Review: Rings of Power is a Failure Part 2/3: The Return of the Roast (Spoilers)

Picking up from where I left off yesterday in my on-going review of the monstrosity known as Rings of Power, I’m back with even more reasons as to why this show is an absolute dumpster fire. As I go on with this review, it is becoming ever clearer to me that Rings of Power is a case study in everything that’s wrong with Hollywood right now and is only going to get worse from here. With that said, let’s get into it.

#6: Acting

The acting in this show is something that came out of a Disney Channel original movie. While there are a few highlights here and there in the series, it’s ultimately garbage since all the actors look like they’re just there to collect a paycheck.

Starting with Morfydd Clark’s performance of Strong Whaman! Galadriel, she has less facial expressions than Tessa Thomson. Every facial expression she makes is always somewhere between angry and really angry. The only time where she doesn’t look angry is when she’s riding on a horse and is smiling (though as I mentioned yesterday, we all wanted her to go back to looking angry). While I think many of the problems with Clark’s performance can also be blamed on the crappy script, throughout the show, it seems that her default setting is angry. We barely see her acting as a truely happy Galadriel and at this point, I doubt that would even be possible.

Moving on to Elrond, the performance given by Robert Aramayo was okay at best. While I thought that some of the scenes where he’s interacting with Durin were a highlight of the show, at other times his performance was making you ask, “Okay, Amazon, where are we going with this? This is supposed to be a family-friendly show.” If the acting didn’t make you ask if they made Elrond gay, a lot of the time when he was talking to anyone other than Durin, the dialouge felt very forced and contrived, like he was just saying what the plot needed him to say. Once again, while this can also be partially blamed on the crappy script, it doesn’t makeup for the bad acting. In my opinion, even if the script is garbage, good acting and actually pretending like it’s good can partially make up for it.

Ultimately, most of the acting was mediocre and some of the good acting scenes really highlighted the stupidity of the rest of the show. While you might’ve been hoping that some of the good acting would be from the actors portraying the characters that we all know and love, it was often the non-canonical characters that had some of the best acting scenes that made their characters somewhat likeable, which leads me to my next point….

#7: The Characters

Due partially to crappy script writing, acting, and plot (I’ll get to the plot in a second), the characters are unlikable and the only person who you might actually like (or at least find not to be completely insufferable), is Halbrand/Sauron.

Halbrand, though a jerk at times because the script needs him to be, is actually better than Galadriel in terms of likeability. A few times throughout the show, he’s mildly funny and he’s respectful towards those higher up the social ladder, though the show often plays this down to make him a simp whenever Galadriel is around. If you were to remove Galadriel from the show, I think he could be a character that people would somewhat enjoy watching, even though he is not cannon. However, I still would’ve perferred to see Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, than Sauron posing as discount Aragorn. If Amazon wanted the fanbase to think of Sauron and think “I can fix him!”, they should’ve gone with what fanartists have already been doing for years: making Sauron look acurate to the books with a “fair form” as Tolkien described, instead of making him look like a hobo. If they did that, not only would the fans be happy, but fans would better understand why the elves aren’t super suspicious of him at first.

(By the way, this is what Annatar was supposed to look like in the books. Art not mine.)

From there, however, everything goes downhill. I’ve already talked about how Galadriel and the Harfoots suck, so I’ll move on to the other characters in the show who everyone hates.

First up are Discount Legolas and Little House on the Patriarchy, Bronwyn, two characters who are completely made up and aren’t in the books. The romance between these two is supposed to make us think of Aragorn and Arwen (I think) but fails miserably and instead all we’re able to think about is “Why is florist is the one coming up with a battle strategy?” Arondir could’ve been shown as a sauve battle commander, but instead, we get Bronwyn as the girlboss battle tactician who gets most of the people in her village killed in the dumbest battle plan I’ve ever seen. There is no chemistry between her and Arondir, and once again everything feels very forced.

Celebrimbor and Elrond are two more examples of how Amazon hates masculinity. In the movies, Elrond is a hardened battle commander who stands his ground. You can feel the grief that is written on his tired face from a lifetime that has spaned a hundred of our’s, but even so, he treats everyone with kindness and decency. In Rings of Power, Elrond is portrayed as a wimp who is overly emotional. His lineage is never mentioned once even though he is related to Gil-Galad and Galdriel through his grandmother, Idril, the daughter of King Turgon of Gondolin, son of Fingolfin, and is of the line of Elu Thingol through his mother, Elwing. He is descended of the two great unions between Elves and Men, Beren and Luthien, and Tuor and Idril. Celebrimbor is related to Elrond through his grandfather, Feanor, the greatest craftsman the world had ever seen. You would think that the show would do Celebrimbor justice and make him the greatest craftsman of the Second Age, taking after his grandfather, but no. Instead, he doesn’t even know what an alloy is.

#8: The Plot

Similarly to Divergent, Rings of Power has way too much going on at the same time to the point where when the show switches from one plot point to another it’s jarring since you can’t remember who anyone is or what’s happening. While it’s important for a story to have several sub-plots that help push the main plot foward, when every sub-plot could be the main plot what you end up getting is an incoherent mess where every plot is fighting with the other plot for dominance. Not only is this confusing, but it means that there is no chance for the audience to form any sort of connection to the characters. Instead, if a character dies, we feel apathy. We don’t know why we should care.

“So-‘n’-so is doing such-‘n’-such while So-‘n’-so-2 is doing something else.”

What are they doing? Why should we care? We don’t know. Characters just do stuff for no other reason than to make the story happen.

Children, this is called And-Then story telling and if you can’t tell, this is a type of story telling that you should try to stay away from. Not only does it make the story boring and tedious, but it also makes it painfully predictable.

#9: Mystery Boxes

Something that should’ve been a huge red flag for Tolkien fans everywhere when the show was coming out was the fact that J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay were the main showrunners and writers for Rings of Power. Why was this a red flag other than their small resume of a crappy Star Trek remake and maybe a few Wattpad fanfics? The red flag was that they are disciples of J.J. Abrams, someone who loves a good mystery box series.

What is a mystery box?

It’s an overused film trope where there is a question for everything and characters will often spend entire seasons trying to answer those questions, often finding it after fans already figured out the puzzle. It’s a cheap, lazy way to try to incorporate mystery and drama into a show and that’s what happened to Rings of Power.

Who’s Adar? Is he Maeglin from The Fall of Gondolin story line? Who’s Sauron? Is Adar Sauron? Are you Sauron? Is Feminem Sauron? What’s the mark that keeps popping up everywhere? Is Halbrand truly the King of the Southlands? Who’s Rocket Man? What’s the glowy thing in the cool box that the Dwarves have? Is it the Arkenstone? Is it mithril? Why’s Elrond in Khazad-Dum and what’s he actually looking for? What are the orcs doing? Why’s the CGI so bad? Will this show ever end? No one knows!

Except everyone knows because like I said, mystery boxes are a cheap, lazy way to incorporate fake drama and mystery into a show and are definitely nothing to base the show off of. Pair that with the And-Then storytelling and you have mysteries that are painfully obvious to everyone.

#10: TOO MANY REMEMBER-BERRIES

Rings of Power should be remembered for the sheer number of times it uses dialouge from or tries to recreate scenes from the original movies (here’s a link to all the times it uses stolen dialouge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW8gmTesvhg). This is a crime against imagination and shows how incompetent and unoriginal the writers and showrunners are. Every time they put a remember-berry on screen, it’s like they’re screaming at the audience, “LOOK! REMEMBER THIS COOL THING FROM THE MOVIES?! REMEMBER?! REMEMBER HOW GOOD THE ORIGINAL MOVIES WERE?! AREN’T WE JUST LIKE THEM EVEN THOUGH WE ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BUT ARE STILL STEALING SCENES AND STUFF BUT ARE TOTALLY DIFFERENT AND UNIQUE! DON’T YOU LIKE OUR SHOW!?”

Not only are the constant remember-berries annoying, but they are innacurate to the actual lore. Many of the quotes that they stole from the original movies are supposed to be said thousands of years after the events of Rings of Power. The ongoing remember-berry of Gandalf is ridiculous since the wizards (also known as the Istari) were strictly a Third Age thing, sent from the Valar to help the free peoples of Middle-Earth combat the growing threat of Sauron. Similarly, Durin’s Bane (the Balrog that is shown at the end of Episode 5 or 6), was also awoken in 1980 TA (Third Age). That’s 3821 years after the forging of the rings. That’s a huge time difference which leads me to my next set of points that will be coming tomorrow.

Until then,

M.J.