As for my view of the series as a whole, as I said at one point here, my initial impression after the first two episodes was: "Not as bad as I feared, but worse than I hoped - maybe there's some potential here." After finishing the series, I find it a mix of "kinda ok, entertaining in a CWish sort of way with a few good moments and elements" and "A startlingly poorly crafted mess that makes a mockery of Tolkien's creation." In other words, that potential has dissolved like a Morgul blade, and the show is--at least in some ways--even worse than I feared.
As an adaptation of Tolkien, it is bordering on disastrous. If Peter Jackson's film were a shadow of Tolkien's books, but obviously lovingly crafted and with a clear intention to embody Tolkien's world and vision as faithfully as possible--and thus overall mostly wonderful--then Rings of Power is a shadow of (a shadow of) Jackson's films, and one that really only resembles Tolkien's Middle-earth in superficial ways: basic concepts and names, but with no sense that the show-runners really "get" Tolkien. Perhaps the most egregious element is the depiction of elves, which from the start came across as kind of a mixture of an idealized version of (very human) Celts and, again, a CW-level expression of emotional maturity and sophistication. Critics of the show like to pick on Morfydd Clark's Galadriel, and I think for good reason: She comes across as a petulant teen warrior princess with very little depth or complexity. I actually was quite impressed with Clark in
Saint Maud, so I suspect
most (though probably not all) of this is in the writing and direction.
But from the start, I didn't require it to be perfectly faithful to Tolkien's Middle-earth, though I did hope it would at least try to do homage to it, like Jackson did, when instead it borders on parody. Meaning, I would have been quite pleased if it was at least well-made fantasy. But what I find simply baffling is just how poorly it was made, in terms of cinematic story-telling, in almost every way - everything from the pacing to the plot to the dialogue to the acting to the world-building to the sets. It was like it was produced by amateurs with no previous experience (oh wait, it was!). The choice of Payne and McKay for such a big budget project is just weird...I heard a rumor that JJ Abrams called in a favor for them.
So while a JJ Abrams version of Middle-earth would have butchered it enough and been a shadow of Jackson's films, it would have at least been well produced; RoP is like an adaptation of what Abrams might have been - a derivation of a derivation, like a Youtube animation of the Cliff's Notes version of a book. Meaning, we're now at four degrees of separation from Tolkien: a shadow (RoP) of a shadow (Abrams-esque Middle-earth) of a shadow (Jackson's Middle'earth) of a shadow (Tolkien's Middle-earth).
Without going into all the gory details, one example of the poor story-telling is the pacing - how the story seemed to somehow both move too quickly and too slowly at the same time. I have no idea how they accomplished that, but it seems to center on glossing over important scenes and keeping them off screen, while padding the run time with endlessly tedious dialogue and other scenes that weren't important to the story. An example of this was Nori's farewell scene, which also highlighted another problem: the tendency to
tell and not
show; telling us how to feel and when to feel it, rather than
showing us scenes that make us feel. Again, another classic amateurish blunder that happened again and again.
In a similar vein to the pacing is the world-building and depiction of Middle-earth as a whole: there was a feeling of cramped-ness, with no sense of the vastness of the world. Everything from the street-level scenes in Numenor which all felt claustrophobic, and too obviously set in a Hollywood warehouse, to the way travel was glossed over (the infamous "from Numenor to the South-lands in a blink of an eye, oh, and with an entire cavalry crammed into a ship or two").
But what is most striking about this overall production quality (or lack thereof), is that because it showed up everywhere, in so many ways - so many cracks revealing that the whole thing was a facade, a production - it seems clear that so little thought was put into making it a believable, tightly crafted world (e.g. Halbrand is in critical condition, so let's take him on a week-long gallup for Elvish medicine!). Meaning, as if they either assumed the viewers would be entirely uncritical, or, more likely, it was simply a matter of incompetence on their part.
There are so many other things I could say, but will leave it there for now. But I tend to agree with most of what Erik Kain of Forbes.com has said, with his season review
here.
p.s. Oh, and as a pre-emptive to the inevitable "Tell us how you really feel...I totally disagree, btw" responses: I know opinions differ, and a lot of folks liked Rings of Power.
I am not saying you are a bad person if you liked it. I'm just expressing that
I think
the show itself was really bad. Not you, you're a good person!
