20/33
Amazon’s original bid for the television rights to JRR
Scenario
An epic drama set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it follows a group of characters, both familiar and new, who face the long-awaited reemergence of evil in Middle-earth. The cast of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and other actors who have completely transformed themselves for their roles. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings novels was to make the series a new adaptation of the latter (essentially a retelling of Gospodar prstenova: Prstenova družina (2001), Gospodar prstenova: Dvije kule (2002), and Gospodar prstenova: Povratak kralja (2003)), but Tolkien’s estate turned it down.
They consulted with the estate and several Tolkien experts (including his grandson and novelist Simon Tolkien) about including new characters and plot elements
Amazon eventually acquired the rights on the condition that the series be separate from Peter Jackson’s earlier adaptations and that it not contradict anything Tolkien had written before. Early ideas that were proposed included prequel stories involving characters such as Aragorn, Gimli, and Gandalf, but the showrunners preferred to focus on important, untold events from the novels’ history rather than simple side stories, so they agreed with the studio that the series would be set in the Second Age of the books. Since they did not have the rights to Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth (which explore the First and Second Ages), they scoured The Lord of the Rings novels and supplements for passages and references to the Second Age in which to set their story. The dubbing for several languages incorrectly lists King Durin III as “Durin II.” The opening credits are a musical sequence of matter taking on various shapes, based on the creation myth “The Music of the Ainur” from J.R.R.
Tolkien’s The Silmarillion
Featured in The Critical Drinker: The Rings of Power – War For A Fandom (2022). This series bears no resemblance to The Lord of the Rings, neither the book trilogy nor Jackson’s adaptation. If anything, this series is more like all those epic fantasy imitations that started appearing in the 80s that were Lord of the Rings fanfics in everything but name, with a few elements changed and renamed. If you told me I was watching Amazon’s Wheel of Time instead of Lord of the Rings, I wouldn’t be surprised – the tone of this show is much closer to that and other poor, uninteresting boomer shows.
The script is, BY FAR, the worst part of this
It’s not very good, by any means, but the blame is not evenly distributed. Not only is the script weak, considering the running time and the time it takes to set up the action, but the dialogue scene by scene is insufferable. The lines are nonsensical gibberish most of the time – they’re stupid, almost incoherent. Not to mention that it sounds like it was written by someone who has no idea how old-sounding English is supposed to sound, so it feels unnatural, like watching a military movie written by someone who has no idea how soldiers talk to each other in private or formal situations.
There are many things the characters say that made me have to stop and go back to make sure I didn’t mishear something
There’s also some incredibly awkward use of language, like the elven king at one point saying, “…washing away the last remnants of our enemy like spring rain over the bones of a rotten body.” I don’t know what it is about that line that makes me realize how little these writers understand both elves and writing in general.