I put this up for friends on Facebook first, but it seems like a good thing to push out here as well. The most interesting conversation on FB was about Galadriel, who both disappointed most of us and yet remains the character and plot-engine that they might be able to do some interesting things with. (My friend Misty Bastian I thought had a particularly good insight into a possible character template/referent for Galadriel in the Second Age as Sauron makes his charismatic appearance, which is Medea rather than Cassandra: alone, bitter, scorned and scornful, proud, and perhaps a little bit bored. Complex, as she should be, rather than just ‘hunter of Sauron’.)
Aside #1 before the main commentary: the scene with the mean elf kids in Valinor is just really off. Elves in Tolkien aren’t intrinsically good, but when they’re bad, they’re bad in an epic way, not as trivial schoolyard bullies.
Aside #2: I’m wildly enthusiastic about the diversity in casting, but I’m beginning to be modestly frustrated by the way that showrunners use that as a way to counter all criticism of what they’ve made, promoting the assumption that all criticism is motivated by racism. (Some of it plainly is, mind you.)
I didn't feel bitter hatred for The Rings of Power but neither did I enjoy it very much. It's just kind of there.
My daughter I think nailed the basic problem. The showrunners don't have any ideas about how to make this special beyond spending money on making it look beautiful. That's not enough.
Tolkien's work created the template for modern high fantasy. Jackson's Lord of the Rings films performed the miraculous feat of putting LOTR onto the screen in a way that drew on Tolkien's language with great skill (e.g., often making it sound better than it would if you had actors reading Tolkien's written dialogue verbatim) while making some changes that strengthened character arcs and invited contemporary audiences into the narrative. (I have my minor gripes about a few of the changes, most signally to the Ent plotline, but ok.)
But because those films were such a success, they essentially made the template available to mass culture where it previously had been a known and familiar thing mostly to D&D players and readers of high fantasy. The last half of Fellowship of the Ring is more or less a really great role-playing game session; Tolkien's template was used in hundreds of derivative works by lesser authors. But by the time the Jackson movies came out, the genre had thankfully moved on--there had been a number of "Tolkien-killer" fantasy novels, some explicitly written to reject his template, some just breezing right by it. (Game of Thrones, Perdido Street Station, His Dark Materials, The Blade Itself, etc.)
So there's this dual movement in the genre: the template became something that had been successfully put onto screen, while the genre itself had radiated outward along a whole new set of lines. The culture was ready for more.
And we got more, most signally in the form of the Game of Thrones series on HBO. But some of the older derivative works limped less successfully onto television as executives clambered all over themselves to claim the piles of intellectual property that had previously lain fallow as if in the hoard of some minor dragon. For the most part, we all scarcely noticed because neither the source material nor the adapations were very good. The Shannara books? Who cares. Wheel of Time? Eh, ok. Narnia? Nice start, but the 2nd and 3rd movies were failures, if of different sorts.
The best successes in aesthetic terms in the post-LOTR era were actually films that adapted fantasy works not built on Tolkien's template. But even Tolkien's template fared well in other contexts: for example, the explosion of filmed or online sessions of role-playing game sessions. The point is that it became highly visible and familiar even to audiences who hadn't grown up reading LOTR so often that the covers fell off.
So when you spend a billion dollars making something of the Appendices of Lord of the Rings, you have a problem. The problem is, "How do we make this something different than a visually sumptuous generic fantasy series that might as well be The Wheel of Time?" And the showrunners here did not solve that problem. They barely seem aware that it exists.
The Appendices give you some wriggle room precisely because they are so sketchy. But what they did is just walk right back into "there's complacency in Fairyland but a mysterious evil is rising, can the designated Cassandra wake people up in time?" If you handed the core books of the 5th Edition of D&D to a nine-year old and said, "Make a campaign to play in for your friends", a lot of them would come up with that narrative template because it's all around us, everywhere.
There's only three ways to make this feel special--to essentially reclaim the Iron Throne of High Fantasy, as it were--and I think the showrunners have already blown it on all three. The first would be to try and create something whose language captures or reproduces the formal-sounding cadences of Tolkien's language while not seeming stilted. (As Tolkien often does.) Not happening.
The second would be to invent a completely new visual style and mood that pointedly diverges from Jackson's aesthetic, essentially saying that the Second Age of Middle-Earth looks fairer (and maybe feels fouler) than the Middle-Earth we know. Well, nope, they didn't do that. This is a slavish reproduction of Jackson's visual styling that also manages to banalize it somehow. E.g., there is no real grandeur or remoteness to the elves, for just one example. The only visually distinctive thing so far was two human hunters who wear giant antlers on their backpacks--I frankly wanted to follow them rather than hang out with hobbits who seemed less like English yeoman farmers and more like a busy Saturday street scene in a charming small town in Napa County California.
And so the third thing they might have done. The hardest thing to do really powerfully would be to understand what the Second Age *is* in terms of Tolkien's legendarium. When this story starts Middle-Earth has recovered from the enormous destruction of the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age, a war where the gods literally came to Middle-Earth and entire landmasses were destroyed or sunk. (It's quite plausible that centuries later much of Middle-Earth has places that are unknown to any of those who live in it as a result.)
It's more than recovered, really. Middle-Earth in the early Second Age is the best that it will ever be. It is a utopia. There is a powerful, prideful, remarkable civilization of long-lived and noble Men in Numenor. The Dwarves are thriving in Khazad-dum. The Elves are thriving in several spectacular kingdoms. Dwarves and elves are friends and trade regularly with one another. There are dark things around the edges of the world and the East of Middle-Earth is largely unknown to those who dwell in the West, but none of that disturbs the glory of the West at its height.
That's potentially a thematic core that you could use to tell a very different story. Sauron here is not the tall scary guy in armor (what a dumb fucking idea to show him that way in the brief visualization, since he didn’t take on that guise in the First Age), he's the snake in the garden--charismatic, beautiful, wise, seductive. He comes into paradise and ruins it. Or is it something more? Is paradise boring? Or even more subversively, is the same providential will that ensured that Frodo was meant to have the Ring at work here too to set a challenge to the prideful and the complacent? (That they will fail.) There are thematics to play with here that could be pointedly set against House of the Dragon's ersatz mix of Shakespeare, Machiavelli and incest porn. But to tap that possibility takes a real vision of the story you're telling rather than just a default kind of "ok now we need to have some hobbits and oh man the fans are going to love seeing Khazad-dum". This is not the melancholy feeling of fighting to preserve some scrap of former grandeur in a ruined world (that's what Minas Tirith and Aragorn's kingship represent), this is a world that is the best it's ever going to be on the precipice of its destruction, brought about in part by its own folly. This is a wealthy, comfortable, peaceful society that makes great things and looks out for all its people deciding to build the atomic bomb because why the hell not. This is Troy not heeding Cassandra. But you get no feel that the showrunners have even a remote intuition that this is the story they might tell. Instead we're getting a D&D campaign and we've already seen it and read it before.
Image credit: Photo by Clint Bustrillos on Unsplash