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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.
I watched the first episode last night to have a more informed take on it. I don't care about the deviations from lore, and the casting choices don't bother me. It's pretty.
The big issue is that... it's boring. Aside from Galadriel, all the characters are completely flat, and there's nothing that makes me want to keep watching. It's probably unfair to compare it to E1 GoT, but it's weak compared to HoD or even WoT. My GF (who has watched the Peter Jackson films half a dozen times but has no other connection to Tolkien or fantasy lit) checked out and went to bed halfway through. I persevered but won't be watching further episodes. I'd probably get more out of generating hobbit images on Stable Diffusion for hours.
The wide CGI shots are pretty. Get into the sets, and it's all cramped: Númenor has five ships for their grand fleet to the Southlands? The main square can hold sixty people max? There isn't a barracks to train the recruits, we do it on a set of stairs in a side-street where the shopkeepers have stalls set up?
CGI and the New Zealand Tourist Board wet dream vistas can only do so much.
With the disclaimer that I haven't watched RoP at all: isn't "cramped" a pretty good description for medieval Europe? Most commercial activity had to fit within the city/town walls, and the manpower needed to build the walls was proportional to the square root of their area. The old European cities I'm familiar with don't really have "squares" in the modern sense so much as they have random areas where buildings are set back and these became public areas or markets. For example, in old Vienna the only space I can think of is in front and to the sides of the Vienna cathedral, and in the City of London the only green space is around St. Paul's. Presumably these were staging areas for construction when the cathedrals were built, after which they became public spaces.
Ships were very expensive in the middle ages, too, but I think you are right about the number being far too small: well after what we would consider the medieval period, the battle of Trafalgar (1805) only involved 73 vessels, and we think of it as the breaking point of the Spanish fleet. But according to this website, the British navy of 1650 had 74 vessels. Wikipedia says that "In the 11th century, Aethelred II had an especially large fleet built by a national levy." but Aethelred II opted to pay Danegeld following the Battle of Maldon in 991, at which the total strength of the Norse was supposedly 2000-4000 men. That would have been at most 100 longships. And the Norse King Canute the Great is said to have had 1,200 Snekkja (41-man longships) in Norway in 1028.
It didn't feel cramped that way -- full of life and stuff. It didn't actually feel cramped at all, just that it was filmed on a stage (especially Numenor), which is not good for your sense of immersion.
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