Brett Austin

I'm a big Tolkien fan - love the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books, and I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movies. I was really hoping that 'The Rings of Power' would be a great show, but after five episodes, it's clear that it's not. First, the good things. 1. The scenic shots (CGI, I presume) of the various locations are gorgeous, which makes sense given the budget. 2. The orcs look amazing. Far better than the orcs in the Peter Jackson movies, which I thought looked a bit too weird a lot of the time. Anyway, these orcs look great. But that's where the good stuff ends. Everything else is awful. The costumes look really fake. You can see that they've spent 100 hours and a thousand dollars making some 'worn rags' that are shaded just right, and hang perfectly in position. They've spent so much money on the costumes (and some of the sets) that they've become 'hyper-real', and no longer look believable. The makeup is puzzling as well. So many of the women are clearly wearing rouge and eye shadow, which makes little sense in the world. But mostly it's the writing that falls short. Sadly, this includes the plot, the dialogue, the themes, the characterisation etc. - all the stuff that makes a good story. The actors may be quite good - I don't know - it's hard to be moved by performances that are limited by the awful script. The one feeling that keeps coming up as I watch is that I just don't care. Somehow, in five hours of TV, they have failed to give me a reason to care about any of the characters, or the plot. I don't think that's ever happened to me before. Sometimes I can see what they are trying to do with a scene - 'Oh, this is an exciting rescue scene', 'Oh, this is where they share some deep wisdom like Gandalf did', 'Oh, this is where they expound the themes'... but for some reason it just falls woefully short every time. It's like they know what they are supposed to do, but they just don't know how to do it. I'm starting to think that they took a dozen TV writers, fresh out of grad school, made them all read 'The Lord of the Rings' once, and then put them in a writers' room and told them to produce more of the same. As if they could somehow match Tolkien, with his years of life experience, mastery of ancient languages, and deep knowledge of medieval literature and thought. It's like me watching a video of Mohammad Ali boxing, and then thinking I can get into the ring and win a title. If this was some indie fantasy offering in a newly-written world, I would give this 2 or 3 stars for looking great, even though both my wife and I fell asleep in 3 out of 5 episodes. But this is a billion-dollar production in the best-built fantasy world in history. There's just no excuse for it being this bad, so I'm giving it 1 star.