A billion dollar disappointment
BY JAMES WILLIAMSON
Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season one is a billion dollar disappointment. In this blog we look at why.
Many people - including myself, a Tolkien fan - were looking forward to Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. We were excited to see Tolkein’s world brought to the screen again. With Amazon budgets, gorgeous New Zealand locations, and JRR Tolkein’s mysterious second age to play with, what could go wrong?
After watching season one, the answer is: plenty.
Filming has begun on a second series to be aired in 2024. We can only hope that the show-runners learn from the many mistakes made in this first series.
An unrivalled opportunity
Budget estimates for The Rings of Power range from US$750 million to US$1 billion. The show is planned to run for five seasons. The show-runners are JD Payne and Patrick McKay. The series is filmed in New Zealand and the UK. Production companies are Amazon Studios (Prime Video streams the series) and New Line Cinema which produced Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Jackson had no hand in The Rings of Power, and it shows).
Unusually, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was personally involved with the negotiations. Bezos gave Amazon Studios a mandate to develop a fantasy series comparable to Game of Thrones in scope. Bezos is a personal fan of The Lord of the Rings, by the way.
To buy the rights, Amazon’s first pitch to the Tolkein Estate failed. Subsequent pitches succeeded by way of a new bid and the promise of creative input. Amazon reportedly paid US$250 million for the global rights, outbidding Netflix by tens of millions. Prime Video gave the series a multi-season commitment as part of the deal with the Tolkein Estate. Amazon announced in January 2020 that the first season would consist of eight episodes. Payne and McKay felt the title should "live on the spine of a book next to J.R.R. Tolkien's other classics". Amazon’s directive was that this series must look flawless, like a box office hit drawing $100 million in its first weekend. That’s a lot of promise and even more hype.
Faithful adaptation or lore-less?
In buying the TV rights, Amazon only had access to The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and The Hobbit. The Rings of Power, set as mentioned in Tolkein’s second age, is covered in more detail in The Silmarillion (first and second ages), Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle Earth. But Payne and McKay did not obtain the rights to these books. The Rings of Power writers therefore had to draw from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, in certain chapters, and songs. They were free to add characters or details and worked with the Tolkein Estate and Tolkien lore experts to ensure these were still ‘Tolkienian’. Simon Tolkien, a novelist and the grandson of JRR Tolkien, consulted on the series, and interestingly, helped develop its story and character arcs.
Payne and McKay have disagreed with critics that The Rings of Power is only vaguely connected to Tolkien's writings. McKay says it was "deeply, deeply connected". The series end credits has a disclaimer that some elements are "inspired by, though not contained in, the original source material".
Over-promise, under-deliver
The Rings of Power first screened on 2 September this year and the last episode of season one screened on 14 October. Sneak previews bubbled up before that. These enticing morsels promised that the series might live up to the hype, maybe even match Jackson’s Oscar-winning films made more than 20 years ago (when Netscape was used for dial-up internet).
This is The Rings of Power official trailer:
Now the dust has settled on the show, now we’ve watched the series not just the trailer, what are we to make of it? Has it over-promised and under-delivered or has it matched its promise? Do we like, maybe love, key LOTR characters and Middle Earth legends like Galadriel and Elrond? Do we like new characters that are not in Tolkein’s books (and appendices)? Do we love the spectacle, the grandeur, the sadness and loss, the themes of death and deathlessness, the homeliness, the history, the scope, the sense of some lost time in our history rather than just ‘fantasy’ which Tolkein masterfully created in his legendarium?
Sadly, I, and many others, have been left dreadfully disappointed. The second age of Tolkein’s world is about the alliance of elves and men, the rise and fall of a great island kingdom of men called Numenor, the forging of the rings of power and the ‘one ring’, the rise and fall of Sauron in a fair human form, and the challenge of the might of Numenor to the gods in deathless, forbidden Valinor (the western land of gods and elves that Frodo and others sailed to for healing, in LOTR).
The Rings of Power season one is about something else. I’m just not sure what.
What went wrong in season one?
Mostly, the writing. The key problems lie in the coherence, validity, and flow of the writing. Scenes do not match up. Characters are badly written, especially Galadriel who is the main character. Tolkein lore is used clumsily, leveraged at the wrong time and place and ignored for made-up material that doesn’t make sense at best and at worst is simply silly. The narrative does not gel over the series. Some scenes are good but far too many are bad. Worse, a cardinal sin: this story, told over more than eight hours, is plodding and often boring.
A quality, industry-standard screenplay is the foundation of any production that even great acting cannot overcome. In The Rings of Power, the acting is too often poor. Galadriel’s character is written badly and often acted flatly. The elves, immortal beings who still have power in the second age, appear like carnival props; hammy, wandering about from scene to scene with no real gravitas or direction. Other characters, like ‘maybe-Gandalf’, are just weird, under-developed, under- or over-acted, and wrongly placed.
The Harfoots (we can’t call them hobbits) are plain annoying and often nasty. Inversely, the Numenorians - key second age players like Elendil and Isildur - have slim, insubstantial roles. One exception is a new character called Adar who’s an ‘evil’ elf, twisted and tortured by Morgoth (major god and dark lord of the first age). Adar is an interesting character, the acting is strong, but the writing lets him down and fails to put him in context to the broader, weak, narrative. Sauron is ‘revealed’ (he’s Halbrand - ta-da!) in episode. 8. His acting is good, overall, but too often let down by poor dialogue. The dwarves, especially Durin senior and junior, are interesting and well acted. This is where the show has done a good job. Yet once again they’re let down by absurd plotting like the Mithril ‘elf cancer’ storyline which is wrong, nonsensical, and certainly not in the lore.
What else went wrong? Plenty, again. The CGI is okay, good in parts. But the details are not attended to as they were with great care in LOTR: armour, swords, extras (copy/pasted no less), ships and men, sterile sets, stolen quotes (from LOTR), strange hairstyles (elves have long hair not shorter ‘salon’ hair), and errors in time, place, distance, and geography. Mount Doom was not created by water, it was always there; Sauron corrupted the land around it.
Probably the worst part is that the detail and context of Tolkein’s beautiful themes are left out or ‘modernised’ in The Rings of Power for no reason other than to give a nod to woke hipness. This is a stunt in search of meaning.
What needs to go right?
Most things, unfortunately. If Bezos is really a Tolkein fan, he’ll ensure that the show’s course gets corrected in a big way. Bottom line? The Rings of Power needs a serious reboot for seasons 2-5. I’m sure that even diehard Tolkein fans and ‘sticklers’ just want to see a fantastic telling of the second age with its wonderful themes, spectacle, drama, and nuance. For non-fans, a grand fantasy epic that makes sense, is strongly acted, coherent, dramatic, and well-paced would be appreciated.
This first series is a terrible disappointment because a great opportunity has been missed. At US$60 million per episode, I’m sure that Mr Bezos will also be disappointed, if only because there’s just too much quality TV these days to ignore the bad writing, inconsistencies and lazy inattention to lore and detail that The Rings or Power dished up in season one.
I’ll watch the whole series because I want to see the second age realised in a brilliant, imaginative, extraordinary way. Tolkein did not write at length about this era, which is why it’s an opportunity that’s too good to disappoint.
After all, we don’t want to see this in 2024! (note - this is not The Rings of Power).
Note: The opinions in this blog are my own. Some facts referenced from Wikipedia.
