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Got around to watching the second episode of The Rings of Power yesterday, and I have to get this off my chest before I say anything else: Amazon gave the show $400 million dollars for 8 episodes. The most for any serialized show to date. So...where the hell did all that money go? It certainly didn't go to the sets or the costumes or the makeup. Everything looks cheap and shoddy. The wardrobes in particular are shockingly subpar. There is no sense of beauty or care for the minutiae of the world, no eye for fine detail. Elrond might as well have been wearing fabric straight from the role for all the style and life it had. Frumpy and ugly and shapeless.
I'm not a Tolkien stan, but it offends me. It's so blatantly indifferent to the characters and the world. We gave you these cardboard cutouts, so give us your time and your money and be grateful. If I had put so little effort into my schoolwork, I would have been chewed to hell and back for being lazy and wasting the teacher's time, and nobody was paying me for it. That Amazon can churn this out and not only be proud of it but expect awards for it stuns me with its gross audacity.
Peter Jackson's first trilogy had a quarter of the budget and twenty times the love, and it shows. The costumes are sublime, and everything looks and feels real. Even the CGI, when used, looks vivid and has depth and blends almost seamlessly into the sets and practical effects. Those movies will still be held up as masterpieces and discussed in film schools 100 years from now, and well they should.
Amazon's version should be an object lesson in what not to do.
It's the small things. The elf ears are painfully fake. They look like unfinished gelatin. And I'm sorry, but elves are ageless. They should not have sagging jowls and age lines and look like puffy bureaucrats who fought their way through the aisles of a Michael's craft store and emerged from battle clad in their trophies. They need to project a remote splendor, not a vague sense of soft-palmed, oblivious indolence. Tall, graceful, sturdy. And they need to have long hair. Otherwise, they're just Romans in dollar-store tablecloths.
As for the plot, I like "Elrond." Pardon the quotes, but this short-haired, plummy twit would get stomped into a quivering puddle by Hugo Weaving's Elrond. Elrond is supposed to be young here, not an idiot, Pippin in bigger clothes. He would not be so ignorant of the way most people in Middle Earth experience the passage of time. He is, after all, Elrond Half-Elven. Even if he could not travel to Khazad-Dum in person, he would have written, would have tried to maintain a connection. But nope, we're supposed to believe he just let the friendship lapse because it never occurred to him that twenty years was a long time. No, thank you. You're not diddling me well enough for me to abide that fiction.
Galadriel is meant to be principled and driven, but she just comes off as an obsessive loon who acts rashly and fails to consider consequences to others. And she's awfully haggard for someone who is supposed to be a legendary beauty. Wan, lank hair, cracked lips. Did they even bother with makeup for her. They can CGI a ridiculous sea worm, but can't make her not look like ass on a cracker? I ask again, where did the money go? Whose ass was it stuffed up in order to get it through customs on the way to the offshore account?
As for thehobbits Harfoots, I don't care.
I don't care.
I don't care.
I'm going to tough it out because I want to get to the orc battles of season two, but this series will likely be forgotten immediately.
I'm not a Tolkien stan, but it offends me. It's so blatantly indifferent to the characters and the world. We gave you these cardboard cutouts, so give us your time and your money and be grateful. If I had put so little effort into my schoolwork, I would have been chewed to hell and back for being lazy and wasting the teacher's time, and nobody was paying me for it. That Amazon can churn this out and not only be proud of it but expect awards for it stuns me with its gross audacity.
Peter Jackson's first trilogy had a quarter of the budget and twenty times the love, and it shows. The costumes are sublime, and everything looks and feels real. Even the CGI, when used, looks vivid and has depth and blends almost seamlessly into the sets and practical effects. Those movies will still be held up as masterpieces and discussed in film schools 100 years from now, and well they should.
Amazon's version should be an object lesson in what not to do.
It's the small things. The elf ears are painfully fake. They look like unfinished gelatin. And I'm sorry, but elves are ageless. They should not have sagging jowls and age lines and look like puffy bureaucrats who fought their way through the aisles of a Michael's craft store and emerged from battle clad in their trophies. They need to project a remote splendor, not a vague sense of soft-palmed, oblivious indolence. Tall, graceful, sturdy. And they need to have long hair. Otherwise, they're just Romans in dollar-store tablecloths.
As for the plot, I like "Elrond." Pardon the quotes, but this short-haired, plummy twit would get stomped into a quivering puddle by Hugo Weaving's Elrond. Elrond is supposed to be young here, not an idiot, Pippin in bigger clothes. He would not be so ignorant of the way most people in Middle Earth experience the passage of time. He is, after all, Elrond Half-Elven. Even if he could not travel to Khazad-Dum in person, he would have written, would have tried to maintain a connection. But nope, we're supposed to believe he just let the friendship lapse because it never occurred to him that twenty years was a long time. No, thank you. You're not diddling me well enough for me to abide that fiction.
Galadriel is meant to be principled and driven, but she just comes off as an obsessive loon who acts rashly and fails to consider consequences to others. And she's awfully haggard for someone who is supposed to be a legendary beauty. Wan, lank hair, cracked lips. Did they even bother with makeup for her. They can CGI a ridiculous sea worm, but can't make her not look like ass on a cracker? I ask again, where did the money go? Whose ass was it stuffed up in order to get it through customs on the way to the offshore account?
As for the
I don't care.
I don't care.
I'm going to tough it out because I want to get to the orc battles of season two, but this series will likely be forgotten immediately.
