The most exciting series of the moment

Amazon Prime Video has had to play the long game with ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ due to its high budget, which is unusual for a television series, and the license cost (reportedly $250 million). The show has five seasons to tell a story that’s still unfolding. A Tolkien adaptation that has fans curious since its announcement.

This adaptation has some drawbacks, on paper, for true Tolkien fans, excluding those who dislike black fantasy races. The first is that Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the three key Middle-earth novels is practically canonical. It can be improved in terms of which elements are left in or out and how they are combined, but overall popularity, prestige, and pop culture impact make it hard to compete with.

The second issue is that the Lord of the Rings canon cannot be used for this series due to the massive mess of Tolkien rights. Amazon had to set its series thousands of years before Peter Jackson’s films because the three main novels and The Hobbit are off limits. It cannot use Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales stories directly, only as background.

Before watching any episodes, the result was called “the most expensive fan fiction ever made,” and Amazon paid for a setting and brand, but not for adapting specific stories. The company’s option is the hardest: it must emulate Tolkien to write new stories.

A limping adaptation
This long preamble is relevant because while watching the first two episodes of ‘The Lord of the Rings’, which provide a glimpse into this new world that sets the stage for what’s to come, I couldn’t help but think about how Amazon has had a lot against it. All those conditions affected what appeared on screen.

“The Rings of Power” is set in the Second Age. The Elves settled in Eriador after defeating Sauron. The first part of the story follows Galadriel, who searches Middle Earth for her brother but finds nothing. A strange body from space arrives. Her unexpected passenger will introduce the Hairy Ones, a Hobbit subspecies, into this story, always without their consent. Humans fleeing an unexpected threat will meet Elves through a forbidden relationship.

There are many simultaneous stories on screen that are oddly reduced to anecdotal and fail to convey an immense network of lives that punctuate a rich and complex world. The series may focus on the inconsequential (Elrond and Durin IV’s relationship, the humans’ relationship with Arondir, the slow discovery of the Hairy Ones) and erase the more intense parts, like Galadriel’s travels.

I find it curious that the series doesn’t tell Galadriel’s story (except for the first chapter and her fight with humans on a raft, the two best moments of these two chapters) while having long, irrelevant conversations. They’re symptoms of a larger problem: simplifying Tolkien’s proposal, which makes the characters all human variants.

The Hairy Ones are just short, good-natured humans, and the motivations of all the races lack the beyond-human epicness of Tolkien’s Elves (although we can expect changes there in the future). Amazon’s goal of making a series for all audiences is affected by this reduction: the action scenes lack violence, intensity, and mass death, so the series lacks Jackson’s epicness.

Is the new ‘Lord of the Rings’ bad? Despite its adaptation’s pace and character development issues, Amazon’s investment in the series was well worth it. JA Bayona shoots with taste, taking advantage of the series’ impressive natural sets, without the wigs and cardboard sets that plague ‘House of the Dragon’.

The most exciting series of the moment

By b0oua

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