Rings of Power -- all opinions and spoilers welcome thread.

Parmandur said:

I can well understand why someone might not love it, or even be frustrated by it. But a 1 star review is obviously driven by an agenda, not a good faith engagement with this art.

Someone can walk through the Louvre and sniff st the Mona Lisa, saying any child could do better. Doesn't mean that one can't be skeptical of that sort of hot take. And that's not saying that everyone has yo love the Mona Lisa, or any other work of art! But not all opinions are proffered in good faith.

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A few years ago, I was visiting a picture museum during a "free night" event that draw people who aren't usually into art museum. I ended up overhearing a couple who were standing in front of impressionnist paintings (I don't remember which one exactly, but it was world-class) and the guy said to his wife something like "the works in this room are all naughty word, the one in the other were much clearer and better executed". The other room had 19th century realist paintings... I am pretty sure he'd rate Monet or Whistler 1-star in good faith. He wasn't trying to irritate his partner (or playing a complex joke on me overhearing...) he was just... stating that impressionism is naughty word in his opinion because it's not, well, using precise lines with a brush. So this painting


is a good painting while this one
is very bad. You or me can consider this is a peculiar view of paintings but it doesn't mean his opinion is a troll and should be discarded. Uninformed, maybe, but trolling assuredly not. Not all who criticize harshly are trolls.

I think you're ascribing your "rating scale" to deduce the intent of the other raters, who can be in good faith when they see a 5-grade scale and deduce : 1-star : "I don't like" 2-stars to 4-stars : "not used" 5-stars: "I like". Not every extreme opinion is necessarily designed to inflame other people.

Parmandur said:

Well, there can be an accounting, with enough work put into it.

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You just can't stop yourself can you? But sure. Those with good, sophisticated taste agree with me, and those with bad taste, disagree.

Evidently the Noldor acted like petulant adolescents in CW teen dramas.

Anyhow, I'd love to see someone do a mash-up of Morfydd Clark's Galadriel in Riverdale.

Parmandur said:

The way you describe Galadriel in this post is precisely on-brand for the Noldor.

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I'd disagree with that. That sort of vengeful monomania is on brand for Fëanor and his sons. It's not so on brand for the rest of the Noldor who followed Fingolfin, bound by kinship to his older half-brother.
Ambition to rule their own places - sure. That fits with the Noldor who stayed behind on Middle Earth when most of their host went into the West at the end of the First Age.

One other thing that's on brand is the crafting of stuff... that may lead to things not working out as intended - like the Rings of Power. But even that is largely confined to Fëanorians - like his grandson Celebrimbor. The other Noldor leaders, Gil-galad, Elrond, and Galadriel, all turned Annatar away out of distrust. So there's this reputation for Noldor that mainly just applies to Fëanorians while Galadriel otherwise stands quite apart from in the rest of the First Age information.

So, yeah, there's quite a bit of room to disagree with your personal take on it and consider that dragging down the overall quality of the series.

Parmandur said:

The way you describe Galadriel in this post is precisely on-brand for the Noldor. At the end of this season, Galadriel goes for making the Three Rings as a way to fight Sauron, which is a mistake mirroring the tragic mistake at the beginning of the Season when the Noldor do a series of very wrong things to fight Morgoth: chiasmus

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I think you're reading an awful lot into something which isn't apparent. I see no chiasmal (chiasmic/chiasmatic [or chiastic!]) structure to the way the narrative has been contrived. Nor do I see any parallels between the Flight of the Noldor and their war with Morgoth, and the forging of the Three Elven Rings (are they now a weapon to use against Sauron, or designed to preserve the works of the Elves?)

I also find the - rather simplistic - notion that "three are balanced" to be tedious. The Rings themselves echo the Silmarils, with their magisteria corresponding to the final resting places of the jewels, although I find the idea of chiasm to be inappropriate. The three main Elven protagonists of the Second Age, Celebrimbor, Gil-galad, and Galadriel, are scions of the Houses of Feanor, Fingolfin and Finarfin respectively - the three sons of Finwe, the first High King. There is a wealth of rich symbology to these connections which could be explored - if one were to engage with these literary (really, pseudo-aetiological) symmetries as they were intended.

ART! said:

HBO's 3rd Age proposal sounds interesting. It sounds like it would have in part been a new version of LOTR, but serialized over X seasons. As intriguing as that sounds to me, it feels too soon to recast those roles, because of how popular the movies are.

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I'd be really interested to see a TV show version of the Lord of the Rings that delved into the offscreen stuff from the books, and the bits that were cut from the movie for time: Gandalf and Aragorn's hunt for Gollum, the wars in Lothlorien and Erebor, Saruman and Wormtongue's manipulations in Rohan, and Gandalf's plan to make Sauron think Aragorn was wielding the Ring against him. And, of course, the Scouring of the Shire.

(Bombadil? That's a tough one. The Bombadil episode just feels like such a random inclusion... but maybe even he could be worked in. He's not totally disconnected from the rest of the story--he's in regular touch with Farmer Maggot, who deserves more screen time anyway.)

But, I agree, it's not time for that yet. Maybe in another ten years or so.

Mercurius said:

You just can't stop yourself can you? But sure. Those with good, sophisticated taste agree with me, and those with bad taste, disagree.

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I mean, this is a thread to discuss the Rings of Power. I fully accept that you do not perceive the artistic merit in the show, but that doesn't mean that it is not present.

Sepulchrave II said:

I think you're reading an awful lot into something which isn't apparent. I see no chiasmal (chiasmic/chiasmatic [or chiastic!]) structure to the way the narrative has been contrived.

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Chiastic would be correct, I do believe. Chiasm is all over the show, both within this Deason and between this show and LotR/The Hobbit and with the Silmirillion (circumspectly, since they can't explicitly use the text), and many elements are clearly setting up parallels to come.

Parmandur said:

I mean, this is a thread to discuss the Rings of Power. I fully accept that you do not perceive the artistic merit in the show, but that doesn't mean that it is not present.

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Yes, of course. And the contrary is also true: just because you perceive the show to have artistic merit, doesn't mean it is present in some kind of objective, intrinsic way.

Which is why I think the most peaceful compromise--at least for us--is accepting that different people have different tastes. To one person, a banana nailed to a wall is a gimmick, while to another it is a powerful artistic statement. Art is funny like that. At the very least, much (if not all) of what we call "art" or "artistic" is in the eye and mind of the beholder.

What is strange, presumably for both of us, is that we seemingly have very different criteria as to what constitutes "artistic merit," as if we come from entirely different schools of literary and cinematic aesthetics. I wonder if we'd find other areas in which we're so polarized - be they films, shows, books, etc, or if this is an anomaly.

Dausuul said:

I'd be really interested to see a TV show version of the Lord of the Rings that delved into the offscreen stuff from the books, and the bits that were cut from the movie for time: Gandalf and Aragorn's hunt for Gollum, the wars in Lothlorien and Erebor, Saruman and Wormtongue's manipulations in Rohan, and Gandalf's plan to make Sauron think Aragorn was wielding the Ring against him. And, of course, the Scouring of the Shire.

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I'd be interested in that in theory. But it really depends upon how it was done, and who was doing it. Book-to-film adaptations run the gamut from really good (GoT) to pretty good (LotR) to fairly awful (RoP)...all imo, of course.

But yeah, imagine Lord of the Rings spread out over six seasons, one for each book:

Season 1: The Ring Sets Out - from Hobbiton to Rivendell.
Season 2: The Ring Goes South - from Rivendell to Amon Hen, and the breaking of the Fellowship.
Season 3: The Treason of Isengard - Saruman, Rohan, and Helm's Deep.
Season 4: The Ring Goes East - Frodo and Sam heading towards Mordor, Ithilen, Shelob.
Season 5: The War of the Ring - Gondor, Paths of the Dead, Battle of the Morannon.
Season 6: The End of the Third Age - Mordor, crowning of Aragorn, Scouring of the Shire, Grey Havens.

I think seasons (and books) 3 and 4 would have to be done mixed together and chronologically like the films, otherwise you might not see certain characters for an entire season. I'm also somewhat dubious about the idea of including the Scouring of the Shire, as it could be rather anticlimatic in a "dead cat bounce" sort of way, yet on the other hand gives the hobbits a nice victory to end on.

But you'd essentially be turning 11-12 hours of film (the extended versions) into 50-60 hours, depending on whether each season is 8 or 10 episodes.

Alternately, you could add a season and make it seven, with the first being precursors - stuff that was included in Jackson's Hobbit films, Dol Guldur, and maybe a young Aragorn. So extending the total run-time to up to 70 hours.

Another option would be to use a good portion of those 50-70 hours on creating new stories and characters in different parts of the world - perhaps a failed Harad revolt, orcs invading Lake-town and the Lonely Mountain (get more dwarves in there), Rhun and the east (and the Blue Wizards), etc. Meaning, it is implied that the conflict with Sauron went beyond the events of LotR--that what was depicted was the central focus, but Sauron's influence was much more widespread, so it could be interesting to see "everything else."

Dausuul said:

(Bombadil? That's a tough one. The Bombadil episode just feels like such a random inclusion... but maybe even he could be worked in. He's not totally disconnected from the rest of the story--he's in regular touch with Farmer Maggot, who deserves more screen time anyway.)

But, I agree, it's not time for that yet. Maybe in another ten years or so.

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I always thought Robin Williams would have made a good Tom Bombadil. But his exclusion from the Jackson films didn't bother me; it felt like a quintessential Tolkienism that would have been very hard to portray on film. The point, I think, of Bombadil is to be a mystery and anomaly, who in a way gives a completely outsider, even quasi-Taoist, perspective on the who drama. That isn't impossible to portray on film, but it would be hard to get just right.