The one time I have ever even remotely cared about the
Academy Awards was in 2004, the year after The Lord of the Rings: The Return
of the King was released. I always saw the Oscars as being exclusively
reserved for hoity toity art films that I as a preteen would never see, meted
out by a snobby board of elitists who arrogantly thought their opinions
mattered more than those of the average movie goer. But The Lord of The
Rings was awesome and deserved to win, and win it did. Eleven times, in
fact. Director Peter Jackson had cracked the fantasy epic code, a code that has
been followed by pretty much every fantasy film since to varying degrees of
success. While Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is
not technically affiliated with Jackson’s trilogy, the same DNA is very
much there, and while the show is not perfect it is still enjoyable if one
views it as the fanfiction it essentially is.
Touted
as the most expensive television show in history, Rings of Power looks
and sounds downright gorgeous for the most part, with beautiful New Zealand
once again standing in for Middle-Earth and a very Howard Shore-esque
soundtrack backing the whole thing (Shore himself returns to Tolkien’s world
via the main title theme). Less impressive are the costumes, which often look
cheap and rubbery, as if the entire budget was blown on the cool sets and the
crew had to do a quick run to a Spirit Halloween store with what was left. The
beautiful sounds also extend to the dialogue itself, which is appropriately
pretty for a world created by a man who was a linguist first and foremost, although
sometimes the writers are a bit too self-indulgent: Occasionally a flowery line
of dialogue will come along that sounds profound but is ultimately nonsense
when one stops to think about it, as if the script was briefly taken over by
people that write inspirational fridge magnets for a living.
It is
a good thing the dialogue is mostly lovely too, because there is a lot of
it. Rings of Power’s story is a very slow burn with lots of
characters and lots of plotlines going on at once and an entire episode can go
by without much happening at all other than talking. This glacial pacing won’t
be for everyone, but it is a long form of storytelling that I personally
appreciate. As any fan of Middle-Earth can tell you, the story in question is
also often suspect when compared to J.R.R. Tolkien’s actual canon, a fact that
any fantasy nerds will have to get over if they are to enjoy what the show is
trying to do. Rings of Power is, in a way, just very expensive
fanfiction put to film, and if treated as such there is a lot to enjoy about
it.
The
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 1 is now available in its
entirety on Amazon Prime.
This review was first published in The Keizertimes on November
4th, 2022. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment