Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)

 

Two episodes in, a review is surely premature. Maybe, to adapt the immortal words of Will Self, it will turn into Tolstoy at the 121 minute mark. But so far, my reaction has not been one of entirely unalloyed positivity.

Some people I know, people who themselves know and love Tolkien, and whose opinion I respect, are loving it; so perhaps my reaction is the one out of whack. But then again, a lot of people are dunking on this billion dollar—let me just say that again, this billion dollar—project. For a billion dollars you might think you could expect a lot. Is a lot what we get?

Not so far. One kind of consensus is emerging, I think, from the fan-reactions: astonishing visuals, excruciating dialogue. There's something in this, although the visuals, which are often absolutely dripping with lovingly and intricately designed Middle-Earthitude, are perhaps not as stunning as some people are saying (I'll come back to this). But certainly the dialogue is bad, on a par with the herky-derky storytelling and the ludicrous shifts and turns of the plot. 

One problem is that the elves get the lion's share of the screen-time, and they're dull, dull, they're a-elbereth-gilthoni-dull. This need not be the case: in the Silmarillion the elves are a rather more lively, dramatically-speaking, prone to the kinds of failings Tolkien considered compatible with their dignity and elevation (pride, arrogance, hauteur, impetuousness etc). But in Rings of Power there's not even that. Instead there is a lot of pompous, humourless posing about, lots of mouthing the given dialogue slowly ensuring each syllable gets its ponderous weight, lots of standing still in golden clothes with arms at their sides, looking off into the middle-distance. The exception is Morfydd Clark's Galadriel, who gets to run and fight and leap about and so on, and is provided with a clunky but vivifying piece of motivational backstory (her brother was killed by orcs). This leads to her hunting orcs up and down Middle Earth. But it seems that all the orcs are gone, and she has to content herself with battling a lumbering CGI Snow-Troll, encountered in the CGIce of the frozen northern wastes. A few video-game leaps and swordstrikes and there's no troll left. (Get it? -s no troll left! Yeah? Yeah?)

(Yeah?)

Anyway, in fact, and as ep 2 makes plain, the orcs are not gone, but have instead taken Paul Weller's advice concerning going underground. It's, we might say, surprising that nobody has noticed this subterranean ruse, especially the dwarfs who are surely experts in that whole Middle Earth basement thing. But nobody has. So we wait future episodes in which, I presume, the orcs will swarm back above ground and make things orc-ward, sorry, awkward for the regular Midland-Earthers.

All the orcs being gone, or so everyone believes, Galadriel is rewarded by the elven king with permission to return to Valinor, the undying lands. This, by the way very much isn't canon: the Silmarillion tells us a ban was placed on Galadriel returning to the undying lands by Manwë, a kind of god, on account of her joining the revolt of the Noldor in the First Age. She's just a Gal who can't say No(ldor). But the show's not interested in any of that. In TV-land access to Valinor is in the gift of the king, somehow.

So off Gal goes, an ocean voyage across a body of water that looks, on the map helpfully panned-over on screen, about as wide as the Atlantic. There are various shots of Galadriel and some other elves standing on the deck of their bijoux little sailing ship, gold clothes, arms at their sides, staring straight ahead with actorly intensity. When they get to the Undying Lands a big SF-nal portal opens up in the sky and then, at that stage and not before Galadriel has second thoughts and jumps overboard before the ship is magicked away forever. Her plan? To swim back across the Atlantic I guess, which doesn't seem to me entirely thought-through. She does a servicable front-crawl for a little while, but then luckily encounters a raft of the medusa, or equivalent.

Meanwhile, Amazon not having acquired the rights to represent hobbits on screen, despite paying $250 million for said rights, the show opts instead for arche-hobbits, a kind of ur-hobbit species called Harfoots. There's some lumbering rural comedy with these scatty, unwashed little fellers, gabbling on in their stage Irish. Then there's an overlong interlude during which Elrond visits Durin IV and his wife Disa (Owain Arthur and Sophia Nomvete) in Khazâd-dûm, which gives the show the excuse to try for a little levity, and some sub I Love Lucy-style domestic-squabble-comedy, wincing and unfunny but at least a change of tone (“I Love Lúthi”). And one undeniable positive emerges from the whole sequence: Durin's enormous red beard, which is tremendous. Really, I can't state too emphatically how great his huge red beard is. It deserves a spin-off show of its own. It brought to my mind the celebrated William Khazâd Williams poem:

so much depends
upon

the red beard
dwarrow

praised for fine
metalwork

beside the white
diggings

Meanwhile Downton Abbey/The Crown stalwart Charles Edwards stretches himself by playing a posh elf. This is Celebrimbor, the smith who is going to forge the actual rings of power:  

One other important development: a gigantic fireball crashes down into Harfootland (Hartfootshire, Hertfordshire, whatever). Boom! In the midst of the crater is a young-ish beardy man (Daniel Weyman, billed in the credits only as ‘the stranger who falls from the sky in a flaming meteor’). At first he is confused and seemingly language-less, although he possesses nascent magical powers. Some friendly Harfoots, Harfeet, whatever, take pity on him. Presumably his identity will be revealed in a later episode with a plot-twisty flourish, but also (presumably) he's young Gandalf, send by the Maiar to aid Middle Earth. His kindly treatment by the Harfoots is I suppose inserted to explain why old Gandalf in Lord of the Rings has such a soft-spot for hobbits. Of course there's nothing about a flaming meteor man in the Silmarillion, and this whole sequence has a much more War of the Worlds than Tolkien vibe to it, really. Perhaps it's not Gandalf, sent by the Maiar, at all. Perhaps it's Tom Bombadil (that would be a truly catastrophic reveal, for a hundred reasons, but I wouldn't put it past the script-writers). Can it really be Gandalf, arriving à la War of the Worlds? After all, the chances of anything coming from Maiars/Is a million to one/He said.

That's enough facetiousness. What about the show's strengths? A billion dollars is a lot of money, and you can certainly see the cash splashed on screen: huge sets, elaborate costumes, casts of thousands and top-tier CGI. This has been very elaborately rendered, and will give trufans the chance to freeze-frame and pore over all the little details with squeals of delight; but as elements in a screen drama I thought the landscapes and cityscapes over-detailed, visually clogged, in some cases positively horror vacui. Over-egged, too rich.  There's a reason why the show lifts when Galadriel, having opted for her insane swim-across-the-Atlantic last-minute change of mind, ends up on the raft with those others: the screen is simplified, water, sky, a few actors and every now and again a giant CGI sea-serpent. When it pares the scene down, the show becomes considerably more interesting to watch. Maybe things will improve with later episodes.  

---

Update. I watched the whole series. Things did not improve with the later episodes.