Rings of Power: Tolkien's Shambling Skinsuit

Oblio said:

Is this show worth watching? I love Tolkien and the Hobbit was one of the first books I ever picked up and read without it being an assignment. I just don't want to be pissed the whole time I am watching this.

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Youll be pretty pissed. The only good part is the Elrond/Durin relationship. This show was made by people who never made any kind of tv show or movie or know the source material. If you dont like House of the Dragon you will very much dislike this.

Oblio said:

Is this show worth watching? I love Tolkien and the Hobbit was one of the first books I ever picked up and read without it being an assignment. I just don't want to be pissed the whole time I am watching this.

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Do you love Tolkien or just love media that is generic fantasy and reminds you of Tolkien? If you actually love his work I don't think this is for you.

zignor 4 said:

And they already used up their trick of Sauron in his basic-bitch form manipulating Celebrimbor and the Elven smiths. But now he throws on a wig and returns as Annatar to do it again, and...none of these brilliant, millennia-old Elves have any clue who he is?

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Considering he looks indeed exactly the same but with a wig, I'm guessing he's only supposed to look like this to the audience, but to any onlooker he looks like a completely different person. As I recall in the books Annatar looked like the most beautiful elf no matter who looked at him, so it's probable he was using a sort of spell to modify his appearance to whoever's looking his way.

If you're into forced diversity aka fat angry black dwarf ladies, hindu hobbits, and inter elf relationships.

Oblio said:

Is this show worth watching? I love Tolkien and the Hobbit was one of the first books I ever picked up and read without it being an assignment. I just don't want to be pissed the whole time I am watching this.

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Prepare to be irritated from an adaptorial standpoint, as this show stretches what amounts to a few paragraphs of Tolkien’s Second Age backstory into hours upon hours of teevee, while at the same time compressing thousands of years into….what….a few months? Perhaps a year? There are some fun and clever Tolkien-nerd easter eggs scattered throughout, but they’re small glimmers buried amongst a lot of nonsense.

How much is your time worth? I’d break s1 down to something like this:

10% quite good

15% decent

^ most of this is in the Dwarf segments

35% eh, it’s watchable

20% mostly bad

20% dumpster inferno

BrutulTM said:

I would take anything on this board with a grain of salt. It's 90% haters in every thread.

If you are some kind of Tolkien expert who already wrote your on fanfic version of the history of middle earth, then obviously you won't be happy and you should probably rethink how you spend your leisure time, just my opinion. If you're desperate to bitch about female characters and black people being shoe-horned into the show then this will give you plenty to whine about every week. If you just want an entertaining show, this one is a little dull but has pretty spectacular cinematography. The characters are a bit shallow although the whole season feels like just an introduction. Hopefully they will get on with the story a bit more in S2. I'm going to watch it but I'm not that excited about it.

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I think you mean "if you've literally read Tolkien you won't be happy".

BrutulTM said:

No. I've read LOTR twice and the hobbit 3 times. Not everyone thinks a TV show has to or even should strictly copy the source material. Different formats, different approaches are necessary, and this shit happened a billion years in the past to what most of us have read and we don't know jack shit about it. If you have opinions on where Sauron or Gandalf came from or what a youthful Galadrial should have been up to then you are a hardcore nerd.

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Well the show didn't have the rights to adapt The Silmarillion or any of the other texts outside of LoTR and The Hobbit, so whatever they did actually pull from Tolkien came from books you've read.

But frankly, while often annoying, most of the adaptorial issues weren't huge deal breakers. Much of the story in general just isn't well written. It smacks of multiple isolated writing teams of dramatically varying quality coming together at the end and mixing a bunch of their shit together in an expensive bowl. It's got plenty of those lazy moments where characters make bad choices and/or do something ridiculous not because there's any logic or internal consistency to them, but because they need to simply progress to the next plot point.

Go ahead and try the show if you're curious, it won't give you AIDS or anything. Book a trip on the high seas if you don't feel like giving any joy to Amazon.

Again, there is some good stuff mixed in with the shit. Most of the scenes with Durin are great. The scenery / set designs can be breathtaking (as they should be given the obscene cost of the show), seeing Mordor transition from green and populated to a volcanic hellscape was nifty. The music is quite good. There is a character, Adar, that was invented for the show and is surprisingly well done. Galadriel sucks. Just set overall expectations accordingly and go ahead and jump ship if you aren't at least mildly tickled by the end of the second episode.

Bandwagon said:

Watch the scene with an elf fighting an orc first. That's the only 4 minutes I've watched and it was fucking horrible

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hah, you are just a nerd if you expect better quality and somewhat adhering to source material, right BrutulTM . Give that scene a pass, sometimes different approaches are necessary.

still rate this lower than Wheel of Time. it isn't just not sticking to the lore stuff, a lot of it is truly retarded.

Oblio said:

I agree with the message BrutulTM and Z zignor 4 are conveying. I also agree the counterpoint Bandwagon made.

Guess I will give it a shot, solo for an episode or two.

Why is entertainment so fucking complicated in 2024? I grew up an an era of few choices, but GOD DAMN those choices were fucking TITS!

Hi2u GI JOE, TMNT, HE-MAN, THUNDERCATS etc

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Rings of Power is like going to the drug dealer with your kids to get weed, then being surprised when they end up on Heroin.

It's the gateway drug to them being reparations supporting trannies, because you are opening the door to forced representation and activist acting/writing.

Goatface said:

still rate this lower than Wheel of Time. it isn't just not sticking to the lore stuff, a lot of it is truly retarded.

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If the casting director for WoT wasn't advancing an agenda people would have forgave a lot of stuff there.