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Review: The War of the Rohirrim

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Roughly half of The War of the Rohirrim‘s best decisions surface in its first scene. The opening gorgeously pans from a map of Middle-earth to its 3D details to a photorealistic shot of the Misty Mountains before being disrupted by a majestic eastle. The appearance of Héra establishes Shieldmaiden of Rohan as a tradition rather than a one-off title, permitting Éowyn (whose reprisal by Mirando Otto is immensely welcome) to belong to a larger history. Éowyn’s voiceover narration establishing that no songs have been written about Héra both builds a tragedy into her story and provides a hefty critique of Tolkien, who only identifies the character as “Helm’s daughter” in Appendix A.

The War of the Rohirrim establishes itself as a minor tale in the Legendarium, a trend Tolkien pioneered long before every attenuated nerd franchise latched onto it. And The War of the Rohirrim somewhat effectively utilizes the ambiguities of the three-page story from The Lord of the Rings by focusing on an unnamed character who’s tragically permitted to fall out of history. The Lord of the Rings, with Tolkien’s use of deliberate gaps and ambiguity in the historical record, is suited to the Rogue One approach. With Rohan, a crucial but less chartered territory of Middle-earth, that approach is a solidly logical idea.

Sadly, probably less than half of The War of the Rohirrim serves that end half as well as it deserves. The characters, while well-portrayed by their voice actors, are reducible to a handful of traits that rarely break out of two-dimensionality. Héra is Éowyn minus the everything, Helm’s mournful relationship with patrilineality is woefully underdeveloped, and Wulf is little more than a reactive revenge monster. At two hours and 14 minutes, The War of the Rohirrim has plenty of time to take its characters to interesting places. Instead we really needed to faff about with a Watcher in the Water eating a mûmak in Fangorn.

There are solid moments of pathos — a couple of character deaths bring some genuinely fantastic imagery. And a second act subplot featuring Helm leads the movie on a fun (if sadly aborted) detour into the numinous. But on the whole, this feels more like an elevated animated Superman movie than a worthy entry in the Legendarium. The hobbits’ description of Helm’s Deep’s founding in The Red Book of Westmarch probably packed more of a punch.

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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: 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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The Rings of Power: Adar Review

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In its second week, The Rings of Power seems to settle into whatever flavor of awful it’s fucked to be. It’s a 69-minute slog that infuriatingly avoids being “nice,” dragging along on the assumption that elves and hobbits are inherently dramatically compelling, and accidentally breaking into three-minute spurts of interesting stuff. Wherever this is going, it highlights Tolkien’s flaws and manages to make them worse. “Adar” is probably marginally more competent television than “A Shadow of the Past,” but it is sinfully ugly, and possibly the single most unpleasant episode of television I’ve ever seen.

Seriously, did this need to be over an hour long? And what is the point of it? Nori and her family are slightly-but-not-totally estranged from the Harfoots, non-Ian McKellen has said a couple words, Arondir begins and ends the episode in an orc prison camp (of which more below), Elendil and his family are introduced and apparently matter because fans will recognize them, and Galadriel and Halbrand… make some babysteps towards a plot, so minimal kudos there. But on the whole, this episode is aggressively pointless and lacking in events. Even its title character, who is mentioned once and appears at the end, has no role whatsoever in the episode. I repeat my mother’s question: who the actual fuck is this for?

I can hardly claim to be a typical Middle-earth fan. No such person would write something as absurd and eccentric as Nowhere and Back Again. But when The Rings of Power puts Númenor and Ar-Pharazôn onscreen, and even I, who knows their significance in Middle-earth, am bored shitless, something has gone very wrong. There are moments of promise: Lloyd Owen brings a tragic, kindly gravitas to Elendil, and Númenor’s immediate moral ambiguity avoids traps this show might easily have fallen into. But the whole enterprise is so drab to look at (Alan Lee’s absence is glaring) and its realization of Númenor’s problems are downright malicious. Númenor isn’t bad because it’s an avaricious ethno-state: it’s bad because its working class is a bunch of murderous thugs, leading to a grotesque out-of-place mugging scene where Halbrand, almost the show’s most interesting character, graphically maims and kills several people. It’s appallingly, unwatchably bad, and cruel for no conceivable aesthetic reason.

Halbrand is particularly infuriating here. Starting out as a vagabond who saves Galadriel’s life out of pity for a stranger, his presence as a homeless descendant of Morgoth’s followers almost makes him a break from the Hobbit/Dúnedan/Sinda mold Middle-earth keeps clinging to. For a little while, Halbrand is a counterweight to Galadriel, a normal personal who’s compelling for his interiority rather than anything mythological significance. And then, quelle surprise, Galadriel figures out that Halbrand is a pseudo-Aragorn lost king. This show can’t even rip off Peter Jackson right.

Where do you go with this? Everyone onscreen is stumbling around in boots they have no reasonable chance of filling. Morfydd Clark remains the show’s best paltry hope by merit of doing things Cate Blanchett wouldn’t have done.…

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The Rings of Power: The Shadow of the Past & Adrift Review

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There are margins of error for how bad Jeff Bezos’ The Silmarillion could be. Those margins widen when you factor in the two unknown Mormon showrunners from McLean, Virginia, the most corrupt city in Northern Virginia. The Rings of Power is further hampered by its need to recall the audience’s memories of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings while satisfying the Tolkien Estate by keeping the show self-contained. And then there’s the fact that Amazon essentially bankrupted its corporate client state New Zealand to produce this show. Everything about The Rings of Power’s conception is self-evidently evil. The question is what it does with that evil.

Remarkably, The Rings of Power just about keeps its damning circumstances at bay, if not quite escaping them. It broadly understands the assignment: do the Second Age for TV while connecting it to The Lord of the Rings. As a prequel, the show is a mixed success, utilizing recognizable iconography while broaching mythological ideas that Jackson’s (in my opinion, justifiably) protracted films lacked space for. It preserves The Silmarillion’s sense of the sublime and takes advantage of the Second Age’s relatively sparse material by filling in blank spaces. The series works to reconcile Jackson’s aesthetics with Tolkien’s mythology, trying to stay on the right side of everyone involved.

The problem is that this appears to be The Rings of Power’s main occupation. It studiously accomplishes the bare minimum, throwing hobbits and elves at the audience with a mild semblance of plot structure and nebulous sense of theming. Its desperation to recall the Jackson movies reminds me of The Force Awakens, but without that movie’s clarity of purpose. The first episode, “The Shadow of the Past,” hops from setpiece to setpiece, throwing Galadriel fighting a cave troll Legolas-style and then quaint little “Oirish” hobbits bantering about food and adventures with hardly a coherent theme to be found. It slogs its way through sixty minutes with a weirdly loose hand on tone, trying to open with a mythological prologue that awkwardly segues into Galadriel’s childhood bullying.

“The Shadow of the Past” is weirdly unable to grasp how to portray its characters, presenting them as tropes and icons before wrestling with any kind of interiority. Elrond (whose portrayal by young Ned Stark is a steep decline from Hugo Weaving) is only recognizable through his name, and lacks few distinguishing characteristics beyond that. Individual performances shine — Lenny Henry as a hobbit is casting genius, while Morfydd Clark plays a thoroughly convincing young Galadriel that recalls Cate Blanchett without imitating her. But on the whole, characters are reduced to ciphers, having less to do with dramatic arcs than “hey, remember this character?”

 The exception is Galadriel. Clark is brilliant, elevating her material, which sometimes turns her into “female Legolas” in a way that flatters Tauriel. Galadriel was always one of The Lord of the Rings’ most compellingly understated characters, serving penance for her disobedience to the Valar. Her “instead of a dark lord, you would have a queen” monologue is a virtuous character’s admission of profound rage and envy (and makes for my favorite chapter in The Lord of the Rings).…

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