The recent Amazon Prime series Rings of Power is advertised as an adaptation of Tolkien; but that is not true.
RoP has nothing to do with Tolkien's world, except a few jumbled names and scraps. Therefore I have not reviewed it on this blog.
I have, however, reviewed Rings of Power on my 'general' blog; because - although I fully expected it to be alien and subversive - I became fascinated by the sheer incompetence of the show. This caught me by surprise, and seems to have wider implications.
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2022/02/why-it-is-good-thing-that-amazons.html
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2022/09/an-inflection-point-in-collapse-of-west.html
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2022/10/season-one-of-rings-of-power-reviewed.html
2 comments:
Thanks for all these! Your 11 September analysis of initial and continuing ineptitude - "there are (already) scores of 'characters' in dozens of settings - so none of them can possibly be knowable, and hardly any can be, or become, memorable": "an incomprehensible array of named characters in many civilizations in the first two parts" gets me wondering... assuming all they have the rights to are the LotR Appendices (I'm not sure that is so - terms of contracts would be interesting to know - but, to assume it), what might a humble, craftsmanly approach be able to do with an as-straight-forward-as-possible sequence of the more narrative parts? (We never read the Appendices in reading the whole Hobbit-LotR-Silmarillion aloud en famille - I should probably reread the narrative parts myself, trying to think, 'if one did not know The Hobbit and LotR, how interesting, how informative, how memorable would they be in their own right?'*) Meanwhile, instead, the still somehow bizarre smug oblivion to being "inept, amateurish, ineffectual".
David Llewellyn Dodds
*Maybe I should also try what I can find of Appendices audiobooks!
Ruth Lacon has an interesting article, "A Proposed Script for The Rings of Power", in the November 2022 issue of Beyond Bree which seemed complementary to your reviews: "Material from almost the whole of the Second Age and parts of the Third has been collapsed into one unholy muddle. But did it need to be that way? No. If someone who is both writer and scholar can be allowed a little thought-experiment, let's try this again..."
David Llewellyn Dodds
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