Moaning about Amazon's "Rings of Power"
Can somebody just do straight Tolkien, please?
First: if you’re a fan of Amazon’s “Rings of Power” series, stop reading right here. You’re not going to like what I have to say. I have some gripes with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, but overall I feel they deserved every award they got. The Hobbit films? Could have been two films max, in my opinion, and there was way too much shoehorning in of gratuitous action sequences that didn’t really serve the story, and the Tauriel/Kili romance thing is kind of odd. How much pressure was Jackson under to re-visit all the story beats from LotR, I wonder? The Hobbit was written for children and was never meant to be an action-packed epic with another “Beren & Luthien” bittersweet romance subplot…but I digress.
Tolkien’s works have withstood the test of time and become classics because they are tales that feel like they should have come down to us from the mists of time, like the Prose Edda or Beowulf or the Irish tales of the Sidhe. While The Hobbit started out as something to read to his children long before Middle Earth had fully coalesced for him, he wrote subsequent works to provide England with some engrossing folklore, and as a setting for the languages (three or more) that he had created as an intellectual hobby.
The “Rings of Power”, on the other hand, feels like a cash grab mishmash of cherry-picked elements from the appendices of “The Return of the King”. It’s cobbled together by very young writers with no understanding of Tolkien, no real life experience, and worst of all, no ability to even write a solid stand-alone new fantasy story with a veneer of Middle Earth set dressing.
For season two of RoP the guys at the “Exploring Tolkien” podcast are jumping on the grenade and watching each new episode as it airs, just like they did with season one, and doing in-depth reviews. They suffer so you don’t have to. I am totally on-board with Jonathan Watson’s lament, “All I want is for somebody to give me what Tolkien wrote! Is that so hard?” I understand that the RoP producers were only granted the rights to those RotK appendices, but there’s plenty there that somebody with even a basic understanding of Tolkien could have used to make a solid two or three seasons of content. Instead, we’re given pouty, petulent lead characters, like a Galadriel who in no way represents Tolkien’s wise “lady of light”, so beautifully portrayed by Cate Blanchet in the films.
We’re also force fed check-box diversity casting that defies all logic. I’m with the Exploring Tolkien guys on this. If you want to show “diversity” in Middle Earth, it’s there already. Give the cultures of the South and Far Harad a glorious Middle-Eastern vibe. Heck, make the Dwarves Asian-feeling instead of Scottish, that would be interesting. Every region and culture could have a lovely ethnicity of its own. What we get instead is crazy casting for every people of Middle Earth, which makes no sense, especially with the Elves who are specifically described by Tolkien as pale-skinned and “fair” (whether peaches and cream blond or winter white with black hair).
Even better (worse?), the writers of this show fail even at their own DEI rules, because every mover and shaker among the elves is white. The lead “Harfoots” (aka “proto-Hobbits” aka Dirty Little Sociopaths) are all white. Shape-shifting Halbrand/Sauron? White. King of Numenor? White. Way to go. You couldn’t even follow your own woke rules.
Do yourself a favor and just don’t waste your time. There are some good shows and films to watch that will actually grow your creative garden and not make you want to throw something heavy at your TV.
Bonus gripe: the above image is of (supposedly) the Queen of Numenor (who should be white, because I guess Tolkien was racist or something). I’m sure that actress is a lovely person and knows her job…but I hate 90% of everything in this picture, including the fact that she has a somewhat less than athletic physique. I like the sword hilt design. Very pretty. Everything else? If you’re going to put gold paint on velvet (probably velour in this case), at least do it right. It should look like embroidery on-camera, not somebody’s shabby chic sofa throw. Then there’s the ill-fitting plastic armor (no bezigues to protect your armpits, just painted Lycra “under Armor” “not a gambeson”), no gauntlets, bizarre micro-mail skirt (try riding in that), no gorget to protect the neck, and a typical actress who doesn’t know how to ride, plow-reigning an obviously patient draft horse and yanking on its face. The image doesn’t show her feet, but I’ll bet they’re jammed toes-down into the stirrups.
I didn't even know this was still going on.
Yes, but also, I would watch a David Attenborough/ Rick Steves mocumentary series of The Silmarillion.