I watched the first two episodes of Amazon’s “The Rings Of Power.” Is it as bad as feared/expected? In a word: yup. Here’s the thing, though: it is so far from Tolkein that it can’t really even be considered a bad interpretation of Tolkein. It’s just a bad fantasy series. And there have been a lot of those.
Beyond the well publicized problems of stunt casting and weird ethnicity swaps, the thing that jumped out at me the most was just how badly interpreted the elves are. The elves of the books and reasonably so of the movies are freakin’ *unearthly.* They are shaped like humans, but they are unrealistically beautiful; the light of the moon and especially the stars seems to fall on them at all times. They are *above* mankind. They are a different order of being. But in Rings of Power? They’re just a random assortment of actors with pointy ears. Many of whom have not just short hair – rather than the long hair elves were well known for – but actual buzz cuts. They are the same height as the bog-standard humans they occasionally stand next to. They might be fantasy elves… but they’re sure as hell not Tolkein elves. Given the billion dollars Amazon spent on this, they can’t claim poverty when explaining why they skimped out on these factors, especially since they *did* go to the bother of showing a “Harfoot” (a Hobbit stand-in species that is short like Hobbits, has large Hobbit feet, but otherwise don’t seem to be very much like Hobbits, which is fine because Hobbits haven;t evolved yet by this time in Middle Earth history) next to someone who will probably turn out to be Gandalf or Saruman (though, again, the wizards are centuries away from showing up in Middle Earth).
The whole thing is a weird mix of high production values – in particular the renderings of environments such as elvish and dwarvish cities – and low-effort CW-level acting and especially writing. It is, essentially, quite forgettable in the sort of way that Star Trek Discovery is enraging. I’ll probably end up watching the other episodes at some point, but likely mostly as background noise. I won’t be hate watching the series like modern horrible Star Trek. I don’t know if it’s because RoP is so far off the mark, or if it’s because so many franchises have been so badly mauled lately that I’m just kinda burned out.
