(There’s a bit of Viggo Mortensen about Vickers as well.) Theo happens upon the hilt of a broken sword that possesses some dark magic and which one supposes might eventually possess him, echoing Sauron’s master Ring, which as of this telling does not yet exist. Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), whom Galadriel meets shipwrecked in the middle of the Sundering Sea, is, like Aragorn in his ranger wear, a monarch in disguise as soon as he says, “My people have no king,” you 100% know he’s it. The forbidden love between an elf and a human represented by Arondir and Bronwyn is a bit of Aragorn and Arwen. Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), a young Harfoot with a taste for adventure, more or less stands in for Bilbo or Frodo, a small person fate has chosen for big things. (Bear McCreary is the series’ composer.) There are maps, happily.
#My story isn t over yet ring series
The series is very much the stepchild of the films, shot again in New Zealand, borrowing their look, their Howard Shore-composed theme, their “Carmina Burana”-style musical cues. And in this respect, “The Rings of Power” is an enjoyable ride. As do the “Lord of the Rings” films, “The Rings of Power” functions as a kind of imaginary travelogue, carrying the viewer through diverse environments and settings and cultures and color palettes, here including the Atlantis-esque island of Númenor, imagined in a Greco-Roman-Egyptian style new to the franchise. Some storylines work better than others.Īt the same time, the allure of Peter Jackson’s six films, adapting the whole of Tolkien’s pre-posthumous works, was not just in the narrative but the production itself, the unprecedented effort put into bringing a fantasy world to intricately rendered life, whether through special effects or remarkable craftsmanship.
And my verdict on that point is … here and there it does.
Although many enjoy digging into the minutiae of Tolkien’s cosmological, historical and anthropological appendices, what matters is whether the series tells a good story - or stories, since there are several, whose intercutting does tend to take a little power out of the narrative. That male elves don’t all have long hair, as they do in the books and the movies, is not something that even crossed my mind. Doom, it is largely based on the novel’s appendices - or even whether it is in the “spirit of Tolkien,” whatever that means to any individual reader. Some might find it disqualifying, but I do not care a whit how much the series departs from the source material, which is sketchy at best - taking place a time long before Frodo set off for Mt. Action scenes, which kept the movies lively, and do get your attention here, are relatively spread out, perhaps because they’re expensive and the season is long.
It looks good, has a few charismatic performances that sell the characters and is all in all watchable, if something less than compelling - predictable even in the suspenseful parts, occasionally exciting and sometimes sort of boring. Well, I have seen six of the first season’s eight episodes, and “The Rings of Power” is neither a disaster nor a triumph, merely television of a visibly expensive, fitfully inspired sort. Titles of videos up on YouTube include “The Rings of Power is D.O.A.,” “Why Everyone Hates The Rings of Power … Already,” “The Rings of Power Is Going to Suck,” “How ‘The Rings of Power’ Should Have Been Written” and “Rings of Power is a PARODY of ‘Lord of the Rings,’” all based on a smidgen of evidence. To judge by the vlogosphere, “force for evil” is the predominant view.
And so it came to pass, in the 21st year after the arrival of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” - and eight years after “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” the conclusion of its prequel trilogy - that a prequel prequel was mounted upon Amazon’s Prime Video in the form of a television series: “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” And even before its substance was revealed to the populace, except in teasers and trailers and sundry con panels and promotional videos, there was much dissension in the land over the question of whether it would prove a force for good or for evil.
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