Francesco Bertone

Before reviewing this abomination I decided to give it 3 handicaps: 1- Let’s pretend that it didn’t receive a billion dollars in budget. For the funding that it received, it’s amazing how it accomplished absolutely ZERO improvement in the quality compared to the early 2000s fantasy franchises. If anything I’d say it looks worse. So, let’s just watch it as you can watch an ‘80s anime, or one of the Disney’s lesser known movies. 2- Let’s assume that identity woke politics are unquestionably accepted by the society. Mulan’s remake: all Asians. Moana: all Polynesians . Wakanda: all Africans. Yet for European folklore somehow we “have to” represent the “Los Angeles we live in today”, with some very poor taste scenes where they clearly make the male characters act clumsy next any kind of diverse female lead, just because they had to tick some boxes in the roles screenwriters papers. Let us then forget about these things and just judge the story, the suspense, the plot like it’s some sort of Marvel movie but set in a medieval world. 3- Let’s pretend that Tolkien never existed. They already butchered the canon, so let’s just further suspend our disbelief, and just consider this TV series as a simple fantasy, unrelated to Middle Earth, like kids that watch LOTR because they want to see elves killing orcs. With these 3 premises, is Rings of Power enjoyable? NO ! And I’m very sad to express this judgement as a former fantasy lover who devoured pretty much any fantasy series I could lay my hands on during my childhood. The characters are either very stupid or suddenly very smart just when the plot demands it, there are clearly some arcs that could be completely skipped because they are irrelevant to the main plot but they wanted to show some well known fan characters like Gandalf and the hobbits. Extremely unlikely sequence of events that happen because clearly the writers didn’t know how to move the plot forward. Useless and contrived dialogues. A way too much idle time: whatever they wanted to achieve they could have done it in a movie trilogy maybe; if you are unlucky enough to actually watch the whole thing you will notice that they really had no idea how to fill 5 seasons of 8 one hours episodes so they just extend every single sequence. Just a very sad fantasy nerd here.