Overview
Set in the Second Age, thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Amazon's The Rings of Power tells the story of Galadriel, Elrond, and a few other additional characters. Galadriel is scouring middle-earth for any trace of Sauron, while Elrond is moving up the political ladder in elven society. We also follow new characters, including Halbrand, a man with a dark and mysterious past, and Arondir, an elven soldier. We also have a few other Tolkien original characters that didn't feature heavily in his works, including Durin IV and Durin III.
Content Negatives
The writers of The Rings of Power set out to tell a story that you could watch with your kids. It might scare them, but there wouldn't be a lot of inappropriate content like swearing. For the most part, the series delivers on that promise. Parts of this series can be truly terrifying, even leaving me anxious at some points. One particularly frightening scene has an orc breaking through the floor of a house, while its occupants hide, cowering in terror as the orc searches for them. However, the only language is a single s-word, and that's interrupted before it can even finish being uttered, and there's no sexual content. It's safe to treat these as you would the movies.
However, blood and gore flow much more frequently than in Peter Jackson's interpretation. Most of it is non-human. Orcs are relieved of limbs and heads, resulting in brief spurts of black blood. One orc gets his eye stabbed, dripping blood onto one of the main characters as they fight. People and orcs get impaled by swords and arrows, their wounds often dripping. A troll (Which is an animal so it's not as bad but still pretty gruesome) gets his jaw sliced in half before being killed with a thrust to the head. Other characters get crushed by falling ice and boulders. The camera pans through a tent full of battered and very bloodied soldiers, some missing limbs. A volcano eruption causes several scenes of people and a horse burning and disappearing into dark explosions. A teenage boy is killed, screaming for mercy (The actual execution happens off-screen). A particularly gruesomely bloody scene features a woman having an arrow pulled out of her, which leaks plenty of red stuff, and the wound cauterized with fire. A wolf brutally bites through a person's stomach.
Content Positives
Characters repeatedly put themselves in harm's way to protect their loved ones. This includes a mother and her teenage son, something that isn't seen very often in media these days. A very strong completely normal family is also prominent, with a mother a father, and two children, who admittedly get almost no screen time but their still there and their parents involve them in the decisions they make. The friendship between Elrond and Durin is a big feature of their plotline, as well as Elrond's friendship with Galadriel. Elrond repeatedly tells Galadriel things she needs to hear but doesn't want to.
Story Review
Before I start ripping on this awful piece of trash, let me first say what led up to this show. It had been years since the last hobbit movie had been released, and many Tolkien fans, including myself, regretfully thought that would be the previous cinematic experience we would ever have of middle-earth. Imagine my surprise when I saw the news that not only had Amazon purchased the rights to make a Tolkien show at a staggering 250 million dollars (Outbidding Netflix, HBO Max, and a host of other entertainment businesses eager to get their hands on Tolkien's work) but that they had committed to making five seasons. News of the show continued to be scarce, and the fact that the show was being made slipped to the back of my mind after a year or two. When the trailers and teasers started to come out, all of the excitement came back to me. When the first episode was released, I was on pins and needles until I could see it.
Another thing that made me happy was that other people that weren't Tolkien fans like me and a few of my friends were looking forward to it. Then the actual episodes started to come out. It wasn't good. In fact, it was downright boring. Of the eight one-hour-long episodes that came out, I enjoyed maybe three of them, and that was when I could get past the show writers completely disregarding Tolkien's work and inserting a lot of minorities confusingly into random scenes simply so they could brag about how diverse their show was. There were some redeeming qualities. Amazon has spent over a billion dollars in total to make this show a reality, and that shows. The sets, effects, costuming, acting, cinematography, and breathtaking scenery are astonishingly beautiful. They didn't get it all right, the warg that they featured looked really goofy in my opinion, but they nailed it at almost every other level. It makes me angry to think of how much money they wasted on all of that to decorate a story that is not Tolkien. A lot of people said that we shouldn't judge The Rings of Power by comparing it to all of Tolkien, which is ridiculous because it is literally crying from the rooftops that it is a The Lord of the Rings show, but there is some truth to that. If the show wasn't necessarily Tolkien but still told a good story I wouldn't be very displeased. After all, the Narnian movies frequently deviate from the books but are still enjoyable because the story is still good. However, The Rings of Power doesn't even do that. No matter how beautiful it looks on the screen while people watch it, nobody is going to walk away from their screen thinking about what they just watched. One critic called The Rings of Power, "beautiful, banal, boredom," and I'm going to leave with that, because it sums it up so well.
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