Bonita Puercita

It's a miraculous achievement to spend a billion dollars dramatizing Tolkien without realizing that Tolkien's creatures aren't actually more primitive in the early days. They're more advanced. Gondor is a pale shadow of Numenor. Sauron couldn't shine Morgoth's boots. Tolkien's world, like most mythological worlds, descends from a golden age. Today's people are a pale shadow of yesterday's heroes. So, logically, the hobbits ought to live in vast and sumptuously appointed caverns. I guess they couldn't afford a Tolkienista. “We harfoots stand by each other,” one proudly states. Till you represent the slightest inconvenience, at any rate. Then we drop you like a prom dress. While it's true that any trace of ommon sense might have made the film's creators wonder why harfoots would be progressing towards civilization while everyone else in the place was falling from the golden age, it's clear that sense, common or otherwise, is not their strong suit. They are idea people. That hobbits are products of bog-smeared leprechauns is certainly an idea. Another is that dwarf lords gave rise to Groundskeeper Willy. Speakers of Irish and Scottish dialects really ought to sue. The Tolkienista the The Rings of Powers' lords couldn't afford might also have mentioned that Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings as the background to his invention of Elvish, which is based on Welsh. So if there is any reason to give any type of Lord of the Rungs beings a dialect, it would be Welsh for the Elves. If only they'd had the funding to learn the material, eh? In any case...did I mention I like the Rings of Power? Well, I do. Two of the three LOTR heroes are well conceived, I think; (the ones the wise and beautiful one calls Lady Godiva and (begin spoiler) Gandolfini (end spoiloer), while the third, Elrond, isn't so bad, really. Galadriel as warrior princess is about right, I think. No realm in Middle Earth is as ferocious to enemies as Galadriel's Lorien. Mordor is daunting, but relatively porous due to an occupying army of middling efficiency. Any foreigner wandering near Lorien disappears very quickly. I loved the entire Galadriel/Sauron development. I found it both dramatically satisfying and true to (my vision of) Tolkien's vision. The race blind casting is awesome, if long overdue. Arondir looks more at home in the Rings of Power than any other character. The visuals are stunning if of somewhat dubious taste (a bit video game on steroids, to me). Much of what isn't so great about the Rings is bad enough to be hilarious. The whole thing is fun to pick apart. I have read LOTR five or six times in my life, including twice in Spanish. The first time through, my mother read it to me when I was six, so it is both perhaps my first real book, and always a cherished memory. Without it, I would never have read the sagas in Old Norse, I don't think, and probably not learned Spanish, either. (The author of An Introduction to Old Norse was one of the Inklings.) My life without Tolkien would not, I think, have been nearly as rich. I'm happy people today remain eager to play in Tolkien's world. I wish one and all the finest of adventures in it. I hope they get half as much out of of them as I did. The Rings of Power series has some wonderful features. It also didn't make many of the choices I would have made and that's half the fun.