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


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1) Tolkien was very careful about the time required to carry out a journey. In the series very long journeys take place within a very short time.

Although I enjoyed the series in general, I found these inaccuracies very beneath a series with this budget.
I feel your pain!

I haven't gone back to watch the season a second time yet, but I swear there's the scene where Elrond and Celebrimbor decide they have to go see the dwarves, and then the next time we see them they're coming around a rock to the door to the dwarven city, and they're wearing the same clothes they were in the previous scene, have no travel gear or even a travel cloak, and there's no sign of any horses or anything!

And then we get the Harfoot travel song with the maps, and it looks like they're traveling hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles, but with no sense of how much time that takes.

I have similar issues with the LOTR movies, though, too. They could have gotten away with showing less travel than they did, and I'm grateful for what we did get, but I really wanted more, because like you say, one of the things readers take away from The Hobbit and LOTR is the experience of travel.
 

Yes, the travel thing was annoying, along with all sorts of other stuff. I have now watched all of the first season and it pretty much lived up, and down, to what I expected from it. This series seems to be made for non-readers, as in if you have only watched the movies, you will be good with this series, but the more of the books you have read, the less satisfied you will be with the show. And in a way, that makes sense, since more and more people just do not read books at all.

I have also come to the conclusion that, while readers know there were three distinct Ages, in making this show, they decided to smash them all into one Age, to go with the extreme time compression they employed. How else do you explain them using the 3rd Age map while supposedly telling a 2nd Age story, which also has a 1st Age prologue? No mention of how much of the continent was lost under the ocean in the final battles of the 1st Age and using a map that clearly says Rohan on it, when Rohan did not exist in the 2nd Age, says a lot. As much as I will hate it, I expect Rohan to show up in future seasons. Elendil and Isildur being alive when the rings are created is more BS. Sure, names get repeated in both fiction and the real world, so maybe those two will just end up being ancestors of the main Elendil and Isildur, but not likely, as they may think that will just confuse the viewers. As for the Balrog, I guess the story they used for why one is sleeping in the root of the mountains was okay, as readers already know it fled there at the end of the 1st Age, after Morgoth lost. But again, because of the whole time compression thing, we know they are going to wake it up long before it did in the books. Then there is the whole "Sauron in hiding" subplot, the making of the Rings in the wrong order, the claiming of Mordor, and so on.

So yeah, as I explained to a friend who has not watched yet, the less you know about the books, the more you will enjoy the show. It makes a decent generic fantasy show, but a poor adaptation.
 

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Honestly, for the most expensive TV show ever made, it was quite terrible. I mean the writing was bad, really bad. And the acting, not much better.

As a Tolkien adaptation, it was a steaming pile of crap.
 




Bear McCreary is on the latest episode of Other Minds & Hands. He's the composer of the RoP scores, and I think his work there is very good and some of his character and location themes are excellent.
I agree that the score is very solid, as are the designs of the locations - in terms of their aesthetic (especially architectural) consistency.

Unfortunately, the result (for me) when the score is juxtaposed with poor writing, characterization and acting is a kind of cognitive dissonance which pulls me out of the experience. In places, the music seems to tell us what we are supposed to feel, rather than reflect any emotions which the story should have naturally evoked in us. @Mercurius alluded to this general issue upthread, and I broadly agree.
 


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