This is, hands-down, the best commentary I have yet seen regarding the major cultural inflexion point that was Amazon's Rings of Power TV series; rendering obsolete my own prior ramblings on the subject.
I laughed out loud several times - so dense, deft and witty is their take on it.
11 comments:
My happiness about avoiding this codswallop grows deeper by the day . . .
@Frank - While I didn't at all enjoy watching it; I have derived enormous fun from talking and writing about it!
There is a "Pitch Meeting" episode about it that is quite funny also.
@AB - Yes, that one's worth a look too.
@ Bruce - I confess, it's been fun reading your takes on this disaster; and I was most relieved to learn that this attempt at inversion is too un-Tolkien to be successfully anti-Tolkien.
Looking at this it seems that they must have deliberately made it to be bad. There's no other explanation for some of the casting and dialogue.
@William - I cannot know for sure, but I don't believe it was deliberately bad.
I think we are instead seeing 'the next stage' of the familiar institutional corruption whereby leftism has permeated almost the whole process of making the show; so that there is a synergistic destructiveness between woke-imperatives at all levels.
All through the show; sub-optimal and incompetent people have been appointed to roles they cannot accomplish; but then the don't even try to fulfil these roles as priority. What should be the primary objectives in producing this kind of show, are instead swamped by a multitude of interacting and clashing politically correct imperatives that affect script, direction, acting and everything else.
What came out of this was a dull mess, that pleased nobody!
I'm sure you're right but it seems incredible they cast people with such uninteresting, sulky teenager faces. They clearly had no idea about what Tolkien means for those who love him.
"They clearly had no idea about what Tolkien means for those who love him." I haven't seen any of this series and don't intend to (I almost never watch TV anyway). Watching this trailer for some reason put me in mind of C S Lewis' That Hideous Strength, specifically the the chapter where Mark has to undergo an initiation which involves defacing various religious objects. I think Belbury understands well enough what Tolkien means for those who love him.
@William - "They clearly had no idea about what Tolkien means for those who love him."
I don't suppose they care enough about the matter to know this.
The impression I got from RoP was stark indifference to Tolkien - neither love, nor hatred, but they just couldn't care less.
The only thing I've seen in Youtube commentaries that seems worth commenting on, in an artistic sense, is a scene where not-Galadriel gets frustrated talking to some guy and pulls a dagger on him. Instead of selling the central idea, I guess, that not-Galadriel is an intimidating unstoppable force who will get hold of the manager no matter what, the male actor's total lack of reaction to having a dagger pointed at him instead sells the complete and total opposite.
They'd have a more convincingly intimidating not-Galadriel portrayal if they stooped to special effects and copied the 'in place of the Dark Lord YOU WOULD HAVE A QUEEN' 0-100 voice change from the Jackson trilogy (incidentally the weakest part of Jackson's adaptation of Galadriel, portraying something that was meant to be some subtle combination of 'slightly twisted and majestic' by way of a The Exorcist-style freakout)... it would at least be quite entertaining to watch not-Galadriel use it repeatedly on the managers of not-Numenor....
(Merry Christmas)
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