Eoghan Irwin

Cinematography, special effects etc. are amazing; costumes are too but not to the extent with Peter Jackson. Nothing good after that. Too many side plots and characters. Tolkien's method in LotR and the Hobbit (which Peter Jackson used very well) is a single group of main characters, which are developed together, allowing the reader/viewer to invest in them, and only then separated to fulfill necessary side plots. In comparison Rings of Power has a mess of separate unconnected characters being drawn together painfully slowly. And speaking of Tolkien the deviation from his meticulously planned history of Arda, from its conception in the mind of Eru to the present day and beyond to the Great End, is grotesque. I skimmed a few reviews and it seemed that many alleged Tolkien fans lauded the show for being faithful to the book. Put simply that's a lie. An example in season two are the Istari, the Stranger and the Dark Wizard. The Istari only applies to the order of Maiar who came to Middle Earth several centuries after the beginning of the Third Age, and thus should not be present in physical form in the Second Age. And it's inconceivable that one of the angelic Istari would have fallen into evil before direct contact with Morgoth and Sauron. And then there's Bombadil's character. The idea that he taught Gandalf to be a wizard is ridiculous, as are the exact quotations from the LotR book, misapplied. Another point on Tom's character is that he would not be known as such for several thousand more years, by the hobbits in Buckland. The name he would have been known by, Iaurwain, is the name of his goat 🤦 The show has also managed to completely screw up the time line of the Second Age with characters and events separated by thousands of years in the Tale of Years, such as the rise of Sauron and the forging of the Rings (which took about fifteen hundred years) and the days of Pharazon the Golden and Elendil the Tall (about 2000 years later). And I get the desire to be racially inclusive, but the way to do that is to have characters from Harad and Rhûn, not by having all races present in every group. In Middle-Earth Eregion represents Europe, Rhûn Asia, and Harad Africa. Just like ancient times in our world, races would have been distributed accordingly. In conclusion, the Rings of Power is a great series if you've never heard of Tolkien, the Lord of the Rings, or the Hobbit, and you're fine with the amount of characters and side plots (and I'm not really being sarcastic, it is a good series if you don't approach it as based on Tolkien). If you're a real Tolkien fan, skip it.