lothos 2008

two words: 'disappointing' and 'unsatisfying' ...have watched all 8 episodes and was underwhelmed by each one. the script was consistently poor, as was the dialogue, acting, editing and sound...the only vaguely 'good' thing (and by 'good', that is relative to the other things...even 'good' in this show means 'meh' objectively) were some if the visuals...while other cgi/vfx look like they were copied from a PS2 game... ...as for being 'true to Tolkien', no...a very big no...for Tolkien, Middle Earth was a labour of love, he worked on it for over 50yrs and writing the first sentence of The Hobbit was essentially an accident and he had to talked into writing The Lord of the Rings itself...other background books (e.g. The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales) were compiled by Tolkien's son, Christopher, and published after Tolkien's death. with this in mind, the writers of this show evidentially thought they knew better than Tolkien himself and seem to have wanted to 'correct' his mistakes...several storylines, multiple 'mysteries', compressing timelines, elastic travelling times, variable wound seriousness, lack of overall awareness of character development... it is telling that a tv show with a much, much lower budget (House of the Dragon) is getting very positive reviews from both geeks and normies...while The Rings of Power (the most expensive tv show ever created...and has had its season 2 budget slashed and filming moved from New Zealand to UK) has had 'mixed reviews'... the UK is currently going through an 'energy crisis'...if we could hook up Tolkien himself to a dynamo i am sure that him spinning in his grave would generate enough electric for the whole nation...