Philip Husband

I didn't have much hope for this show, but it's managed to exceed my already low expectations. It manages to be bad in almost every way it's possible to be bad, to the extent that it's close to being unwatchable. 1. Storyline: Dull and incoherent, particularly the inclusion of the "Harfoots", who just wander around and have pointless conversations. 2. Dialogue: The writing is utterly tedious and clunky: I can't recall a single memorable line, and I hope the actors were paid extra for having to mouth this drivel. 3. Acting: The actors are not particularly good, and their attempts to project charisma are generally laughable. The character of Galadriel is horribly miscast: instead of the graceful and ethereal Cate Blanchett, we get the mousy and squawky Morfydd Clark. The actor who plays Elrond looks like someone who works in middle management. 4. Visual effects: The CGI manages to be considerably inferior to that of the Peter Jackson films: it just looks fake, with colors like those in the sort of paintings that are hung in cheap motel rooms 5. Music: It's actually well written, but it's purpose seems to be to make dull events more exciting than they actually are, and as a result, it's laughably overblown. 6. Fight scenes: The choreography is terrible, unlike the Lord of the Rings trilogy in which people look as if they might actually get hurt. 7. Tokenism: Tolkien's purpose in writing the Lord of the Rings was to create a specifically English mythology: Peter Jackson understood this, and made appropriate casting choices. 8. Cinematography: It looks like Amazon hired cameramen from a daytime soap. 9. Pacing: The show just drags: cutting between different tedious storylines is supposed to keep us in suspense, but this doesn't work when each one is equally dull. The source material for this show is just not sufficiently compelling to justify a series of this length, in the same way that making three long films based upon "The Hobbit" was excessive. To overcome this problem, the directors pad things out with endless slow motion panning shots and pointless dialogue. It's possibly the most boring show I have ever seen.

Trite, tedious, and tokenistic trash. As with "Ratched", another of Netflix's original offerings, the production values and cinematography are excellent, but these do not make up for stilted dialogue and a slow moving and formulaic storyline, with characters so shallow and uninteresting that one cannot muster up any interest in their development.