Rings of Power: Tolkien's Shambling Skinsuit

jayrebb said:

Was writing fast-- didn't have time for word choice. 'basing' was lazy.

It could mean a little more modern take, or it could mean realism being taken up a few notches. Details are scant.

My take on the leak was that it's not going to be campy high fantasy fluffy Peter Jackson stuff. And they don't care if the set pieces are Earth-like rather than Middle Earth. And the fact they don't care could impact the tone of the story telling. It's not clear if that's supposed to jive with the overall tone of the story, but there has to be some reason this leak was reported specifically about the look of the show not being satisfactory to LOTR fans.

A few critics are already convinced this is going to be a pretty disrespectful effort by Amazon though.

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I am one of those who firmly believe this is going to be a total raping of Tolkien's works. The showrunners have no experience and are associated with Bad Robot (they were going to do the Star Trek 4 movie). If rumors/leaks are to be believed, they fired the writers when Christopher Tolkien died and brought in new ones. Since he was the one zealously protecting his father's legacy, there is no one left to ensure Amazon treats Tolkien with respect. They have brought in a nudity/intimacy coordinator so they are going to GoT the series. HBO-type nudity and sex in a Tolkien work. It's a disgusting perversion of the source material and an insult to the memory of a deeply religious man. That type of thing has a time and a place but it is not in a work with Tolkien's name attached to it.

Since his world is based on the mythology of the British Isles, and we all know how anything with even a hint of white, European origins is now problematic, we will get all kinds of "subverting expectations." Sauron will be a toxic white male. There will be tons of gender swapping. There will be a female lead (probably a person of color who is a lesbian since the current fad seems to portray all black women as lesbians). She won't be kick ass because of the strength of her character, but because all the men around her will be dumb, ineffectual and weak. The religious and moral undertones that Tolkien weaved through his world will now be something like: the elves are colonizers of Middle Earth; Gollum's fall to the Ring will be some kind of (and blatantly obvious) allegory for capitalism; orcs will now be all white and also an in your face symbols of Caucasian, Judeo-Christian, European culture that invades the noble, peaceful and perfect indigenous peoples; and so on and so on.

I am deeply tired of Hollywood, and all of the entertainment industry, being so creatively bankrupt that they cannot create anything new. Instead, they take classic works and IPs and "update" them with modern, culture war propaganda, completely erasing the original themes and morals lessons. Twenty, heck even ten years ago, I would have been excited to see SF/Fantasy novels adapted for a movie or series due to the great advances in special and digital effects. These days, any time I see some classic work adapted or rebooted by Hollywood, I know it's most likely going to be utter garbage and feel nothing but apathy.