The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Post by **Leisher** » Mon Sep 05, 2022 4:39 pm

True?

Post by **GORDON** » Mon Sep 05, 2022 4:48 pm

The trend I'm seeing is that in order to be "inclusive," they make all the males dumb, and all the straight white males evil.

Post by **TheCatt** » Mon Sep 05, 2022 5:48 pm

GORDON wrote: ↑Mon Sep 05, 2022 4:48 pm The trend I'm seeing is that in order to be "inclusive," they make all the males dumb

Welcome to dads in sitcoms for the past 50 years.

Post by **GORDON** » Mon Sep 05, 2022 8:09 pm

Screenshot 2022-09-05 200835.jpg

Post by **Troy** » Mon Sep 05, 2022 8:18 pm

This show totally sucks. It's not the wokeness. There is just a stark difference in quality between it and the new Game of Thrones. It's just too campy? Lame? A bunch of things.

Post by **GORDON** » Mon Sep 05, 2022 8:58 pm

Something I noticed in Amazon's "Wheel of Time" were production values.

In Game of Thrones, everything is dirty... it's a lived-in, medieval world and it looks like those walls are centuries old.

In WoT, it looks like the sets were built last week and they scattered straw here and there. I wondered if Amazons LORD OF THE RINGS would have the same problem.

Post by **Leisher** » Wed Sep 14, 2022 4:02 pm

Wut?

Post by **TheCatt** » Wed Sep 14, 2022 4:35 pm

Someone's form of satire...

Post by **GORDON** » Wed Sep 14, 2022 7:16 pm

Nah it's been decided already that if it fails, it's because of racists.

Post by **GORDON** » Sat Oct 15, 2022 12:56 pm

Season 1 is done.

Being Tolkien-adjacent, one needs to address the language. Tolkien was a master, if not The. The Peter Jackson LotR trilogy did pretty well.... lines such as, "I feel if he were evil he would look fairer, and feel fouler." And Gandalf's comforting of Pip when all looked lost at Minas Tirith still brings a tear to my eye.
That's what went through my mind through this TV show. So if the original written word gets an A+, then the movie gets a solid B..... and this show gets a C-. They tried. I bet they had a linguist with a master's degree as one of the writers. But.... this person was either mediocre, or he/she got vetoed by people who wanted it dumbed down for mass appeal. It isn't bad, but it isn't great. That being said, I've seen some of the clever bits of language mocked by internet reviewers as, in essence, "lol gay." Basically I've seen unfair criticism.

Sets: A+. All of the cityscapes are CGI, of course.... but I could appreciate that the rest of the sets were actually there. I would bet a dollar they got some of the creatives from Weta, who worked on the original trilogy, and they had the money to build these sets.

Story: I'm not so sure. My understanding is that they weren't allowed to use anything from The Silmarillion... and because of that I think they took considerable license. So when inevitably someone DOES get the rights to The Silmarillion, there's going to be all kinds of plot inconsistencies. Anyone who points this out will be labelled a toxic fanboy. I'll give this score a conditional D+, until someone feedbacks me otherwise. I did think it was a bit clever how they accidentally ended up in Mordor. Not sure if that was Tolkien, or they made it up.

Black people and women where there weren't supposed to be black people and women............... abstaining from the score. In spite of the fact Tolkien wrote all of this to give a lore to the Anglo Saxon peoples, ultimately that doesn't matter to much for the story being told. Black elves and dwarves didn't phase me in the least, and actually I liked the scenes with the black drawf woman. The heroic black male elf was, ultimately..... well, I'll let that one go until everyone has seen it. It doesn't matter too much, aside from the fact that having people who you can look at and actually say "This person was from THIS tribe, or from THAT region" helps in story telling, but it isn't ultimately a story breaker. As far as gender swapping, I don't think it matters too much. It's still a shame we're not allowed to see good, honorable, strong male leaders in current pop culture (aside from Pike in the new Star Trek?), but maybe too much psychic damage won't be done to half the population. Probably.

Changing Galadriel: My memory of her character pre-LotR is too dim for me to give a grade, but this doesn't bode well. They already said one fact that contradicted the movies. I've heard that they gave her a shitload of plot where before she had none. But I don't know enough to have an intelligent argument.

All in all, I'm still in. Looking forward to season 2.

I'm calling out Thib to watch the show and critique.

Post by **thibodeaux** » Sat Oct 15, 2022 7:54 pm

Ain’t nobody got time for that

Post by **thibodeaux** » Sat Oct 15, 2022 8:07 pm

I am out of town do a full rant may not be forthcoming. However I will just say: I thought the Jackson trilogy was probably as good an adaptation as is possible…and I didn’t like it. Fellowship was ok, but I found the others tedious and was not a fan of how they reused Tolkien’s dialog but in different contexts and from different characters. Lame.

The hobbit trilogy was awful. Nuff said.

So, I’m too old to spend whatever time the Amazon show requires. I don’t like the black washing at all and frankly the Drinker has made me think I wouldn’t enjoy this show one bit.

Post by **GORDON** » Sat Oct 15, 2022 10:32 pm

As much as I like The Drinker, I think some of his conclusions are wrong and/or unfair.

Post by **thibodeaux** » Sun Oct 16, 2022 7:44 am

GORDON wrote: ↑Sat Oct 15, 2022 10:32 pm As much as I like The Drinker, I think some of his conclusions are wrong and/or unfair.

I imagine he's more entertaining to me than this show would be.

That said, aside from the blackwashing (and I could write a whole rant on why that proves the show writers are stupid, evil, or both), they've essentially made up their own story. Now why would they do that? What I've heard is that they just have the rights to "Appendix A" of Lord of the Rings (the book). It's true there's not a lot of detail there, but there is an actual TIMELINE and HIGH POINTS, none of which they have appeared to keep. They're just using some character names and then writing their own story.

This tells me the show writers think they're better than Tolkien. Is this possible? Sure. Is it likely? Cue clip of JK* Jameson laughing his ass off. Now, it is true that with a visual medium like film or TV you can't just use the book as script, and you sometimes have to leave stuff out. I get that (RIP Tom Bombadil). And sometimes (GRRM/Stephen King) the book is too massive or even incomplete (also GRRM). But as indeed GRRM showed us, even when an experienced novelist isn't at top form, his crap is better than what a hack TV writer can do.

So, given that the writers are already stupid, evil, or both, they also suffer from Dunning-Kruger. I think I'll pass on it.

*See what I did there?

Post by **GORDON** » Sun Oct 16, 2022 9:47 am

*Yes I did, brava

There was a criticism Drinker made over a thing that happened in the show... "That isn't how *that thing* works!" Except yeah it sort of does, and he missed the point of what happened. I thought it was interesting and clever. The fact that it had been done over 5 episodes right in front of my eyes, and I didn't see it coming, was nice. And there have been a few other points he's made about other stuff where his read of it had been different than mine. But don't take this as condemnation, I think he's my fave critic of stuff at the moment. I just think he's not 100% accurate of all things all the time, not because he lies, but because he has a different read. See: She Hulk.

That's all I got for now, go away*.

I do sometimes wonder who the creators of the content think they are creating content for, when they change races/sexes/whatever. They have a core audience from whom their clicks/views are going to be, and holding up a sign in front of their faces with a "we're changing the race of this character for your own good" in the middle of the show feels like a middle finger. They'd rather piss off the people who are their bread and butter and go after demographics that might possibly never really get on board with them. Sure, some women love fantasy/sci fi, and some peeps in the part of town where the murders happen like LotR. But those people get ragged on a lot by their peers for being weird.

Post by **thibodeaux** » Sun Oct 16, 2022 6:37 pm

GORDON wrote: ↑Sun Oct 16, 2022 9:47 am They'd rather piss off the people who are their bread and butter and go after demographics that might possibly never really get on board with them

This is pretty much my thought and so I'm not interested in watching. But I have soured on the idea of adapting Tolkien to film/TV. Again, I didn't care for the Jackson trilogy even though it was clearly created by and for fans (although, again, not sure if it was his wife or who that decided to butcher the dialog; I found the dialog extremely cringe). The Jackson Hobbit trilogy for me might as well not have happened. I fell asleep during the first one and didn't bother with the other two.

All that said: not to derail but the irony is, I was thinking about it and probably the thing that got me interested in Tolkien was the Ranking-Bass cartoon version of the Hobbit, and partly also their version of Return of the King. While their RotK isn't great, the Hobbit adaption is better than the Jackson one in every way (except one: for some reason they made the Elven King of Mirkwood look like some kind of frog creature).

In fact, the Hobbit is a GREAT book for a film version: it's short, it's got a simple linear plot with lots of cliffhangers, it's got a good balance of whimsy and comedy with danger and deadly seriousness. Oh yeah and it's light on the "fantasy names" which tbh I find kind of cringe in most fantasy and I'm sure make it hard for newbies to follow. All the places have extremely simple English names like "Lake Town" and "The Lonely Mountain." Even "Rivendell" is an English name: it's a valley or "dell" that's been sliced or "riven." The book is truly a classic children's fairy tale. If Tolkien never wrote another word, the Hobbit would have been a gem; perhaps forgotten and unknown by most but a great read for those who stumbled upon it.

Post by **Troy** » Mon Oct 17, 2022 12:01 am

This show is so fucking bad. House of the Dragon is 10x the show this is.

Post by **GORDON** » Tue Nov 08, 2022 3:49 pm

Unsubstantiated rumor that they're going to reboot.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2022/11/ ... st-season/

"It was never intended to be an intersectional feminist show. That came from the top and now they're feeling the heat."