James Molesworth

Simply woeful. Our whole family are disappointed. Becoming very difficult to justify our Netflix subscription.

Waiting for the characters to get interesting/endearing to the point where I want to follow their story arcs. Not as nauseatingly feminist/politically correct as the “Wheel of Time”… yet. I barely made it to the end of the first season of WoT, and I am a big fan of the early WoT books, (before that series got too big and long for its boots). For the Rings of Power, I understood the challenges of bringing that set of fragmented stories, spanning over thousands of years, to the screen. But, as the famous line by evil Durza in Eragon goes… “I was expecting some(thing) a little more…. well, more!” Especially given the budget. At least in characterisation and storytelling… the cornerstones of good theatre, fiction, and movie-making. Compared to the LOTR movie characters, who were fabulous from the first minute, the RoP characters are very wooden and 2 dimensional. Also the characters in “the Witcher” and GoT streaming adaptations also felt great from the openning scenes. The storylines so far are also very fragmented. Anyone without a reasonable knowledge of the Tolkien stories of the Second Age for context is likely to be completely lost. For example… Morgoth is never really explained, nor the Trees of Light, or Valinor etc etc etc. Just fleeting references, then lots of bloat time spent on odd races. The balance is just wrong. That is woeful script-writing. I will keep watching, but I can understand why many people are disappointed.