Joey King

It’s not as bad as some of the 1 star ratings will have you believe but it’s no where near as good as the 5 star reviews would lead you to believe. The cinematography is stunning for the most part with the exception of that weird, somewhat cringey slow motion scene of Galadriel really enjoying riding a horse ride. The scenery is beautiful and can see the level of effort and detail put into such a large scale. My issues with the show is it’s pacing is slow, the storyline feels almost scatter shot as the writers seem to try and introduce dozens of characters but not flesh them out with actual personalities. The protagonist is insufferable and has shown a range of malcontent and self entitled to a brief moment of empathy, then back being an insufferable self entitled malcontent. I could only withstand that for 5 episodes. I blame that on the writers, because this is brutal. The harfoots are almost next level cruel with their need to survive through migration. I do like the portion of Arondil’s story and how the elves are in the south lands. But there’s so many weird things that you can’t help but notice and make you go, “well that’s not right.” The dialogue hasn’t gotten better in later episodes, but again I chalk it up to bad writing. There still a lot of potential to get this right but it’s hard to stay excited about the show when it’s rather dull.