The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (TV)

All non-Nolan related film, tv, and streaming discussions.
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Probably for the best, if you gonna do this, get away from the Jackson look and feel and put your own unique spin on it. However, they didn't really do that, and it looks pretty similar to what we've seen before.

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radewart wrote:
August 6th, 2022, 3:27 pm
Probably for the best, if you gonna do this, get away from the Jackson look and feel and put your own unique spin on it. However, they didn't really do that, and it looks pretty similar to what we've seen before.
Yeah, when they showed the Balrog in the trailer I was really disappointed because it looked exactly like the Peter Jackson version. The impression it left was that the story seemed to be a lot more derivative than one would think. There's a big visual difference between the animated Hobbit, the animated LOTR and the Jackson films, though they all deal with the same world but for some reason Amazon seems to be afraid to get away from the Jackson films visually. It's a shame.

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Still, I want to see how Amazon do it.

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Batfan175 wrote:
August 6th, 2022, 3:44 pm
radewart wrote:
August 6th, 2022, 3:27 pm
Probably for the best, if you gonna do this, get away from the Jackson look and feel and put your own unique spin on it. However, they didn't really do that, and it looks pretty similar to what we've seen before.
Yeah, when they showed the Balrog in the trailer I was really disappointed because it looked exactly like the Peter Jackson version. The impression it left was that the story seemed to be a lot more derivative than one would think. There's a big visual difference between the animated Hobbit, the animated LOTR and the Jackson films, though they all deal with the same world but for some reason Amazon seems to be afraid to get away from the Jackson films visually. It's a shame.
It's a double edged sword (no pun intended).

Jackson's film trilogy is one of the greatest cinematic accomplishments in the history of the medium, so any attempt to remake it would be misguided. Leaning into that is a good way to show that this show is not trying to remake it or replace it.

However, leaning into it too much means that this ever-expansive world is confined - akin to how Disney is so scared to do anything unique with Star Wars.

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Finished watching the first two episodes. Not sure what to feel. I'll continue to watching though just see if it improves.

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Havoc1st wrote:
September 3rd, 2022, 10:30 am
Finished watching the first two episodes. Not sure what to feel. I'll continue to watching though just see if it improves.
Same, I think. It's not bad, but there's no real reason given to continue watching. It feels very kid friendly, despite some horror elements here and there. It mostly plays on the joy of discovering a universe, with its customs, its geography, its people (dwarf, elf, hobbit), and the childish wonder that ensues.
Seeing the dwarf kingdom is fun, but there's no stakes, just two people chilling. The only sense of urgency is because the other guy wants to build something before April or something. There's also no stakes in the hobbit storyline for the moment.
In fact, we're like Nori, we see strange stuff happen, and don't understand.

Also the action sequences feel weird. The one in episode 1 with the troll is too quick, in an episode where it's the only one. The cut at the end of the fight against the orc in episode 2 feels weird. We see the entire sequence, well done btw, and we cut when we get to the payoff.

Also it's hard to know what people think of this show on social media, between the people who will love everything as long as a corporation puts a lot of money to tell them it's great, and all the idiots who complain about the cast being inclusive.

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Someone needed to tell this Galadriel that it's OK to move her face while acting.

No, but in all seriousness she does some impressive work with her eyes and speech. The quality she gives to her voice in particular, neither old nor young, is absolutely perfect.

Cate Blanchett, she is not. But then again, who is?

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I liked this, and even though it feels impossible, we should all try to distance ourselves from whatever has come before. Based on the first two episodes this is a very solid and intriguing TV show with great story potential, and what else should we expect from an AAA title? I have my reservations, but it's not specific to how they handled the base material, but rather how TV shows work in general. I just get easily bored and annoyed by some of the clichés of writing a TV series, but - to be honest - the same is can be said of the original LOTR trilogy... or any TV show I've seen in the past 15 years. So the format itself can be tiring for me, but otherwise the first episode was surprisingly solid in my eyes. It had good pacing, good tempo, I like how they introduced this world and I also loved the ending, the "cliffhanger". The second episode was a bit less adventurous, but I'm sure I'll go on watching this because I'm curious to see how "epic" it will get.

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Missed opportunity to name this show "The Ring Awakens".

The reason they picked the 2nd age over the 1st, despite the latter having so many more canon stories and characters that they could have used, is very simple. They needed characters from the 3rd age for nostalgia's sake. But that wasn't enough, the new characters and their relationships should also very much reminisce the popular LotR characters. With some gender and race swapping thrown in for good measure. That will surely make it different enough.

You liked the banter between Legolas and Gimli? We have some of that going on. Aragorn and Arwen's taboo romance was ship worthy? We have more of that for you too. In Jackson's films, it was Gandalf going around warning people of the rising darkness that they had become complacent towards. We definitely need to start with that, just give that role to Galadriel. I'm not even going to get into the Harfoot thing.

Drinking competition turns into hammering competition. Fight with a cave troll, that was a classic, we change it into Snow Troll this time.

Now it makes perfect sense why these showrunners with practically zero resume were lobbied by J.J. Abrams. They speak each other's language.

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