The Lord of the Rings: "The Rings of Power" - Review

Although it had some great moments, the first season of this show was not very impressive overall and it seems like a waste given how much money was spent on it.

In «alloyed», the final chapter of season one of the lord of the rings: the rings of power, engineer celebrimbor studies a small sample of mithril. He wonders if there is a way to get more of the magical mineral that could save the whole elven race with less.

«more with less» is not the way rings of power operates. It is said to be the most expensive television show ever made, full of epic battles and grand views of the fantasy world j. r. r. Tolkien created. The series is meant to be impressive in its size and scope. But now that the eight-episode season is over, one may question if the show has done less with more than it should have.

«alloyed» had some truly touching moments, as did many other parts of the season. I particularly enjoyed the subplot involving young nori and her fellow harfoots as they tried to save the stranger from a trio of witches. The harfoot story is very heartfelt, and it’s this sincerity that really makes these tolkien screen adaptations so powerful. Of course, the spectacle is great too, but it’s the emotionality that really pulls everything together. In this case, we not only saw nori remind the stranger of her belief that he’s fundamentally good, which gave him the courage to defeat the witches, but also the sad death of harfoot leader sadoc. He accepted his fate and simply asked nori and his other traveling companions to sit and watch the sunrise with him one more time.

The harfoots, or dwarf prince durin and his wife princess disa, were both very much missed in the finale. The sincerity of these characters feels strongly at odds with the way mckay and payne built the season around the question of which character would turn out to be sauron, the biggest bad in all of middle earth. Mystery box plotting has grown overused and tiresome in the post-lost tv world, but it still fits some shows. On this one, though, the «who is sauron?» riddle clashed with the plainspoken tone of everything else. And it was also a half-hearted mystery at best. A good chunk of the season used orc leader adar as a sauron red herring, then lost interest in the idea until the finale began with the witches declaring the stranger to be sauron. This made it clear that it couldn’t be him, because it was much too early in the episode. Suddenly, the gamesmanship was undercutting any ability to engage with the story.

Sauron is halbrand, the rogue who saved galadriel from drowning. He comes across as a han solo type, out for himself and uninterested in the quests of people like galadriel. By mid-season, he shifts into a mode more like aragorn, the reluctant king from the original trilogy. And finally, galadriel realizes that her would-be friend is in fact the monster she has spent centuries chasing.

Sauron’s ability to take advantage of his most obsessed opponent is an easy way to demonstrate his intelligence, which combined with his magical powers makes him incredibly dangerous to all the heroic characters in the show. However, this has the side effect of making galadriel look foolish, after the early episodes had worked so hard to build her up as being both tough and clever.

Galadriel’s story arc was not improved by the detour she and halbrand took to the island kingdom of numenor in the middle of the season. The numenor scenes were both dull and oddly low-budget looking. The show’s ability to properly light action and/or night sequences proved to be both a benefit and a drawback: there was never a house of the dragon moment where it became impossible to see what was happening, but everything in numenor, and in most of the indoor scenes, were so bright that it felt as if this expensive production had been temporarily turned into a cheap fantasy drama from the 1990s shot in vancouver.

The show also seemed to waver back and forth between wanting to excite the hardcore Tolkien fans and making the show work for relative newcomers (or, at least, for people who had seen the Jackson movies once). One of the Numenor characters, for instance, is Isildur (Maxim Baldry), the callow teenage son of revered ship captain Elendil (Lloyd Owen). if you don’t know it, or only vaguely remember him being mentioned at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, then you’re stuck in a Riverdale episode with wigs and swords(*). Conversely, when Adar’s scheme to set off a volcanic eruption to blacken the Southlands was executed at the end of the sixth episode, many Toliken-ites immediately recognized this as the creation of Mount Doom as the centerpiece of Sauron’s kingdom of Mordor. But at the end of the seventh episode, the show was careful to transform the “Southlands” location chyron into one that read “Mordor,” just in case the casuals hadn’t gotten it yet.

This is hard property to wrestle down under any circumstances, and especially one where the cost of making it is so high. As the defining show of Amazon’s attempt to become the one streamer to rule them all, Rings of Power has to attempt to be all things to all people — or, at least, to all potential fantasy fans. It’s an unfair task to ask of anyone. That McKay and Payne succeeded as often as they did throughout the season — in the introduction of Galadriel, in the poignant friendship between Durin and the wise Elrond (Robert Aramayo), in the humans versus orcs battle sequence that led to Mount Doom’s eruption — is in many ways remarkable. But at other times, Rings of Power played — like so many streaming debut seasons unfortunately do — as a very long pilot episode for the show all involved actually want to make, or at least like a rough draft of that show. (As soon as the finale abandoned the pretense that the Stranger was Sauron, it got right back to teasing the idea that he is an amnesiac Gandalf, with his friendship with Nori explaining why the much older Gandalf was so fond of hobbits.)

There’s enough good here to justify making like a Harfoot and continuing down this familiar path. But Rings of Power isn’t some scrappy underdog where it’s easy to forgive the growing pains along the way. No one involved is being asked to do more with less. We just have to hope they can do even more with more whenever this behemoth of a franchise returns.