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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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