Eruditorum Press

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Christine Kelley

About Christine Kelley

Christine Kelley writes about art and politics. Currently her main project is Nowhere and Back Again, a psychogeography of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Her first project was the now semi-retired blog Dreams of Orgonon, a song-by-song study of Kate Bush. Support Christine on Patreon.

Posts by Christine Kelley:

Doomed to Die Review

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maybe not. But also, what the fuck?

To Payne & McKay’s credit, they’re finding new ways to fuck this up. Instead of mangling a version of the show that wasn’t working anyway, they’re juxtaposing the best parts of The Rings of Power with… weirdly mean-spirited fridgings? Elrond/Galadriel incest? The A-plots of about five different episodes? There was a good 40% of this episode that worked, and the rest of it felt like a P&M script.

Celebrimbor is the part that works. Annatar keeping Celebrimbor in a time prison, where he forges rings as Eregion burns, is glorious, taking one of Tolkien’s most dramatic stories and injecting it with fresh human emotion. The scene where Sauron tells Celebrimbor about being tortured by Morgoth is the single best bit of writing of this show’s two seasons (Charlie Vickers starts coming to life when he gets to be a sneering villain). And Celebrimbor having to lose a part of his body to save his soul forms a nice parallel with Frodo and Maedhros. That part of the episode is genuinely phenomenal and tragic, everything you’d want from a filmed Silmarillion.

The rest of the episode is… so, what the fuck? We’re dealing with some George R. R. Martin-style plotting, where we’re constantly groping for new bits of plot. Tonally, we’re doing some weird stuff, and putting dramatic emphasis on bizarre things (the horse? the lady elf archer getting shot to death?). Galadriel continues to be The Rings of Power‘s Thirteenth Doctor, getting lectured at while breathlessly intoning words of motivation to men in despair. It’s not that Tolkien was innocent of making women the support systems of men, but like, Éowyn and the Witch-king this ain’t.

There’s not a whole lot to say here. It’s Part 1 of the finale. Part 2 is the episode where we get to have opinions. But in the meantime, we’re stuck waiting around to see just how badly P&M will fuck this up. …

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Where Is He? Review

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Like not-Gandalf in “Where Is He?”, The Rings of Power faces a crossroads. Pre-season finales have a tricky part to play. They need to set the stage for the ending, synopsizing the season to date and making an argument for how it should end. By that standard, “Where Is He?” is a shining success that capitalizes on all the most compelling parts of The Rings of Power‘s second season.

Perversely, this makes me even more concerned about the finale. We haven’t seen a Payne & McKay script since Season 1’s final episode, which was… I think they revealed Galadriel’s squeeze was Sauron? Maybe Celebrimbor forged the Three Rings? They’ve gained some competence since then. Season 2 has proved they know how to staff a writers’ room. The season’s good episodes exist because P&M allowed them to. To deny their role in the better episodes of this season would be as disingenuous as saying that Seinfeld only worked because of Larry David. Do I trust these guys to land a season finale? After last time, basically no, but for the first time, I’m actively hoping — perhaps futilely — they don’t fail instead of surrendering to the seemingly inevitable.

Not that “Where Is He?” is a masterpiece. Galadriel’s role in the episode (and most of the season) is to get lectured at by Adar and other male characters. She gets leered at for the entire episode, making few decisions except spilling her guts to Adar and unwittingly helping him to besiege Eregion. The fascist dweebs whining about diversity should be assuaged by this move, which outdoes Tolkien on the reactionary front.

The series’ usual faults are present. Charlie Vickers remains positively ligneous as Annatar, even as the scripts handle his character pretty well. The not-Gandalf and Harfoot subplots lack any momentum (The Rings of Power‘s pacing has only improved since Season 1 by dint of things actually happening this season). The Stoors evoke (probably on purpose) the quasi-Aboriginal children from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in a racially uncomfortable way. And not-Gandalf getting the Dagobah treatment from Tom Bombadil is a downright grating piece of Hero’s Journey-ism that contributes nothing to the season’s saga of complicity, guilt, and sundered families (I yelled at my TV when I heard Tom Bombadil say “many that live deserve death”).

But once again, these flaws are mostly frustrating because the meat of the episode is so solid. Sanaa Hamri is TROP‘s best director to date, creating drama with her shot choices that aren’t there in the script. An aerial shot of Númenor that directly parallels the island with Minas Tirith is downright jaw-dropping, as is the night-to-day rotating shot of Sauron in Eregion. Hamri even draws out some tension in the not-Gandalf/Bombadil scenes with a slightly unnerving low angle. And the Jaws homage on the shores of Númenor rivals anything Peter Jackson ever shot.

The rest of the episode is fairly excellent. Celebrimbor takes an Othello-like turn as his Iago Annatar coerces him into creating the H-Rings, torn apart by guilt and gaslighting.…

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Halls of Stone Review

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“Here, we bring the sun to us. At last, it is daybreak once more in our mountain!”

In its own way, The Rings of Power perfectly demonstrates Tolkien’s contention that all good things can be used for evil purposes. The show has some strong writers turning in good scripts and great scenes. A handful of actors — particularly Charles Edwards, Owain Arthur, and Lloyd Owen — routinely give strong performances. The second season has even had moments that elevate the source material. On weeks like this, it’s even almost good. But the show’s flaws are so gaping that even the light of Ëarendil can’t lead it out.

Perhaps the show’s biggest onscreen problem — aside from its aesthetic flaws — is Sauron. Charlie Vickers has the range of a two-by-four, walking through each scene with the same vacant facial expression that somebody on the set has mistaken for ambiguity. You could argue that Sauron is pretty much a void himself, but the show wants us to believe that Annatar is a seductive, beautiful force. Vickers would be a problem if he played Isildur or even Arondir. The fact he’s playing the fucking Lord of the Rings is show-breaking.

And that’s a shame, because it means that this week Vickers is ruining one of this show’s two actually good scripts. Vickers isn’t making Annatar the warm, seductive, dangerous figure he’s supposed to be, but the character on the page is an excellent foil for Celebrimbor. Annatar forces Celebrimbor into what amounts to a stupor of guilt, forced to craft the Rings because he’s cut himself off from the outside world. It’s a damn good depiction of gaslighting, not least because somebody on the set was clearly gaslit into believing that Vickers can act.

The whole episode is dramatically united around moments of hope before the Fall, generally with fathers and sons having their relationships torn apart. The scene with Durin’s Door is quite good, making one of the great scenes of The Lord of the Rings even more tragic (a sign of the lost friendship between Dwarves and Elves). It’s good stuff dramatically. Visually, it has all the pitfalls this show tends to suffer from (weak directing, awful lighting), and that certainly prevents this from being a strong episode of TV. But let’s call it the second best episode of this probably doomed season.…

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Review: Eldest

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A week ago, I would have expected much worse from The Rings of Power than “slight structural mess.” I’m shocked the show has graduated to “collection of good scenes with some real gems in the mix.” If last week’s episode was an unexpected step in the right direction, “Eldest” stumbles off the trail a little bit before more or less getting back on track. I’m still not optimistic for the season finale, but seeing The Rings of Power embrace quality even for a minute is pretty unexpected.

After “The Eagle and the Sceptre” spent its runtime exploring how power changes families, “Eldest” goes smaller, focusing on the development of Tolkien’s characters before they became legends. The episode puts its characters in early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, essentially turning them into fantasy protagonists embarking on a quest. The strongest scenes are the ones with The Stranger and Tom Bombadil (and having Rory Kinnear play this role so soon after Men is funny). Letting not-Gandalf be a confused Istar in a post-regenerative haze figure out his purpose works better when Bombadil is leaning over his shoulder, instead of a couple of hobbits constantly asking “who is the Stranger?” Bombadil could easily be fanservice, especially in this show, but here he serves a thematic purpose, as the “Eldest” who shows not-Gandalf the nature of names and substance (“Who are you?” “Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer”). It’s a nice little rebuke to this show’s exhausting tendency towards guessing games about a character’s identity – or at least a redirection. We’re graduating from JJ Abramsesque puzzle boxes to Steven Moffat-ish games.

Sadly, there’s still fanservice. Galadriel and Elrond’s encounter with the Barrow-wights adds fuck all to the episode, doing little other than extending the runtime and homaging one of the least interesting chapters of The Lord of the Rings. The whole sequence fucks the episode’s pacing. While things are finally starting to happen in this show, fewer things are happening this week than last. That would be fine, but four episodes into an eight-episode season, it constitutes a massive pacing problem.

There are other nice bits. Galadriel talking about her experience of Nenya actually lets us understand what the Three Rings do. The encounter with the Stoors is funny, and shows that tyrannical matriarchs are a hereditary problem in their tribe long before Sméagol’s grandmother comes along. And it’s always good to see some Ents. This episode isn’t great, but I’m shocked it doesn’t suck either.…

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Review: The Eagle and the Sceptre

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Shit. I liked it.

That was a nicely done hour of television about how the lure of power thwarts family relationships and uses good intentions for evil ends. It’s the best original work to come out of the Legendarium in 12 years. Did The Rings of Power always have the capacity to do an episode like this? I’m not sure, but a Hannibal writer sure was able to pull this off.

Perhaps the main thing this did right was focusing on the show’s more interesting plot threads. We’re finally back to the Númenóreans, who provide some really strong drama. The scenes with Isildur are genuinely moving, showing him as a guilt-ridden young man desperate to make a mark. It turns him from the corruptible scapegoat of The Fellowship of the Ring‘s prologue into a tragic figure.

Helen Shang makes similar overtures with Celebrimbor and the Durins. They fall prey to Annatar’s machinations because of their desire to make a mark or survive. The Durins want to save Khazad-dûm and preserve their way of life, so they provide Celebrimbor with materials to forge the Seven Dwarf-rings. Celebrimbor is willing to lie to Gil-galad to save his legacy. Characters who come across in appendix form as tools become sympathetic, even noble figures whose attempts to help are doomed by history.

There are lots of neat details too. Adar having an Orc family humanizes the Orcs in a way I would never have imagined last season. The Ents showing up is nice, and the Eagles get established as a crucial symbol for Númenor instead of the deus ex machina they’re (somewhat unfairly) tarnished as. This episodes positions the Rings of Power that characters try to use to redeem themselves. And it screws them all in an act of glorious tragedy. This episode reaches into the Legendarium, seizes on Tolkien’s themes, and finds new things to say about them.

I can’t believe it. Just this once, The Rings of Power has elevated The Lord of the Rings.…

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Review: Where the Stars Are Strange

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It’s praise with faint damnation to say that McKay and Payne’s best recent decision is to front-load this season with the show’s two best writers. Jason Cahill isn’t going to magically turn this into The Sopranos or Halt and Catch Fire, but having an actual writer at the helm helps this intangible sludge become somewhat potable for 62 minutes.

“Where the Stars Are Strange” spends its runtime dealing with the consequences of Season One. Galadriel’s past friendship with Halbrand/Sauron puts her at odds with Elrond and Gil-galad, Sauron entices Celebrimbor with the promise of greatness, and Durin and Disa rebuild their lives after their estrangement from Moria. There’s a semblance of thematic togetherness to this episode. It broadly deals with characters trying to redeem themselves after dire falls from grace. Sauron’s transformation into Annatar is thematically solid. And the tease at the end indicating that Celebrimbor will give the Rings of Power shows that this season might actually head somewhere. No doubt this show will find some way to drop the ball, but as television, this was fine.

More or less. The subplot about “The Stranger” and the Harfoots remains tedious. It’s completely separate from the rest of the show and continues to labor under the delusion that Gandalf not yet being Gandalf is interesting. And the bits where not-Saruman shows up are a bit of a waste of screentime. And we still get lines like “we may be able to crush two spiders with one boot.” This is the same old Rings of Power, with its lack of drama and pacing, but these next few episodes might fool some viewers into believing that they’re interesting.…

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Review: Elven Kings Under the Sky

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Sauron

J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay have learned nothing in the 685 days since the first season finale of The Rings of Power aired.

20 minutes into the 77-minute long premiere of Season 2, there’s nothing resembling a dramatic hook, no explanation of why we should be excited about a season of The Rings of Power, nothing resembling an argument for why The Lord of the Rings matters in 2024. We just get a lengthy flashback of Sauron making his way towards the events of last season. There’s no drama, no cutting aesthetics, no beauty that pierces like a sword or burns like cold iron.

Payne and McKay have completed the Marvelization of The Lord of the Rings. In 2024, The Lord of the Rings matters because it’s an established IP, and established IPs are exciting. Amazon wants you to be invested in this show because sometimes it’s recognizable, even if it takes great pains to avoid emulating the most visually appealing parts of the Peter Jackson movies. Nothing has tarnished Tolkien’s legacy quite like The Rings of Power since Peter Thiel or Camp Hobbit. But as long as Amazon can keeping profiting off Kiwis in a post-pandemic world, that’s probably fine.

Beyond that, I guess there are a few meaninglessly positive things you can say about this piece of shit. “Elven Kings Under the Sky” is the show’s best episode to date. At 77 minutes, it’s a slog where nothing happens, and it’s still failing to bring any of its plot threads together, but hey, McKay and Payne let Gennifer Hutchison write an episode, and she actually has a sense of drama, character, plot structure, and theme, not to mention any prior writing experience. The fact the showrunners only wrote the last two episodes of this season doesn’t exactly give you the idea they have any confidence in themselves, but hey, we got an actual writer this time around.

And for a minute, this pays off. The flashback section of the episode that explores Sauron’s past, while failing to make much sense at all (Sauron got killed by his minions, turned into Venom, and shapeshifted after eating an old woman?), at least gives the sense that Hutchison has read Tolkien. The coronation-turned-assassination, where the recast Adar (oh god) flips Sauron’s crown upside down to stab him, is the first compelling beat of visual storytelling this show has done, and feels like it could actually have come out of Tolkien. You can’t see it, because this show can’t do lighting worth a fuck, but there’s a compelling moment here amidst the intangible sludge.

Otherwise, I guess we’re just dealing with more of the same joyless, disconnected, boring gruel we got served two goddamn years ago. Sauron continues to lack any character, Galadriel is an insipid Éowyn remix, Elrond continues to be absolutely nothing whatsoever, and not-yet-Gandalf is still not yet Gandalf. The episode ends without any sense shit has actually happened. And despite the $9 trillion budget, this still looks like The CW produced that miniseries The Bible.…

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Review: Love Lies Bleeding

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It’s about time cis people got their own version of Bound.

Some films are carried by their premise. Love Lies Bleeding is about Kristen Stewart as a lesbian who turns her life upside down for a bisexual bodybuilder. That alone could sustain the movie. So it’s awfully nice of Rose Glass and company to make this an absolutely batshit, decadent, horny, drug-fucked neo-noir shitshow. Anything less would be, if not disappointing, then inferior to this version.

Stewart’s Lou is stuck in Reagan/Bush’s America, going out with the most annoying and only other lesbian in town, doing steroids, working a dead-end job at her mobster dad’s gym in Albuquerque, maybe the ugliest city in America (also her mobster dad is played by Ed fucking Harris). In the background, the Berlin Wall is falling and Poppy Bush is destroying a man’s life to show America that crack is bad. Fortunately for Lou, she’s only on steroids, which help her kick her cigarette habit.

Lou is caught in a hypermasculine dystopia; her only alternative is to be a fucking stupid dyke. Overwhelmingly influenced by a psychopathic mob dad and her severely abused sister, Lou is a chronic enabler, someone who survives by ceding control to others while unsuccessfully trying to have total control of her life. Introduce a mullet and some toe-sucking into the mix, and you have one of the most fleshed out characters in years.

Like all the minorities of the Eighties, Lou is an observer; a neo-noir protagonist for the dispossessed muffdiver, someone who watches people get jacked but doesn’t participate herself. She’s an orphan of neoliberalism, cast out of Reagan’s America, a refugee from the War on Drugs. Enough of my fucking similes; go watch this roided up flick.…

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Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

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Furiosa holds the tenuous position of following up Mad Max: Fury Road, the defining moment of the 2020s. It would be hard to hold failure against it, but at the same time, for Furious to be anything less than sheer brilliance would be devastating.

So why the fuck is Furiosa a better movie than Fury Road?

Perhaps part of it is how Fury Road makes itself half of Fury Road‘s story. After seeing Furiosa, you’ll see Fury Road as the second part of a greater story about Furiosa. This franchise is no longer about the titular Max – it’s the story of Joseph from Genesis, a tale of a woman stripped of the Eden in which she was born, gouging the landscape in search of something new. There’s no Manifest Destiny because there’s no destination; these last two movies are the story of a woman’s cries of revolt in an endless desert.

And Furiosa explores this angle more than its predecessor, which was ultimately a triumphalist thrill ride. That’s by no means a flaw of Fury Road — it’s why everybody rightly fell in love with it. But Furiosa challenges the myth of the badass – as my girlfriend Janet pointed out, it asks “oh, you want the myth of a heroic girlboss? Well, here’s that with all the fucked up monstrosity that entails.” Moreso than Fury Road, Fury Road explores the contours of the patriarchal societies of the Wasteland. It has much more to say about the experience of the oppressed than Fury Road did. Hell, it’s more Biblical and difficult than Fury Road got in its best moments.

I don’t want to say much more because you really should just go watch this movie. Furiosa allows its protagonist to be an operator of the great mechanism of history, the “fifth rider of the apocalypse.” It’s beautifully structured, explicitly invoking Eden at the beginning and the end, and transcends its predecessors. This is as good as blockbusters get.…

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Review: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has the unenviable task of following up Hollywood’s finest blockbuster series since The Lord of the Rings. The Caesar trilogy is a needlessly moving, unsettling, exquisite examination of humanity’s relationship with its replacement. All three movies seize on the best aspects of Franklin J. Schaffner’s masterpiece Planet of the Apes and expand on them. War for the Planet of the Apes is the greatest franchise blockbuster ever made, an argument I’ll advance another day. To follow the Caesar trilogy is like trying to follow Charlton Heston, Franklin J. Schaffner, and Rod Serling. That’s a challenge the last three Apes movies rose to, and a damn near insurmountable one for Kingdom.

To its credit (and slight detriment), Kingdom responds to this challenge by opting not to reach for the dramatic heights of its predecessors. It’s a quieter, less plot-driven affair than the previous movies, focusing instead on a series of detours through ape society and the remaining humans (intriguingly called “echoes” by the chimpanzees). That’s a welcome change of pace in a blockbuster scene as mindless as this one. Kingdom is a cut above the average Hollywood franchise movie, with a strong cast and solid directing from Wes Ball (who I am told directed something called The Maze Runner, which I will never see).

Tragically, “above average” is insufficient for a Planet of the Apes movie. Kingdom’s pacing, which could charitably be called leisurely instead of sluggish, is almost fatally poor. The movie spends its first act languishing with a tedious coming-of-age story about a chimpanzee named Noa (played admirably by Owen Teague). Noa is simply not an engaging protagonist: he reacts to lots of things, but makes few decisions and mostly serves as a viewpoint character for the audience. Given that the last Planet of the Apes film came out seven years ago, this almost makes sense. But Charlton Heston elevated a viewpoint character in the original Planet of the Apes. Andy Serkis’ Caesar didn’t have to be a viewpoint character to be immensely sympathetic. Does 2024 cinema have so little faith in audiences that it gives us a wide-eyed chimpanzee to hold our hands? Apparently, because we’ll waste an entire first act on the single least interesting character of the movie.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes instead soars when it takes the focus off Noa. As a chapter in the Apes saga, Kingdom remains in dialogue with the series’ themes of cyclical history, theocratic overreach, and the slow replacement of humanity. Set 300 years after Caesar’s death, Kingdom presents the ape world as divided by its reactions to Caesar. Noa’s clan ignores Caesar, orangutans preserve his legacy and wisdom, and an ape kingdom led by the bonobo Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) co-opts Caesar’s name for purposes of control. The second act is the best part of the movie because it explores this in depth. This vision of a halfway point between the Caesar trilogy and the original Apes is genuinely interesting.…

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