Rings of Power: Tolkien's Shambling Skinsuit

“First of all, I’ve never been to anything like this. It was absolutely wild, but a positive experience for sure. I got to say hi to some of the cast and crew and of course everyone was friendly and high energy. When the show started and got into gear it was hard to not get distracted by the fact that some of the people I was watching on screen were sitting a few feet from me and also watching…themselves. It was strange, funny, and a little surreal all at once. Because of this and the overall experience, I don’t think I can give you guys a completely unbiased view of the show as it was impossible to not get caught up in the excitement of everything, but I’ll certainly do my best to decouple my opinions from that and give a fair assessment. I’ll warn you that I’m going to get into some spoiler territory but I’ll try not to ruin any big twists or surprises and there’s a ton that I’ll leave out (mainly because I’m old and forgot it already, haha).

So as you know I love Jackson’s LoTR trilogy despite some missteps and even a few things that were just straight up awful, but overall I think he left us with a really remarkable series of films that largely honored the source material. There’s a really good 2-3 hour movie hidden in The Hobbit trilogy somewhere, but they bloated that thing up to such proportions that it virtually buried the book. I don’t hate those movies but if I rewatch them I’m going to make liberal use of the fast forward button.

So, where does this land in comparison to those? My immediate impression is certainly far more positive than it was for The Hobbit movies, but it doesn’t quite deliver the same sense of scale or high stakes that the LoTR movies do. Of course, this is also a very different format (TV show vs film series) so I wasn’t expecting it to. From an adaptorial standpoint I think it gets a lot of the basic back story and general themes right. We do get a few minutes of first age stuff which is really awesome and left me wanting more. It reminded me of the LoTR prologue and the Last Alliance marching on Mount Doom in that sense. We finally see Valinor and the two trees (awesome!!!), a little taste of Morgoth, as well as some battles which include a few “beasts” on both the good and evil sides. There’s more going on here but I’ll leave some things as surprises. Don’t worry, they’re good surprises, if a bit condensed / brief.

While all of this was fantastic to see it did go by very quickly and I wonder how much of it (if any) will be revisited as the show goes on. I really hope it is. We meet Finrod and after a short while we’re told about his death, but (sadly), we don’t see it happen. His body does seem to have some scratch marks on it so I assume he’s meant to have been killed much as he was in The Silmarillion. This sets up Galadriel’s vengeance arc and then the show starts to kick off in its own direction.

There’s a lot to take in. In that sense it kind of reminded me of early GoT. We are taken all over the place and introduced to a bunch of characters and locations – some completely made up for the show, of course. I can see non-Tolkien fans getting lost but I think there’s enough here to keep most of them interested while it slowly starts to come together. For the most part, the characters are well done and those who came from the book are given (mostly) good dialogue that while not verbatim Tolkien fits very well within the world, much as was the case with the Jackson films. There are a couple characters I’m not really sold on yet, but we’ll see how they turn out in the later episodes. There are a TON of small details that Tolkien nerds will go nuts for. They also make reference to things that those familiar with the books will pick up on and appreciate, but for non-book readers, the show does a nice job of making those references flow well and feel like solid world building rather than straight-up fan service. Whatever nitpicks or debates that people will have regarding whether this show is "true" to Tolkien or not, there’s no doubt that the writers have read the hell out of the books. There’s a certain small detail that I happened to catch that got my inner geek jazzed up but I won’t spoil it until you’ve watched the show (hint: related to a certain first age character who’s long dead by then).

I obviously have no idea how the rest of the series will unfold, but as far as these two episodes are concerned, I think the biggest thing that will divide fans are the Harfoots. They’re the show’s comic relief and while I found them sort of charming and suitably Hobbit-like, a couple lines were pretty cringy and frankly their plotline could just as easily turn into a bust as end up interesting. Think more Merry and Pippin (the film versions) rather than say Bilbo and Frodo. We’ll see what happens there.

For the most part, the Elves are very well done and while there are plot threads here that were either completely made up for the show or loosely based on book stuff, many of the general themes of the Elves as they existed in the first and second ages are intact. One of my favorite parts of these episodes was easily the Khazad-Dum bits. It looks fantastic (I much preferred it to Erebor in the Hobbit movies), and Durin is consistently entertaining while staying suitably regal and dwarvish. I even ended up even liking his wife (but where the hell is her beard?). BTW, if you are expecting to see Numenor, tap the brakes as it’s not in either of the opening episodes. This was a bit of a downer at first, but I get why they are spacing things out. It’s already quite busy.

The cinematography is fantastic, but I guess it would take a special talent to shoot New Zealand and make it look bad. The SFX were largely excellent and you could see where some of the budget was put to good use, however there were a handful of wonky parts that looked rushed / incomplete.

Overall, despite a few small reservations this was a strong start to the show, especially considering the multitude of plotlines, characters, and locations that are being established. None of the trailers really made much of an impression on me, either good or bad, but the show itself definitely feels different from them in a positive way. If the subsequent episodes keep up I’d say we have a winner.”