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Collections: Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth Feels Flat

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Submission statement for Southkraut: Bret Deveraux discusses everything The Rings of Power creators did wrong other than the culture war stuff. TLDR: they understand neither geography nor economics nor anthropology. Also, they are racist towards the Irish.

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I think there's a lot of reasons there, but the main reason is simpler. This is a thing made by people that aren't in love with Tolkien and his world. They are doing it for money, or for culture war reason, or for any other reason - but their primary goal seems to be something other than to cherish and enhance the Professor's legacy. This is the only way I can explain the decisions that were made and the approaches that were taken there. Dissecting the details can have its own fascination, but for me the main reason stays the same.

This is why, as a long-time (since the 80s, probably?) Tolkien fan, I am not even mad at them. As noted above, and I agree, it's just not Tolkien. It's using Tolkien for... whatever, I can't even care about it. Best thing that can be done about it is to file it to a dusty shelf of history where the weird curiosities are stored, and only take it out when we need to feel better by looking at something extremely cringe-worthy.

I haven't seen any of it (I cancelled my prime when it released as a protest), but from the discussion, it seems a lot like the movies where there's a screenplay already written and after that the characters and setting are licensed and thrown stop the existing screenplay.

They're already shooting the second season, so Amazon is committed to that. But unless it comes out in a year's time, there will be too big a gap between first and second seasons to hold interest. People will wait to see the second season of "House of the Dragon" because they want to see what happens next (it ended on a successful cliffhanger). Rings of Power? Ended with Sauronbrand taking a stroll over the mountains. They pissed off lore fans and I don't think enough happened to make casual watchers bother to keep up with it.

I don't think this will make five seasons. I think Amazon is desperately searching for a big hit to pump up the streaming service, it hasn't managed that yet, and Rings of Power was not Game of Thrones as Jeff wanted. Given that they're having to recast Adar (the one part pretty much everyone, even if they disliked the rest of the show, thought was good), and have cast a bunch of "who that?" actors for new parts in the second season, I wouldn't be surprised if the show was quietly let die. Maybe broadcast the second season, use lack of viewers as the excuse for dumping it, keep trying for that golden goose hit with other material (e.g. they're apparently going to do a show based on the game God of War: Ragnarok which has me rolling my eyes, and I haven't even played the games).

There's reports that Jennifer Salke scrapped a proposed Conan the Barbarian series and fired Ryan Condal, who then went on to be showrunner on House of the Dragon. So that turned out to be a bad decision. I wonder how long she can hang on to her role? Jeff wants a Game of Thrones for Amazon, and she hasn't delivered (and may have fired the guy who could have done it with the Conan series).

Things get compared to Ghostbusters 2016 too often, but in this case the analogy works. A product lacking in creative inspiration, love of the source material, or love of anything else really - the woke crap is bad in the same way that a rotten crutch is a problem for someone with one leg. If they'd filled it with my pet social causes, it still wouldn't make me interested.

The difference was that Ghostbusters 2016 was interestingly bad. There hadn't been a case of a "go woke, go broke" on that scale prior to that, as far as I recall. At this point, the novelty has thoroughly worn-off, so it doesn't even interest me as an example of bad TV.

What would interest me is a thorough comparison with LoTR 1978, which is very flawed in many ways but which I have an abiding love for nonetheless. When I saw it as a kid, my imagination was expanded and my sense of what is possible in storytelling grew. I slogged through even the most boring parts the books, which I wouldn't have done if I wasn't enticed by the film, because the film hooked me into Tolkien's world. The fundamental difference between LoTR 1978 and RoP seems to be that one had inspiration but not the means and the other had the means but no inspiration. Bakshi really wanted to bring Tolkien's world to the big screen and though he lost the war, he won many battles.

God bless Ralph Bakshi, he really did try to make a film that would be true to the books and be creative and push what animation could do. The worst thing he did was put a Viking helmet and no trousers on Boromir. Compared with what the Rings of Power lot managed to do between scrapping canon characters and inventing their own stupid lore (mithril came about because an Elf and a Balrog fought in front of a tree which was hit by lightning while a fourth Silmaril was hidden in its branches), this is high art.

And Rings of Power had nothing as catchy as this (sorry, Bear McCreary, you tried but Fiona Apple warbling over the end credits was nothing near as good).

They are doing it for money, or for culture war reason, or for any other reason

They're doing it cause they're not that important and helming a major IP like LOTR could make their career (like Game of Thrones put D&D on the map)

The real question is why studios continually favor hiring not just mercenaries but mercenaries with little experience, either with the direct IP itself or - more unforgivably- with big budget film-making at all. This was supposed to be Bezos' baby and he just defaults to industry standard practices that either failed (in the case of Star Wars) or only work because of very strong producer control (MCU).

Would he build his yacht or megamansion this way? Find relatively cheap builders with little experience or concern for the project as such?

Combined with the fact that when you make movies, you can fuck up pretty badly and still stay afloat. You don't have to recall a shitty movie because it might kill people.

Well, no movie has ever been pulled back because a consumer died. Crew members, on the other hand...

I mean, every time the showrunners gave an interview, they just dug the hole deeper and deeper. Ten years working on scripts which never got made - but that was just down to mysterious causes no-one could anticipate, not because they were poor writers who only got work as script doctors and never had a credit of their own. And so then they decided "Hey, might as well try TV 'cos we're never gonna have our own movie" but they needed J J Abrams to pull strings for them even there:

“We had reached a point — we’d been writing movies for 10 years that should have gotten made,” McKay says. “Movies where the director was right, the cast was right, the script was right, the title was right and it was a big IP — and it still wasn’t happening. So [we thought] maybe we should try this TV thing.”

...The duo walked into their second Amazon meeting with full confidence. And then … well … “We did seven more pitches,” McKay says.

...At one point, Payne and McKay asked mentor and former boss J.J. Abrams to call Amazon to put in a good word, and he did. “We feel like that moved the needle,” says McKay.

...Amazon claims there’s been a coordinated effort to attack the show for daring to diversify Tolkien with strong female characters and people of color. “The hardest part was for people on the cast who have had things related to them privately that are just harmful,” Sanders says.

"Yeah, so we're talentless hacks who went for this project out of desperation, luckily we had an in with a guy who could get us hired because we sure weren't getting the job on our merits. But why people criticise our show, well that's just trolls and racists, you know?"

"Yeah, so we're talentless hacks who went for this project out of desperation, luckily we had an in with a guy who could get us hired because we sure weren't getting the job on our merits. But why people criticise our show, well that's just trolls and racists, you know?"

They don't care what we think. They're selling themselves to the industry as "we had experience, took us a while to get here, now we're here". You tend to see this a lot with actors who talk about their long struggle or how many rounds of auditions and screen tests they went in for a momentous role.

This usually works better when your movie /performance isn't a total flop (it usually happens on the promotional circuit before release) but, as you point out, they have a solution to that: hiding behind the alleged victims of racism and sexism.

The real question is why studios continually favor hiring not just mercenaries but mercenaries with little experience

I suspect maybe because mercenaries with experience can't speak fluent woke, and mercenaries with little experience can. And studio executives feel that if they don't have enough woke credentials, the critics and twitter mob will rip them a new one, and they certainly don't want that to happen. So it's not like they choose poor producers, it's that their criteria for choosing weren't "who would make the best story", but, for example, "who would ensure best hype among people that matter". Even if the goal isn't explicitly to make a woke product, if you hire people that don't rub the woke the right way, there would be wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and nobody wants that trouble.

Actually, if you read "Whither Tartaria" and numerous articles on the same topic lately, there are indications that yes, at least some mansions are built this way too - i.e. that the choice had more to do with social currents than with the expected utility of the result. Not sure about yachts, I know nothing about that.

I've seen some speculation that it is because they're unknowns, thus will be a lot more biddable to being told what to do and how to do it. A big-name A-list director with an established body of work can walk off set and even if the studio tries to say it's because the guy is an asshole, the director can appeal to what he's done before as evidence of the quality of his work and that the studio wanted a pile of shit which he wouldn't agree to. Hence the usual tactful "creative differences" angle when this happens. EDIT: I mean, look at Henry Cavill and The Witcher and now Superman. Nobody is saying, at least that I can see, that Cavill is in the wrong here. Most reaction has been 'he was a fan of the original Witcher stuff and the writers didn't give a shit about the lore so that's why he was pushed out' and even if reaction to the decision about Superman has been mixed, with some happy about a reboot, nobody says "yeah, that Cavill was rubbish".

A bunch of no-names? They can't afford to do that, because the studio can make it that they'll never work again. So they'll be "yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir" when the ninety dozen producers want this change, that added in, the other thing taken out (seriously, I counted up, and between executive producers and assistant producers and plain producers, there are something like thirteen of them for an eight-episode season, more than directors or writers!) and other executive meddling.

Payne and McKay have no big reputation or record, so if (say) Jennifer Salke says "No toxic masculinity! More women!" then we get Galadriel who can one-shot an ice troll, Míriel is now Queen-Regent, Bronwyn the Village Healer is de facto war leader of the Southlands villagers, and Elendil now has a daughter instead of a second son. "We need diversity!" Black Elves and black Dwarves coming right up, sir! Galadriel/Sauron romance - well okay, they probably thought that one up themselves.

Galadriel/Sauron romance - well okay, they probably thought that one up themselves.

Idk - star-crossed lovers are a staple of the most successful sci-Fi and fantasy movies/TV:

  • Both LOTR trilogies had them (Aragorn-Arwen, Tauriel-Kili)

  • Star Wars trilogies has them (Luke-Leia*, Anakin-Padme and Rey-Kylo - and that's just the 9 main films)

  • Game of Thrones (Jon-Ygritte, Lyanna-Rhaegar, Jon-Daenerys, Jamie-Cersei, Daario-Daenerys*)

Given this, it wouldn't surprise me at all if producers specifically asked for some star-crossed lovers. Assuming the orcs are off the table, that kind of leads to Sauron as the obvious choice (well besides maybe Pharazôn).

** These are stretches

Maybe there just aren't that many mercenaries with experience [left]? Are the showrunners unionized?

I don't know if it's necessarily that - it's that writing a really well-crafted story difficult. I'm sure there are lots of passionate fans of Tolkien who couldn't replicate his genius. The difference is that they don't get (jesus christ) half a BILLION dollars to realize their terrible vision. To me, it's that lack of appreciation for the craft that is the issue. Peter Jackson is a born filmmaker. He appreciates the craft that goes into making something great - that 'scenes' and 'stories' are the emergent property of lots of tedious, difficult, practical work. That's why even though he heavily alters many key scenes and characters, his work stands on it's own feet. The writers of Rings of Power are unwilling to do any work.

I've seen some pretty grotesque Tolkien adaptations. And in some of those the lack of craftsmanship (and budgets) was obvious. But here I think the problem wasn't that.

The writers of Rings of Power are unwilling to do any work.

And the reason for that I think was that they weren't in love with the world and the story. If you are, you'd put in your best work, billion dollars or not - just because that's what you dreamt of doing for ages. But that didn't seem to happen here. It's like the parts of the story for them were just tokens which can be combined in any way or form and as soon as it looks passable to them, it's good enough. I think it's not because the lack of skill - but because they though whatever they did is good enough and they don't need to do better.

Yeah, the Peter Jackson LOTR movies aren't especially great adaptations of the book, but they are great movies on their own merits. By most accounts, this Amazon show is a bad adaptation and it's bad on its own merits.

Peter Jackson is interesting because he got his start making completely insane horror comedy movies on no budget.

The showrunner for Rings of Power is fucking nobody. Not even kidding. The guy basically has no other credits and he was given half a billion dollars to go nuts with. It's mind-boggling.

When I heard Jackson got the job, I was "Wait a minute, that guy who made The Frighteners? Okay, I enjoyed that movie, but adapting Tolkien?"

Well, it worked out fantastically. There are decisions Jackson made with the adaptation that I don't agree with, and things I definitely would not have done, but in the end - he wanted to make a Tolkien movie, not a Peter Jackson movie.

Payne and McKay, whatever they may say about being huge fans and going back to the books, want to make their own version.

I watched Meet The Feebles sometime after LoTR, and I could definitely see how Jackson turned his ability to get people invested in a storyline into heading up the greatest movie shoots of all time. There's just something about how he didn't shy away from pain and character motivation which suited his adaptation.

On a tangential note, is it just me or does the AmazonBasics version of Elrond look kind of like a less chubby, more British version of SBF? Something about the shape of his eyes...

Thanks!

Oh, I have entire rants on this topic and I've relieved my mind more than once. Basically, it's not Tolkien. The characters may have the same names as characters he wrote, but they're not the same at all.

The Harfoots were particularly painful, but it's not so much racism as "Yank who has Irish name and a great-great-grand da somewhere back in the 19th century does typical Hollywood diddley-eye version of the Irish". Wince-inducing, but not meant to be insulting, just patronising. That the Harfoots are, as negative reviews have called them, dirty little psychopaths has nothing to do with my proud island race (ahem).

It's just one more example of how the showrunners do not have one single clue. They certainly don't understand Tolkien or his world.

One of the funniest reviews is this ongoing series of reviewing each episode. The guy is Australian, so warning for the language getting saltier as the episodes go by. But parody and criticism can't outdo the writers of the actual show who made it that "You can take a pyroclastic flow to the face and come out of it with nothing more than a dusting of ash".

This one is a little more on the nose, depending on your tolerance for comparisons to the Holocaust. It takes the position that the showrunners deliberately made Galadriel a psycho killer in a subtle psychological study, and not that they were incompetent buffoons who tried to do "driven by vengeance" but created "absolute bitch nobody could like". He also has a Northern Ireland accent, so some might need to turn on the subtitles 😁

He also has a Northern Ireland accent

Rings of Pyre

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