The Spruce Goose of the streaming era has arrived, Amazon Prime's concisely titled The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. To-day, worldwide--well, in English speaking countries--everyone is marvelling that something so bland and unimaginative could be so expensive. Maybe it's kind of a flex for Jeff Bezos. Thousands of years from now, maybe someone will find this series and wonder just who this Ozymandias was. But if I could take a moment to find the silver lining here, it's to point out that the works of one man, on which he toiled out of love and passion, will always be remembered better than the billion dollar fart made in its shadow.
Another silver lining is that once again something has made clear which critics can be bought, which critics are partisan zealots, and which ones are honest viewers of the material. I'm not here to complain about the racially diverse casting. In fact, the only performance I thought was interesting at all was Porto Rican actor Ismael Cruz Cordova as the elf Arondir.
He doesn't have a lot of dialogue but he's capable of conveying a lot with facial expressions and gestures. These are qualities I really wish were possessed by Morfydd Clark, the actress who plays Galadriel, more or less the series lead. No-one apart from Cruz Cordova gives an interesting performance but Clark's one note charge, blundering through weakly written material, is surely the black hole at the centre of this shallow galaxy.
The diverse casting, interestingly, does not seem to be random. This may explain why the cast excludes Asians, though why there are no Irish actors among the Harfoots speaking with Irish accents is a mystery. It becomes clear when Arondir is established as a kind of helpful government official assigned to protect a village of white hillbillies who throw racial epithets his way.
These hillbilles, we're told, were once staunch allies of Morgoth. I wonder if the writers thought of this as an allegory for Barack Obama graciously governing formerly Confederate states. All the other elves we meet are white; the council that refuses to allow Galadriel to continue hunting Sauron are all smug white men.
So, yeah, the diverse casting certainly doesn't seem to be random.
Why don't they want Galadriel to continue hunting Sauron? We know they're wrong, she knows they're wrong. Why do they think they're right? The show never tells us. This is one of the fundamental problems in the story. The Lord of the Rings featured characters investigating, finding clues, studying ancient texts, so you start to get an impression of whether or not someone is reasonable to have an opinion. The Rings of Power, for all its characters, feels very thin, stretched out, like butter scraped over--yeah, it feels like that. Again and again, we're told people have motives but it's not clear as to why.
The second episode is a little better. Written by Gennifer Hutchison, one of my favourite writers from Better Call Saul, she takes the time to give characters some dialogue that feels genuine. The relationship between Durin and Elrond and between the Harfoot girls start to feel like real people. It's still held back by the acting and weak world building, though. And there's certainly no excuse for weak world building here.
I can't even really praise the visuals. They're based on the same John Howe and Alan Lee art as the Peter Jackson films without bringing anything new to the table. The compositions are never better than pleasantly adequate and the cgi fight scenes are as bad as, if not worse than, Legolas sliding down the Mumakil in Peter Jackson's movie.
With Amazon having lashed itself to the mast of this ship, I suppose they have to continue making the show. Maybe it'll get better. I find it difficult to imagine because the money spent seems to have been without any particular consideration for the audience. This madness may continue to play out as it is to an ever smaller group of people until few people on either side care about what the other is doing.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The Mighty Rings: Rings of the Lord: Ring Lord of Strength: Ring-a-Ding-Ding is available on Amazon Prime.
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