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So, after all these weeks, Amazon's Rings of Power wraps up its first season. A section of mainstream media is still defending the show while others are somewhat calling it, we have a 2nd season coming, several retcons to the lore, and a very predictable Sauron reveal. Now we're supposed to expect a certain special someone from Galadriel's past that I'm shocked even exists in this canon. If there's one bit of character development in this whole debacle, it would be Erik Kain's diminishing confidence in the show.
I'm gonna nitpick a line from this piece:
I don't know if Amazon Studios will face a crisis as was reported earlier, or if they intend to trot out a slightly less expensive season 2 before axing it altogether, or drag it all the way. But it seems, as several others had stated in last week's thread when I brought it up, this is really just a billion dollar gig for Bezos' ticket to the ultra-woke Hollywood clique to maximise his elite status after all. To that end, he likely has succeeded many times over.
As a pretty strong conservative, I loved the show, fight me. There were tons of great moments, lines, special effects, music, and overall ideas. The one thing it didn't have much of was character development--while the side characters did seem to grow, the main characters mostly stayed pretty static.
But seriously, there were plenty of scenes that just amazed me. I find myself confused at the very tepid audience response--it did tons of cool things that to me make up for its relatively small issues.
I'd like to know which ones were most impressive so I can give them a gander.
One of the reasons I haven't started the show is because despite looking, I haven't seen any reference to a particular scene or sequence that was mindblowing and awesome and justified the whole show just by its very existence.
Like, what scene would you point to if you were trying to draw someone in?
That brings to mind 2 scenes, but the better one is a huge spoiler so I'll focus on the other (much smaller spoiler).
In short, an elvish protagonist is captured by orcs, and now he and a few other elves and a bunch of other humans are stuck working for them as slaves.
They wait until daytime, when the orcs hang out under a protective awning while the slaves labor under the sun, then start working to break their chains so that at least one can escape and notify the elves of what's happening. The orcs of course catch on quickly, but can't enter the sunlight en masse, so it turns into a battle to buy time for the escaping elves.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hXMvoApWHT0
That's the actual video, I have to confess that watching it over again I was much less impressed with it, but in the moment found it very cool.
I liked the improvisational aspect of that, but it also highlights the core of the shows problem to me -- there isn't really a story, there is a sequence of things that happened. If elves are ninjas that can use chains and twigs, how did they get caught? Why do they run into close-quarters and get disembowelled by the Warg, rather than using the spear in their hands as a spear. Arondir sometimes seems a master warrior and other times not, and the other elves mainly seem to suck (except for that one brief moment).
And then Arondir 'loses', but gets set free anyway (Adar), where he gets in a fight, but they get free anyway (running in the forest with Theo), where the Orcs surround his town and attack him (pre Mt Doom) ... but they get free anyway. It made it hard to care, because nothing that happened in one scene (Arondir captured, Bronwyn hit by an arrow, Halbrand bedridden with a gut wound, Whatsishisname blowing up boats, Mt Doom exploding, The Numenoreans going to middle earth) has no effect on the later ones.
So you can't really set any expectations or feel for a story. You can watch the pretty pictures, but that's about it.
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Oh lord.
That's one of the scenes I've already looked at because it was one of the few 'high points' anyone seemed to tout from the show.
It's not bad but nothing in there spurs me to want to watch further to find context. Some elves were captured, and there's an escape attempt, with a giant mutant dog. I'm not exactly ripe with curiosity to know how this situation was brought about. Maybe a little curious to know how it resolves, but I can safely guess that the Orcs lose, right?
I'm especially annoyed with some shoddy editing choices. At 1:45 he does the slow-mo flip (which is offputting to me anyway, but okay) and the warg flies past him and is a few mere feet from impacting the tree. Then immediately cut to a new shot that shows the warg flailing around for another full second as they're further from the tree than they just were in the previous shot.
The spatial orientation of that scene is a bit fucked.
The orcs actually win, and all of Arandor's elf friends die. Later the bad guy asks Arandor to deliver a message asking the villagers to join team Bad Guy, which is how he escapes.
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Arondir and the trench? That is so bad - did you see Fluffy, our fearsome Warg bitch (and yes, Fluffy is a she, I saw the teats on her corpse in one shot)?
The wuxia wire-work acrobatics of Arondir, the other Elves and humans digging the trench trying to fight the Warg and the Orcs with bits of sticks, everyone dies except Our Hero, the pathetic copying of Boromir's death with the Elven watch commander - it was embarrassingly bad.
I liked the Dream of the Downfall of Númenor, because it's hard to go wrong with a massive wave destroying everything in its path.
But the eruption of Mount Doom was also terrible, because everyone should be dead - there is no way you are walking away from that, before you can even flee you will be dead.
Galadriel walks face-first into a pyroclastic flow at the end of episode six and at the start of episode seven, she wakes up totally unharmed save for a coating of orange dust while around her horses and people are on fire.
All of Galadriel's fight scenes are bad, from the ice troll onwards. So we have five or six Elven warriors being smacked around by the ice troll, then Galadriel just has to do a jump off a sword blade and kills it with a twirly-twirl of her sword single handed and without even a decent fight. Every scene she is in, she wins because she is that awesome. And it's all done fast and reliant on CGI to fill in the gaps.
There's a funny, if exaggerated, analysis of the Battle of the Southlands here and I think it makes the main points clear; the show went for what it thought would look 'cool' but failed on that, as well as failing on making any kind of sense. Yeah, the Jackson movies also went for 'cool' in the face of 'this makes no sense' but they pulled it off because they were able to make the fight scenes look reasonable. The show copies the movies but gets it wrong all the time.
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