The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)
There are Tolkien fans, and there are TOLKIEN FANS, and then there are people who want Tolkien to be as inaccessible as possible so they can keep it for themselves (since the four books published in the author's lifetime are ubiquitous they focus mostly on the posthumous works). If you're into music you're familiar with the phenomenon. This third group sharpened their swords - forged from a fallen meteor, no doubt - as soon as they heard that Amazon was going to make a TV series set in Middle-earth (technically in Arda, which encompasses the whole fictional world). It wasn't going to stick to The Lore!
Many of these folks happen to be Identity Evropa fellow travelers, on the alert for anything they can call Woke, and they got it when they saw that the cast, while mostly white, included actors from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. And when they couldn't see a visible beard on the female dwarf, they flipped: here was something Lore-Breaking they could attack without looking racist! This being 2022, the fascist-adjacent conspiracy theories soon followed: It's part of the Satanic trans pedophile feminist commie plot to destroy "our" culture, they don't care about making a good show.
I paid a medium amount of attention (okay, a bit more than that) in the run-up to the show's launch, and a couple of things were clear: the production values were going to be first-rate, and the showrunners were aiming both at the general public and at hardcore fans. (Regardless of how you feel about soulless union-busting megacorporations, I hope we can all agree that Amazon wants to make money. They wouldn't intentionally make a show that fans of the intellectual property hate.) And since the show was to be five seasons long and set in the Second Age, which Tolkien had sketched out but hadn't written about in detail, clearly they were going to invent a ton of characters and subplots. The big open questions in my mind were, would the storylines feel like Tolkien, and would they work as standalone narratives?
Spoiler-Free Answer:
Nope. I had an open mind right up through the finale, and I acknowledge that what they were trying to do was very difficult, but they didn't pull it off. The problem wasn't the POC actors, the beardless lady dwarves, warrior Galadriel or elves with short hair, but that the big story arcs were predictable and/or dumb and/or led nowhere. The showrunners got the gig based on a terrific idea to flesh out the Second Age outline, but they dropped the ball and wasted the one shot we had at it.
The "elves leave by spring or perish" thing flips the main theme of the Age, the immortality of the elves vs. the mortality of humans (The Gift of Eru). The Nümenorean envy of the elves now makes no sense. Beyond that, Gil-Galad, Elrond and Celebrimbor are basically bureaucrats: they don't show any of the grace or ethereal qualities of elves, or the high-mindedness of heroes. Ursula Le Guin wrote a brilliant essay, "From Elfland To Poughkeepsie," warning about this precise pitfall. Think of how transported Sam was at just the thought of seeing elves - imagine his disappointment if he met them and they acted like these guys.
The Adar storyline is great, and shows the writers were capable of creating fully realized characters who are also larger than life, who "do no wrong without just cause." (I stole that from Willie The Shake). Arondir is willing to sacrifice Bronwyn in order to save the rest of the Southlands, and she's on board with it. But they don't go that route with anyone else: The dwarves and Elrond are largely motivated by pettiness. The MAGA Nümenoreans have no good qualities. Galadriel takes tremendous risks with her life and that of many others, but then lets Sauron off scot-free because she's afraid Gil-Galad will yell at her. On that subject, I get that Galadriel needs an arc, but they've made her responsible for nearly all the evil in the Second and Third Ages: she saves Sauron's life, believes he's a lost king on next-to-no evidence (ignoring him when he tells her he isn't) and convinces him to go back to Middle-earth when he was content to remain in Nümenor.
The Simaril-in-a-pear-tree mithril creation story is weird enough, but saying that good and evil each have their virtues really misses what high fantasy is about. Overall it seems like they're confusing the fact that some questions are morally complex with full moral relativism. On the other hand, they spend a whole season emphasizing that everyone is shades of gray, and then the climax of the wizard story is him bellowing "I'm good!"
On that subject, the Gandalf (or conceivably Blue Wizard) story is a middling D&D campaign: Why make characters called The Dweller, The Ascetic and The Other One and then blow them to hell without explaining any of their backstory? Seems like they're just there to give the magic-user his +3 staff, and for the half-hearted Sauron mislead.
More minor but still irritating are the storytelling mistakes, such as all the double and triple beats: This guy's Sauron; no, he's not. This person died; no, they didn't. Galadriel is going to save everyone; no, she ruined everything. She learns that she's become the evil she was fighting; she forgets the lesson. The wizard tries to fix something; he accidentally breaks it. And I was defending the pace of the show, but after they crammed half the season into the final episode I take it all back. On the other hand, I'm not complaining about the contrivances that bring Sauron wherever the plot needs him to be, because to be honest that's one thing that does feel like Tolkien.
Ultimately, yeah, it didn't stick to The Lore, to the show's detriment, and the hate-click YouTubers are high-fiving, though the Wokeness never materialized (e.g. the alleged girlbosses ultimately didn't accomplish anything) and they didn't predict any of the actual problems. Another depressing outcome here in the Darkest Timeline. Where are the Istari when you need them? (DBW)
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)
