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the rings of power

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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Of The Rings of Power and Amazon Being Fucking Evil

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Pausing Nowhere and Back Again this week for some words on this Amazon thing. We’ll be back with Lake-town next week.

Well, that was inevitable, even if knowing what to call a show is apparently a spoiler these days. It’s a less Tolkienesque title than Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, but it scans, even if the existence of a series title with a subtitle is a moral atrocity. 

As The Rings of Power is a prequel show, the title indicates a focus on the Three, Seven, and Nine rings. Showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay (let’s hope they won’t be the next Benioff and Weiss) give the impression The Rings of Power will cover the Second Age, from “the forging of the rings, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the epic tale of Númenor, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.” Akallabêth stans rejoice, I suppose.

The period Payne and McKay describes lasts anywhere from 1941 to 2231 to 3409 years, depending on where The Rings of Power starts. That could be the founding of Númenor, Sauron’s time in Eregion, or the Rings of Power’s creation. It seems unlikely  that the series would depict any events that happen after the siege of Barad-dûr or Isildur’s death.

The Rings of Power apparently sticks to Tolkien’s overarching story and filling in the blanks, per the Tolkien Estate’s guidelines. It has unprecedented licensing to adapt portions of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, so the Tolkien Estate is clearly pleased with the series. This raises some concerns, as it may mean The Rings of Power is more traditionalist than its predecessors, Peter Jackson’s double-trilogy. At the same time, adapting Tolkien’s conservative mythology in the tedious Marvel Cinematic Universe era should be an interestingly strange sight.

I’m almost wholly unfamiliar with the show’s creative team, so I can’t predict their approach to Middle-earth. The job they’ve inherited, however, is fascinating. They have to work with Tolkien’s plots (outlines, really), which span millennia and contain scarce details. This will give the team ample room to concoct new stories within Tolkien’s framework. I wonder if each season will cover a particular era. Certainly there will have to be an almost anthology-like approach to it: characters will inevitably die between seasons. Maybe we’ll get The Lord of the Rings as True Detective. There are worse ideas than “Nic Pizzolatto writes elves.”

If the tone of this piece can accurately be called “cold,” there are a couple reasons for that. The rampant spoilerphobia of contemporary pop culture is a killer on enthusiasm. Before I watch a series or a movie, I like to know something of its story. As of now, we know basically nothing about The Rings of Power‘s creative approach. I’m not going to go ga-ga over this stuff unless Amazon lets its creators show they have an interesting story to tell.

There’s also Amazon’s involvement. If you’re reading Eruditorum Press, or if you’ve paid any attention to the world these past few years, you know Amazon is one of the most evil and destructive organizations in the world.…

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