For years now Amazon have been working on “The biggest fantasy series in history”. Yet every year, red flags kept on showing and it always seemed too good to be true. And now that the trailer is here, I can confirm: This show is awful.
I was really looking forward to this show, I’ve always been an avid reader of Tolkien’s every piece of literature. And the “Rings of Power” is a rude insult to the world that Tolkien created.
Amazon’s right to Tolkien’s works
Tolkien never wanter to sell the rights to his works to be featured in film or other media. But due to financial issues, the rights of the “The Lord of The Rings” and " The Hobbit" were sold to Middle-earth Enterprises (Formerly known as Tolkien Enterprises) in the 70s. But other works were kept in-house with the family organization “The Tolkien Estate”.
Now in order for Amazon to use any material from sources other than the LOTR or the Hobbit books, it has to get The Estate’s approval. And due to the nature of Amazon’s (horrible) adaptation of the story, the Estate declined Amazon’s request to other materials such as “The Silmarillion”.
Milking it
Amazon was left with the same material that was used in both the animated work in the 70s, and Peter Jackson’s films. And A LOT of (really bad) improvisation, and forced PC statements that has absolutely no place in this beautiful fantasy and spread like the plague in everything there is.
Why it is really bad
By now, You must’ve seen how almost everyone is refusing this money hoarding so-called motion picture, but to do it justice, u/lactaEstoAlea did a thorough breakdown of why Tolkien readers are really upset about this on Reddit:
- Show creators claim to be improving on or correcting Tolkien’s work
- Outright anachronisms and breaks from the lore
- “The show is not based on but inspired by Tolkien’s work”
- Focus on show original characters, sidelining the major ones from the books
- A transparent emulation of the Game of Thrones format
- Massive compression of the events’ timeline
- Focus on action and forcing it into the story where there was none
- Deviating from the established aesthetics of the universe
- Removing some of the unique aspects of the universe for convenience’s sake. In particular, the elven language
- Killing off/ignoring/removing/replacing major characters
- Poorly thought out marketing which fails to appeal to the existent fanbase
- The show looks inexcusably cheap considering the immense budget it has
- Comments from the creators that promise current day topics from the US will be addressed in the show
Tolkien did once say:
Evil is not capable of creating anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good.