Ears, Pointy, Two

I’ve watched three episodes (all there is, so far) of Amazon’s billion-dollar Tolkien fanfic, Rings of Power, and I find my reactions mixed.

Public reaction so far has featured complaints that the series isn’t faithful enough to the source, but that complaint doesn’t have any weight with me. The filmmakers didn’t have the rights to the Akallabêth, and had to settle for the appendices to LOTR as a source. Drama is different than written narrative, and will inevitably take shortcuts, combine minor characters into a single figure, and shift the emphasis from contemplation towards action. Nothing wrong with any of that. Wake up and smell the greasepaint! If you want to make a more faithful adaptation, raise a billion dollars and do it yourself.

More complaints concern the skin tones of some of the actors. My, aren’t the racists a bunch of whiny snowflakes! The sight of a black face amid the elves sends them to their fainting couches. I hope they fucking stay there.

Nor do I care that Galadriel is a young, driven warrior rather than a sage queen. Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, and so does a teleplay. Galadriel is the most interesting character in the series so far, so let’s start with her.

My first reaction was how incredibly beautiful this series is. A lot of fantasy series— not naming names, here— are set in murky, ill-lit places partly to set a mood, but also to hide substandard CGI. Rings of Power sets its story in brilliant sunlight that picks out bright detail in the fantasy landscape. The CGI was stunning. It’s a seductive realm, and I found myself ready to be seduced by it.

Except I wasn’t. The second episode featured mainly pointless action, including a rock-breaking contest between Durin and Elrond that was merely silly. I couldn’t be brought to care about a conflict so artificial and so imposed on the characters— you’d think elven and dwarven royalty would have other things to think about than maintaining a twenty-year snit. In the same episode Galadriel found herself in peril on the sea, but to anyone who knows anything about small boats or the behavior of oceans the action was ridiculous.

Episode three picked up the story again, with Galadriel arriving in Numenor, and Sauron’s plot beginning to reveal itself in Middle-Earth.

The problem is that I was not really engaged by any of this. I was unable to care about any of the characters (with the possible exception of some of the hobbits), I think because their concerns were both remote and so common in fantasy as to be hackneyed. We’ve seen it all before: forbidden love between humans and elves, an obsessive desire for revenge on the part of a heroine, royalty conspiring and murdering, orcs being nasty, hobbits playing pranks and breaking the rules. The series’ incredible beauty frames action that is banal. The actors are all accomplished and do their best with dialog at once pompous and cliche, but they can’t quite save it.

The series may pick up once the major characters start encountering one another and maybe build a Fellowship, but since the series is intended to run five seasons that may not be for some time.

I’ll stick with it, for now.