I have to start by saying that there’s nothing terribly wrong with “The Rings of Power” – it’s a decent show – and that’s likely the problem.
LoTR has always been very special to me – one of those works that defined my reading habits for decades, aided in the formation of goals and principles and gave me a standard to be applied against any work of speculative fiction subsequently read. I tried to capture some of that in a post several years ago.
I will always be thankful to Peter Jackson for the work he did to bring LoTR to the big screen. I honestly don’t know how it could have been done any better. There was an obvious reverence for the source material that shone through in all three of the films. I invested emotionally in those films and was truly transported by them. They made Middle Earth, and all its heroes and villains come alive for me. I’ve threatened my family for years that I intend to set aside a weekend at some point in the future and watch all 3 films – Director’s Cut – back-to-back so that I could enjoy a seamless cinematic masterpiece, and I still intend to do so.
I will not waste many words on Jackson’s subsequent handling of The Hobbit. It was a sin – both literary and cinematic – one that should never have been committed. The LoTR films were art – his Hobbit adaptation was crass commercialism that likely had / has Tolkien rolling over in his grave.
All that out of the way – we finally get to “The Rings of Power”. I’ll caveat what I say next by recognizing that the source material here is not as robust as what was available for LoTR. Not that Tolkien didn’t write volumes about the history of his world – it was his life’s work, and it’s reflected in the bibliography I put into the embedded post. It’s just not as fully formed as the source material for LoTR. That requires the show runners and directors to fill in narrative blanks. I’ll also give the RoP team credit for creating, at times, a visually stunning world. Finally, I’ve enjoyed seeing young Galadriel – before she becomes the powerful, almost terrifying figure that appears in LoTR.
Having said all that, the show is tragically average. I know it is because I’m OK letting episodes accumulate before getting ’round to watching. I’ll finish it but I just find it to be so uninspired that it almost breaks my heart.
One of the many, many things that makes LoTR so very special are the semi-mythical, almost magical references to all that had come before – tidbits of history about the 1st and 2nd ages, brief descriptions of Gil-Galad and his peers (Cirdan, Celebrimbor, Elrond) and the mental images of lost places that Tolkien creates for his readers. Above all, poignant sense of sadness that permeates LoTR for all that’s been lost to the evil of Morgoth and Sauron.
With the exception of some of the depictions of Numenor, I haven’t found or felt any of that in Rings of Power and I’ve now watched enough to know that I won’t. Unlike some of the other recent translations that have really worked for me (Wheel of Time, House of the Dragon), this one just doesn’t. It’s not nearly so bad as The Hobbit but it doesn’t even occupy that same universe as LoTR. Meh!
Cheers