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I can't comment in too much depth as I haven't seen any of them, RoP largely because in the ads it looked like it was aping GoT and I had no interest in it. My understanding is that RoP was a pretty massive failure. Being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist can end that way.
Oh damn those bloody trailers, talk about bait and switch! There's one tiny part where I was going "Are they gonna give us the Oath of the Feanorians????" but nooooo, of course not! That's the really frustrating thing - they clearly dug into the lore, because only book nerds are going to pick up on things like that and that they actually put the Bough of Return on the Númenorean ships, but then they go and give us Super Galadriel One Shots Your Puny Troll and Sauron Just Wants To Do Some Smithing, Dude, Gimme A Job In Your Forge.
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Rings of power was also just bad, with a nonsensical plot, physically implausible stunts, flat characters, and lawd’ dem rangs nigga diversity wrecking suspension of disbelief.
Like I said, I never watched it, based on everything that was said about it. And you have to make a really bad Tolkien adaptation to fail to get me to watch it when I already had a Prime subscription for football. But surely we can draw some reasonable conclusions from the choices made by those who make bad television, as contrasted with those who make good movies. They intentionally benchmarked Game of Thrones, and they flopped so badly that fewer than a third of people who started it finished it. Bad decisions tend to cluster.
If you never watched it, good decision on your part. If you want to know what it was like, this parody series gets it right 😀
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Also the black Elf guy can't act for toffee. I know he's a Wood Elf but that doesn't mean he has to be as wooden as a plank! Black Dwarf lady is a bit too on the nose for Sassy Black Chick, if she toned it down a bit she'd be more bearable. She went Lady Macbeth mode disturbingly fast.
The stunts. Oh my gosh. Galadriel one-shotting an Ice Troll after it's thrown the Useless Male Loser elf-soldiers around like snuff at a wake. Galadriel pretty much in everything - she's so AWESOME GIRL POWA!!! The training sequence in Númenor is very special, though.
Honestly, at this remove, I've kind of stopped being steaming mad and I'm just laughing at it all. Imma just gonna swim the width of the Atlantic home! The knife-ears took our jerbs! Galadriel horsie-riding! Celebrimbor the most useless smith in Noldor history! The dirty little psychopath Harfoots! Oh, and the Magic Hobo who is not Gandalf, we swear (wink, wink) plus the Eminem impersonator servant of Morgoth (we think)! and of course, THE SEA IS ALWAYS RIGHT!
Adar was the best character in it, so of course the one good actor promptly left after the first season and has been recast.
That is, uh, indeed very special. I had to pause 20 seconds in just from the cringe before continuing. I'm not sure I can watch the whole thing. It looks like if someone who has never trained in combat in their life or even watched a martial arts movie decided to write what they imagined a training scene might look like. Which, to be fair, is very common in action scenes in a lot of films and TV shows, where the choreographers clearly believe that making a good fight scene is about people waving their limbs around in flashy ways, rather than making every swing, punch, kick, block, dodge, etc. a meaningful and believable progression of the back and forth to weave the narrative that constitutes a fight. It's just, you'd expect with a billion dollars to play with, they could hire at least a half-decent action choreographer/director.
HEMA armchair analysis:
The swords themselves seem comparable to a Langmesser (long knife), which is a renaissance weapon for which we actually have some primary sources. Sadly I have almost no experience with it. That said, the ones we see on screen are clearly blunt practice or rather stage weapons; steel wasters.
Now, for the fencing, Curly Blackhead takes a perfectly valid two-handed Pflug guard there...only that his sword is about half the length it should be for it to make sense, and even then he's starting out within arm's reach of Mary Sue. And then we get some overcommited thrust, wild swings - all one-handed of course, which makes more sense for such a short sword - and in between a lot of stepping back to start over instead. I'd say it's credible under the assumption that this is the very first time that guy ever picked up a sword.
As for everything that comes later, eh. No point in pretending it makes sense. Every man in that scene is a bumbling idiot who stops cold as soon as she parries, they wind-up for a half a minute each but strike without any force and are effortlessly deflected, nobody follows up with anything after first contact, and they seem to stumble and forget what they're doing all the time.
As for a bunch of newbies getting to fight an experienced fencer - it's fun with a slightly elevated risk of injury, and worthless for actual practice.
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What, you misogynist, you can't suspend your disbelief that tiny Morfydd Clark (playing a character who canonically is a minimum of six feet tall* and should be played by someone like Gwendoline Christie) can beat up a pack of Númenorean teenagers in a back alley crammed with shopkeeper's stalls? 🤣
Considering how useless those teenagers are, who clearly have never held a sword in their lives, and that the famed military powerhouse of Númenor doesn't seem to have such a thing as a barracks or a training ground but has to find the nearest semi-clear space around the city in which to teach them how to fight - what about the navy, do they only skulk around on beaches shouting at the sea or what? - well, it's less unbelievable that the Awesomest General In All Of Middle-Earth could kick their puny mortal asses. She is a knife-ear, after all! We already know they're coming for the Númenoreans' jobs!
*She's described as "man-high", and taking the basis that later Númenorean heights were based on the ranga, which is around 6' 4", that's the ball park figure we're looking at here. So a good foot taller than Morfydd. Gwendoline is 6' 3".
It's not even just because I'm a raging misogynist. Like, I could suspend my disbelief while watching a fantasy series enough to believe that a slender 5' 4" woman could defeat half a dozen people at once, if she's a master warrior and they're all lowly amateurs. That's a common enough trope in martial arts and other combat-based works - usually it involves a clearly powerful and muscular badass, but the world being a fantasy world goes a long way. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did it quite well with the tiny Zhang Ziyi making fools out of dozens of men at once. But that's the kind of thing the show needs to establish first by showing us what kinds of supernatural/fantastical abilities she has to overcome these odds that would be literally impossible IRL. And even then, the show needs to meet me halfway by showing her struggling, getting bested here and there for a moment before using her greater experience, skills, abilities, etc. to turn the tables. There's some level of incompetence and intentional "waiting their turn" we can accept in these 1-on-many fights, but the show needs to make an effort in hiding it.
But even before all that, there's the fact that they seem to be starting the training by having these rookies fight this master swordswoman using real weapons. That's like bringing in Michael Jordan to teach basketball to teenagers and throwing them straight away into a one-on-one match against him. Not even where he's pointing out errors in his opponent as they play, but he's just playing to win. Sure, that'd be a fun thing to try at some point in training, most likely as a little showcase for the most confident/best trainees, but as step one? All that would accomplish is showing off just how much better Jordan is than everyone else, and no one would learn anything. Perhaps there could have been some subplot of Galadriel getting no respect as an unproven small foreigner, and using this as a way for her to earn their respect, but that didn't seem to be the setup. I'm no expert in things like combat or training, but even I know enough to tell just how unbelievable the whole scene is, right from the jump. These writers getting paid handsomely in this billion dollar production should be expected at least to do enough research to make it believable to a layman like me.
Gotta say, it's a shame that the GOT curse of its less established actors not being able to transition to proper stardom seems to be in force with Gwendolyn Christie. Someone of her stature could make for a really fun action heroine to watch, and she seemed competent enough in the combat scenes in GOT. The Star Wars sequels completely wasted the opportunity with her character. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where ROP starred her instead; that said, I never got the sense from the Jackson trilogy that Galadriel was supposed to be some badass warrior, so perhaps it wouldn't have been the best fit.
It's such a stupid scene that really. Count the ways it's idiotic.
(1) We need to suddenly train up a bunch of warriors in, like, ten minutes before we set sail on our heroic mission
(2) The reason we need to train up etc. is because they're all volunteers, unlike our navy. At least we have a navy, and they're trained, even if it's mostly to shout at the sea
(3) Since we only have a navy and not an army, we don't gots no place to train up our volunteers
(4) Well, that's what side-streets were made for, right? Not that we're expecting to, like, do any urban fighting but hey, maybe we'll have to liberate a village and so. You know. Knowing how to fight in confined spaces? Yeah, I'm not convinced either
(5) Okay, so you know the raging paranoia roiling the populace about the Elves, especially since this one mouthy bitch landed? Let's do everything to stoke that by suddenly putting that one mouthy bitch in charge of training our army
(6) Speaking of training, she's going to go right from "this is how you hold a sword, pointy end away from you" to "let's try and see who gets first blood, winner gets the promotion, loser gets - well, at least a case of sepsis" in about, ooh, three steps?
(7) Speaking of training part deux, it's going to involve a lot of "am I teaching you to fight or to dance limbo?". If we have to take on the Orcs in the cha-cha, we'll leave them in our dust!
I could go on, but Shad from The Knight's Watch did it better
EDIT: If they had to insist on Galadriel being a Queen Bitch, then yeah, Gwendoline Christie towering over the cowering bunch of squeaking kids going "yes, ma'am" in terror would work. Still, Elendil is supposed to be about seven feet tall, and the actor they got is there mainly to be bossed around by Glads and Miriel (which is a shame, he gives distinct impressions at times that he could actually act in the part if it didn't consist of him being the punching bag for the Girl Bosses as a Useless Male).
EDIT EDIT: No, it is because you're a raging misogynist that you object to their totes cool and awesome display of Glads being a Boss Bitch. They told us so in myriads of media pieces that only toxic trolls objected to the show because it was all about Women! Diversity! Inclusion! Reflecting Our Modern World! 😂 So it can't have anything to do with "This is bloody ridiculous", or common sense, no that's not the real reason at all.
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In the media associated with ROP I saw, the racially diverse hobbits and dwarves seemed rather curious, especially compared to its absence in the Jackson trilogy. I also heard that ROP had the same problem of people teleporting across the continent that plagued the later seasons of GOT (also, apparently at one point Galadriel hops off a ship that's hundreds of miles from nearest land with the plan of just swimming back to shore? And it actually works?). Which points to a very distinct lack of understanding of what contributed to GOT's success. Part of GOT's appeal was in presenting us with a believable medieval fantasy world, which, besides the realpolitik and sudden violence the show was known for, included different peoples from different nations looking, talking, thinking in recognizably distinctive ways. Even stripped of all the costumes, the Dothraki looked different from those from Winterfell and they looked different from those from Dorne, and all that made sense because of the presumed lineage of these cultures and nations. And when people needed to travel a few hundred or thousand miles, this presented real logistical issues that would present challenges to overcome, often in interesting and entertaining ways (IIRC Arya and the Hound running into adventures traveling from King's Landing to just halfway up the continent took a whole season, and it was an absolute blast the whole time!). These aren't things you can just gloss over and expect to still be good.
I wonder if the showrunners just thought that only autistic nerds care about that nerdy shit, and what matters is their ingenious powerful narrative that this franchise is merely being used as a vehicle for delivering. And, arguably, that could have worked! Perhaps it would've pissed off the Tolkien fans, but there are more non-fans than fans, and the world of Middle Earth merely being window dressing for a good story could still have been wildly successful. Unfortunately, from what I've heard, the protagonist, a young Galadriel, ended up being just another aggressive, abrasive, overpowered girlboss whose primary flaw is that everyone else doesn't see how correct she is. Which isn't exactly conducive to a satisfying narrative.
Yeah, if the Numenoreans weren’t slacking on their swim lessons, they’d have made landfall without a hitch.
They put all their planning into ship design.
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Well very fortunately you see, she is picked up by a raft of survivors from a shipwreck, who are then all immediately eaten by a sea monster except for her and Sauron, I mean Halbrand. But the raft of love only is necessary for long enough for Halbrand to once again save her life, then a passing Númenorean ship finds them in the middle of the wide ocean and brings them back to Númenor.
As you can see, total fidelity to the books was paramount for the adapters.
In the confrontation between Adar and Galadriel, the psychopath genocidal torturer is not the Orc-father.
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Oh man I didn't even make it past the first episode. Soooooooo Bad.
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