Season One: the autopsies
I'll come back tomorrow with excerpts of what the mainstream critics have been saying- in sum, it's a collective "meh".
I will for now observe by way of comparison that House of the Dragon got more compelling drama out of a funeral than Rings of Power could from a battle and volcanic eruption. This is the result of giving priority to the f/x team over the writers. |
Crisis Magazine:
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I wonder at the amount of hubris required to rewrite a world classic, not only for the necessities of time compression in a film environment, but to detrimentally alter the plot, radically change characters, and plop in superfluous storylines that bear absolutely no resemblance to the original author's intent.
I wondered at this while Peter Jackson and Phillipa Boyens made a mockery of The Hobbit, stretching and warping a fairly linear and short novel into three torturous films, and I am even more flummoxed and bebothered at how Amazon could lay out $1 billion (or whatever the ridiculous amount was), and yet hire hapless hacks to scribble fatuous fan-fiction with characterizations and plotpoints that anyone who has read Tolkien would immediately recognize as nonsense, and open itself up to such scathing critical ridicule. We wonders, precious-s-s, we wonders. |
A mangled Myth, mouldering at the Morgue
Speaking of autopsies -- an exquisitely appropriate term -- I caught this from the comment section of a movie-review YouTube channel, only one of the many I visited looking for postmortems on this cultural cadaver:
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:D It doesn't help that Morfydd Clark's acting range stretches all the way from "angry" to "****ed off." |
The Rings of Impotence
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I don't know; I have been reliably informed by a Tolkien Professor that the depiction of *Galadriel in Amazon's RoP is just what Tolkien intended because of this line from Boromir:
"‘Well, have a care!’ said Boromir. ‘I do not feel too sure of this Elvish Lady and her purposes.’" LotR, Mirror of Galadriel And Aragorn's retort: "Speak no evil of the Lady Galadriel!’ said Aragorn sternly. ‘You know not what you say. There is in her and in this land no evil, unless a man bring it hither himself. Then let him beware! But tonight I shall sleep without fear for the first time since I left Rivendell. And may I sleep deep, and forget for a while my grief! I am weary in body and in heart.’ He cast himself down upon his couch and fell at once into a long sleep." ...was (essentially) a lie... |
Has anybody seen the disposable consort Celeborn?
As I've pointed out previously, the opening scenes of this Rings of Impotence television series reminded me of the film Miss Congeniality, where the young tomboy girl punches out boys who give her any lip, then grows up to be an FBI agent who goes undercover as a contestant in a Miss American beauty pageant ("scholarship program"), wins second-place on the basis of her own looks and talent, and saves the day at the end by foiling an attempted terrorist attack. In a show of gratitude, the pageant awards her the title of Miss Congeniality.
Obviously, a one-to-one correspondence does not apply here, but in the Rings of Impotence, the elvish tomboy Galadriel starts out the same way in bucolic Valinor (a.k.a., "Heaven"), absorbs some bad advice from her older Elf brother about trying out a little "darkness" (i.e., evil) in order to "see the light" (i.e., do some good), and grows up to be a revenge-obsessed "warrior leader" in the mundane world of elves, men, dwarves, Harfoot-Hobbits, Wizards, Nazgirls, and orcs. Unfortunately, her single-minded pursuit of the "evil" Sauron causes her to embrace both evil and him (in the rather transparent disguise of "Halbrand," about the only masculine-looking character in the cast). And who should win the object of their desire? Her (Sauron dead)? or Him (Sauron in possession of a base of operations in Middle Earth)? After watching days and hours of video clips and analyses of this eight-episode television series, I think I've got enough material for a first cut at a structured verse critique. Since another two years will probably elapse before the producers of this drek dare to assail television audiences once again, I will probably find ample time to refine and extend this treatment or else perhaps supplement it with another, differently phrased, composition. Anyway, for now . . . Quote:
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