time of ~40 hours.
Game of Thrones is 70+ hours start-to-finish, that wasn't an excuse to slow the pacing down or write impotent dialogue. It knows how to direct characters, and the showrunners understand that 60 seconds of horse riding doesn't make good television. Allegory is used sparingly, and the world is fleshed out through it's characters rather than CGI environments. It leads to a story that can be followed by bookworms and football dads alike.
The Rings of Power doesn't build it's world in the same way. Instead we're whisked away to exotic locations that most viewers are unfamiliar with, and the following scenes do nothing to really characterize the world these characters inhabit. It's like the writing team and art directors never met to share notes. I'd argue that this lack of cohesion makes it decidedly harder to follow than other contemporary fantasy shows.
> The ones mentioning the budget as if it had been allocated to the first 4 episodes are even worse.
Okay, I'll be generous then. Why can't $125 million dollars buy better writers?
> It knows how to direct characters, and the showrunners understand that 60 seconds of horse riding doesn't make good television.
And the result was a soap opera set in a “fantasy” world. They teased us with white walkers in the first episode, and then… nothing, for like 7 seasons. We didn’t even get to see any dragons for what seemed like forever.
Part of the problem (as I understand it) is that this series is being directed by first-time showrunners. Amazon took a big gamble, and I would not be surprised if some of these cinematic/writing failures are the result of that.
You'd need someone to judge the contest so you have the same problem that people with large budgets in modern film making completely lost the ability to tell if a script is very, very not good.
I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but I did too! It was the hardest I had laughed at something unintentionally bad in a while. It's particularly hard-hitting because it's preceded by some really pretty CGI vistas and camera sweeps in full-motion that almost bring you back to the immersion of the Peter Jackson movies. And then the steering wheel veers hard left, mixing in weird slow-mo shots that evokes images of stock footage and Getty Images watermarks.
The executives and producers. There’s a fascinating leaked email thread from Marvel where a couple random execs are hyping up each other’s terrible ideas, saying they could kill off characters and reboot Iron Man and other self-indulgent nonsense. Then Kevin Feige, all hail and hallowed be his name, joins the thread with a simple sentence - “We don’t need to reboot, we can make infinite stories in these universes.” With a stroke of the keyboard he stopped that garbage in its tracks.
There’s also a great speech by Kevin Smith where he describes being hired to write Superman and he goes to the producer’s house to read the script. The guy is coked out, ranting about how there needs to be action every 10 pages in the script or the audience will get bored. He’s talking about spiders and says the main villain should be one. Then Smith says Superman’s kryptonian name, “Kel’al” or whatever, and the guy is like, who?
That’s the people making these calls sometimes. Most companies do not have a Kevin Feige.
Amazon especially is going to be an overly cautious and bureaucratic behemoth. Inexperienced as a whole despite whoever they hired. Meanwhile HBO just bought a Channel 5 documentary produced by Tim and Eric and A24 with total creative freedom. Risky. That’s the difference between shills and artists.
I’m not sure I would use the Marvel franchise movies as something aspirational when it comes to writing. They very much are paint by numbers movies. I think the Disney recipe is the worst thing to ever happen to action cinema and part of the reason these shows are all so poor.
Peter Jackson first trilogy is probably a better benchmark.
Writing isn’t there for Marvel sure. But to me the achievement is reliably producing B grade movies. Entertaining, worth a chuckle, easy on the eyes. None deserve an Oscar, but none (or few) are really very bad. Even if that were easy to do with one movie, and I’ve watched a lot of real garbage, doing it with a string of 20 interconnected films? Culminating in Endgame? That required the steady hand of a few really solid people. It was the first of its kind by an absolute mile, a totally new achievement in cinema. Spielberg and his ilk have been obsessing over all the CGI and sleeping on the real achievements.
For reference my favorite movies would be No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Fury Road. I like The Wire, Breaking Bad, True Detective season one. But I think Marvel is a different sort of thing altogether. The sheer reliability of it is unrivaled. Which is why I say that’s what Rings of Power lacks for me. The writing doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Just keep the thing competent despite all the cooks in the kitchen. Many pieces of media seem to fail at this.
Lately I will say the formula has worn thin. I consider their run to be from Iron Man to Endgame.
As a lifelong fan of LOTR, I'm having a lot of fun with this show. I don't really see why people dislike it so much. This show tells a story already known for decades. It's not meant to have hairpin twists every episode. The fun comes from the production, the interpretation of the characters, the gorgeous backdrops. All of which I enjoyed tremendously so far.
At least for me, Tolkien's work was always a slower pace, at times almost medidative experience. It's got suspense and action, but also a depiction of melancholy and beauty unlike anything else. And I feel the show is using these qualities well.
The dialogue, criticized by many, is actually very feasible and for the most part fits LOTR well (except a couple of infractions). Yes it's geeky, and sometimes unnecessarily heavy handed. Welcome to Middle Earth! That's part of the charm, and always has been, especially when something truly beautiful is being said.
I really don't know what expectations everyone had for this show, maybe a GOT clone, which thankfully it is not. Personally I feel like it was made for Tolkien fans like myself. I just hope they don't screw it up going forward.
I am relishing a fantasy series that doesn't devolve into an obsessive desire with rape and other sexual atrocities. My wife and I don't get the Game of Thrones fanbase: the show is mostly horrific sexual abuse of women with some male sexual humiliation thrown in.
Rings of Power feels more like a return to fantasy as a meditation on wonder: I feel sometimes as if I was a child again stumbling upon some ruin in EverQuest or swampy bog of alien dangers.
I believe the early fans of A Song of Ice and Fire were excited about it because it went against the fantasy culture that Tolkien had started of a sanitized diaphanous world where the villains were unquestionably evil and the good guys could do no wrong. I think Martin tried to present his world in a more believable way as to how history shows us similar feudal periods went.
I think I also prefer Tolkien's flavour, but I can appreciate Martin's grittiness none the less.
I too am a Tolkien fan and I enjoy the show. Seems like a good one so far. Much of the criticism seems to be nitpicking from people with certain expectations that weren't met. If you don't like it, that's fine. You don't have to watch it. I'll continue enjoying it.
I just hope they can stick with it despite all this backlash from everywhere. Very curious about their take on Sauron, which hasn’t been shown yet as the evil sorcerer that he was.
my hope is that they show him as a super likeable beautiful character that every weak mind starts to love immediately, before pulling out the rug under everyone's feet.
>Yes it's geeky, and sometimes unnecessarily heavy handed. Welcome to Middle Earth!
exactly! I feel like I've lost my mind talking to people about this. How has anyone who likes the movies or books a problem with the dialog in the show? It's always been lyrical and corny.
> I don't really see why people dislike it so much
Fanboyism. Fashion.
Its a pretty good show. Actually I consider each episode a movie. The story is rich. Comprised of interwoven stories that coherently connect to each other.
I would go as far to say that I like it better than the last 2 books of Lotr trilogy, where the story and setting turns to a neverending beautification of monarchy, leaving behind the gripping story of a band of misfits fighting against great evil and difficulties until the end of the fellowship of the ring.
That's because Tolkien was a monarchist, of course. But that does not help anything.
One thing which I thought was hilarious was a scene with an elf walking toward a village. He knows the village is there; it’s his destination. He’s been walking toward it for the better part of a day. Then he crests a hill and is like “oh shit the village is on fire what happened here?”
Contrast this with Legolas who would often peer into the distance and then announce how many orcs there were in a raiding party far enough away that the others couldn’t even see them.
That’s actually one of my biggest problems with this show. I don’t get the sense that the elves are a different species with different abilities and a different type of soul. Especially in the opening scene of episode one, when you see a bunch of elf children acting like stereotypical human bullies.
I also really, really hate that halflings seem like they’re going to play a major role in world events. The shock value to the mythology of LotR was that the hobbits up until that point in history had been completely inconsequential. It kind of ruins the stories of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry if this is actually the second time that hobbits have shaped history.
It just feels like they are relying on the names and visual effects and the set dressing to carry the show, while they cram in a generic fantasy plot.
I can't help but agree with this. I admit I made the mistake of not approaching it like expensive fan-fiction; I actually expected that they'd stick roughly to the facts of the Appendix they supposedly based it on. So I'm already frustrated that they're making a mess of that.
And clearly they love their plot more than their characters, dragging the characters by their hair to wherever the plot needs them to be, whether it makes sense or not. And even that could have been acceptable if at least that plot was something good, but I still don't see it. A lot of stuff feels like it should be going somewhere, but after 4 episodes, it's still not clear where it's supposed to be going, except towards those heavily foreshadowed disasters: Sauron's return, the fall of Numenor, and it looks like they're also going to throw Durin's Bane into the mix. 4000 years early.
It all looks great. I love how the Harfoots and the Orcs, Numenor and their ships, as well as the dwarfs, look. And there are some great, lovely, inspired scenes. But it's starting to look like it's all superficial. Everything is haphazardly taped together by awkward plot twists.
I really wanted to love this show. I still do. But they're making it very hard.
It is written at the level of a daytime soap. Plot is full of holes. Characters are shielded by unbelievable plot armor. Acting is wooden.
Still attracts a dedicated audience just like daytime soaps. Notice that the people who like the show don't really address the issues covered in the article. They don't care.
I do care and it is almost painful to watch.
How does the creature not understand the question of their name but understand the question of where they are from? Oops?
Why did the orcs return the elf's bow and arrow? How else will the elf rescue the boy.
Who swims with a full gown? Gotta
keep it PG-13.
How can an elf who lives hundreds of years not learn any diplomacy? How the fuck would I know?
How can the orcs chase the boy out into the sun without any effects yet later burn in the sun? How did it become dark as night yet become sunny a short time later? Gotta reuse the orc sunlight device to let him escape.
A wheelbarrow of food is enough to feed how many people? Have they invented the horse drawn carriage?
BTW, where are the horses or horse like animals?
If you flee to a tower, you must have a plan for defense? Do you?
Does the actress playing Galadriel have any emotion other than anger and that freeze frame uncanny valley smile?
How did Galadriel get to the king again? One would think that her escaping once would result in many more guards to prevent a second escape.
750M$ dollars and the best they can come up with is Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles cringe fight scene choreography.
Also those "sad dramatic slow motion death scenes" of those elf character dying were peak stupidity: we don't even care about them since they had 30 seconds of screen time and you give us slow motion sad dramatic scenes as if Frodo himself would deserve on his hypotethical death...
What I find more inexplicable is how many people actually enjoy the show. Even if one of the biggest fictional universes where not attached to it, the writing and details absolutely ruin the show for me.
At times, the characters seem to give up any logical thinking, relying entirely on "feelings". Because Archimedes never existed in Middle Earth, a character believes for instance stones don't float because they don't "look towards the light". Another character believes that someone that literally fell from the sky in a fireball is important simple because "they have a feeling".
I could go on about how many scenes look like stock footage, but now I'm more curious as to how all these details don't affects how some viewers take it all in. I know each example individually seems minor, but the sum of 100 minor absurdities is a huge absurdity.
Apparently a thing that is frequently done in TV shows nowadays is "scrapbooking": shooting a whole bunch of scenes for several different storylines, picking the ones they like or which test well, and editing those into a rough approximation of a single story. Rumor has it some of the Disney+ Marvel and Star Wars series are made this way. I can't say I've heard anything about Rings of Power, but scrapbooking does appear to be a cause if the aggressive badness in streaming shows today, especially "triple A" major studio productions that are bad.
Writers rooms have fallen off a cliff. Look back at the cinema of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Dialogue, character arcs, stories, even plot hole ridden films were competently written. A lot of it still holds up.
A majority of the stuff we are seeing these past 10 years is really bottom of the barrel writing. Occasionally something great will come along like BR2049. But for the most part the writers rooms have been terrible. This is unsustainable and will eventually bottom out as poorly written movies and shows (I mean, “content”) continue to lose money.
I very much think that it knocks it out of the park compared to a LOT of other recent works in fantasy genre, including the Hobbit trilogy.
An error here and another there do not make terrible writing. There are various interwoven stories in the Rings of Power, each of them consistent within itself, creating a tapestry that easily makes you buy into the world. It requires much less suspension of belief compared to many other works. Including the Hobbit trilogy, again. And don't even mention recent Star Wars flops. That was bad writing.
Can you explain to me why the elf lady wanted a boat then actively refused to take the one she was offered?
Or why the orc leader suddenly left a prisoner go to do something which could have been done by his own army since forever?
This show is extremely sloppy. Most of the events seem to happen because they are convenient for the plot rather than organically. That’s the hallmark of poor writing.
I don’t think so. Lotr is pretty sound and even the eagles my doom thing was explained by Tolkien.
Part of the neatness of the world to me is how everything fits together. Dwarves don’t decide to randomly shave their beards. Elven kings don’t scheme against their subjects. Nothing happens randomly in lotr or even the hobbit book.
Literature is often polarizing. You see many literary novels that get a U-shaped rating distribution, with most readers either loving or hating a book. I think the best explanation for this is the distinction between plot-oriented and character-oriented readers/writers. Plot-oriented readers want a logical development of events and will tolerate shallow and interchangeable characters (as in most hard sci-fi). Character-oriented readers want development of personalities and relationships, and have less demand for structure (as in much fantasy). Perhaps the controversy over The Rings of Power is an example of this.
I would make the distinction "visuals" vs "plot and characters" in the case of rings of power. It undoubtably looks fantastic and for many that is enough for it to be good, regardless of the plot or characters.
If it's really going to be 5 seasons, why are they cramming everything into the first season? They could have had the first season be about the creation of the rings, Sauron seducing the elves while nobody is aware that he's back (except Galadriel, probably). Introduce Numenorians as this great nation across the sea with beautiful boats. Then do the big war with Sauron where the Numenorians come to the aid of the elves at the last minute (the events in the Appendix completely justify making this super tense and dramatic). Next season, show the Numenorians turn away from the elves, getting jealous of their immortality, have some dramatic events showing how their relationship sours. Then Ar-Parazon takes power, sails his massive fleet to confront Sauron, captures him, Sauron seduces the Numenorians leading to the fall of Numenor. Final season: the Last Alliance between Elendil and the elves.
Instead, they seem to be doing everything at once, leading to a very confused story. They're already foreshadowing events that shouldn't be happening for 2000 years, introducing characters that shouldn't be born for 2000 years. The story is jumping to the end before the rings of power even exist. It seems to be telling the story backwards.
I read all of Tolkien's books I could get my hands on as a teenager. That was decades ago but for whatever reason the show so far has reminded me of the books far more than LOTR and Hobbit movies ever did.
Agreed. I commented with more detail as well. I guess a lot of people expected a different show. But if you actually know the source material, it's a good depiction of that, IMO.
Its somehow comforting that in the age of statistics and AI making a great piece of art still seems to require the effort of a single mind slaving away with all its weird idiosyncracies and obsessions. To use a Tolkien analogy- if Amazon, one of the most powerful companies in the world, were capable of just buying a great show with money that would be like the lords of Gondor just marching into Mordor and fighting their way to Mt. Doom. As we know from the story the quiet effort of small people can have a huge affect on the world.
So far after episode 5 ive fell asleep 20x, surfed the web for oven mitts and called my ex wife to take me back. Thats how boring this series is. Horrible writing, dreadfully dragged on plot, characters are boring and all over the place. An epic fail and embarrassment to the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit trilogy's
I'm willing to give Amazon a lot of slack given who they are and what they're attempting to take on, as long as it's entertaining, i.e. I've set my expectations pretty low. The thing making it disappointing for me though, is that if they're going to dole it out at one hour a week, the episodes should have more in them. Or if the eps are individual slow burns, maybe drop the whole season at once so I can binge it. Apparently my attention span is too short.
Wow people are very judgmental these days, it's a show most are getting for free. Try to enjoy it and not nitpick details. I agree its not like The sandman or other better created shows but it's okay however a waste of money imo.
Amazon execs have no understanding of art/cinema. Don't expect much from the teams they organize.
People have every right to complain and criticize and they can do that as much they like. There's no penalty from the companies for doing that - at least not yet /s. Nowhere is written that we should mindlessly praise every form of entertainment they are serving us.
There are people who actually do love pointing out all sorts of details, technical issue, the quality of material or lack of it, the every single bit of "what's wrong with this thing". That's more entertaining for them than regular watching.
Besides, the critical opinions - even the strongly voiced ones also work for film/show/whatever advertising and popularity.
By far, my favorite example is the scene where Elrond challenges a mountain dwarf to a rock-splitting competition. As viewers (even ones unfamiliar with LOTR), we know the outcome of this contest. The only thing they need to show us are these two characters after the competition, breaking down their relationships as begrudging friends. Instead, we spend more than a minute-and-a-half watching a rock splitting montage. Completely pointless from a storyboarding and writing perspective, especially considering that the outcome doesn't circumvent our expectations.
My second favorite example is even dumber; the third episode has another pointless 90-second scene of Galadriel riding a horse and smiling in slow-motion. I'm not joking, the entire scene looks like one of those HDR demo shots you'd see on a TV at Best Buy.
The show is genuinely difficult to watch, but don't take my word for it. Watch the first episode for yourself and take a shot every time you audibly sigh, you'll never want to watch an Amazon original again.
Edit: links to both scenes below
- Elrond & Durin: https://youtu.be/KT6ldSEVHCU
- Galadriel Riding: https://youtu.be/4ZqMRAb3zKk