David McKellar

As a casual fan of LOTR I never really had high expectations for the series lacking most knowledge of lore and not caring a slight bit about it, I'm just going to list out my opinion in points. Make sure to take my opinion with a grain of salt as my opinion on 'generic fantasy' made in the last 5 years tends to be pretty negative. What I liked: The acting is actually really good, with only a few hiccups that I would blame on the script. CGI, cinematography, scenery and wardrobe were amazing but as with most fantasy media I found the main and side characters were a bit too 'clean' however that's really just a nitpick. The dwarves were by far my favourite, though I also liked Arondir and Bronwyn's plotline. What I disliked: The pacing of the show is so unbearably slow. The characters while well cast, are mostly unlikeable or generic in their personality, motivation and goals. The plotlines, much like a lot of the characters were generally uninspired. The Harfoots... the accent threw me off entirely, I know that hobbits really didn't exist but the last thing I was hoping was for pseudo-hobbits in a pseudo-shire. If they really needed an extra race that bad to tell the story then I wish they would have gone for a much bolder, less obvious cooker-cutter choice (Hardcore fans be damned). Galadriel... not a fan, she has many of the traits that made me somewhat dislike Legolas but without that shining personality. In order for a show to make me like a negative, aggressive and cynical character you really need something beyond that to lure me in initially, now while the start of the episode has her speaking to her brother I would argue that a massive 8 minute exposition dump isn't exactly endearing. There is too much going on, too many characters, too many plotlines with what I feel is very generic and often bad writing... it's only the second episode so you can lose track of what's going on, forget an important detail and the like without much time to get into the characters and yet somehow it still moves at a snails pace. Too many generic actions that I see from other movies such as shouting "Hey!" during a fight as an enemy is about to kill/hurt another character only for the bad guy to turn around and stand still until the person that shouted attacks them, it's laughably bad when the bad guy in this example stood still for several seconds as though it was the set up to an MCU gag. Final thoughts: What would I rate the show? A 3.5 out of ten or 2.3 out of 6 stars Will I watch the rest of the show? Overall Durin, his wife and the dwarves as a hole added the level of fun needed to keep me watching after the snoozefest that the first episode was however the rest of the plotlines (other than the other one discussed) are just not for me. It may be one of those series where I dislike the start of the series but watch the last or second to last episode because I was being nagged to watch it (Like stranger things) and it gives me the motivation to start from scratch. Is the show really that bad? Not necessarily, 33% of the reason my rating is so low is because of how tired I am of generic writing however if you are the average person that can stomach watching the same shtick again like the people already giving it a high rating then I'd say go for it.