Sean Novack – Google

Visually stunning, but too much of a departure from the source material. I was very excited to see a story I was very familiar with from another point of view- that of Toranaga. This isn't that, it's a new story that has different characters that just happen to have the same name and go through a few of the same events. Bottom line: Respect the source material, Hollywood. It's sold more than 30 million copies for a reason.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

I really wanted to love this series. After seeing the previews and how gorgeous it looked I was very excited. For 38 years I've been an avid Tolkien fan. I've studied his and the other Inklings work now since college and have lectured in college classes and sat on panel discussions since then as a Tolkien scholar. Unfortunately, what we have here isn't Tolkien, it's glorified and beautified fan-fiction that is constantly contradicting itself and the source material to the point of disrespect. One of the many reasons David Lynch's "Dune" film in the 80's and Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" film in the 90's flopped so badly was that the screenwriters, producers, and directors failed to present the critical element of what it was that made the novels so successful in the first place. They deviated too much from the source material in order to tell the story that THEY wanted to tell, rather than the story that the author was telling. Jackson did deviate from the novels in the original LotR Trilogy by changing characters, locations, and cutting chapters altogether - Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire most notably. Theatrically those changes made sense, he was consistent internally to the story, and none cut from the heart of or changed the message of the character arcs. I understand completely what it was Amazon attempting to accomplish, and I see that they wanted to "modernize" the world of Tolkien. The biggest problem was that Amazon wanted to do a series about the Second Age, but they don't have the rights to The Silmarillion or The Unfinished Tales. All they have are the appendixes of The Return of the King. If they really wanted to put something together that was going to appeal to the fan base, they needed to pay for those rights. Instead they tried to do things on the sly and simply wrote their own as they went along. If they really wanted to use the information that they do have the rights to, they can still put a lot more of what happened during the Third Age on screen. I would excited to see that product, rather than what is little more than a bunch of writers pretending what they're doing is real. Ironically, the reason that Amazon is pretending that is destroying their ratings is racism, and while they are trying to interject what some would call "wokeness" into the world of Tolkien so that there is more representation of Earth's racial makeup, if they had treated the subject matter with respect that wouldn't have been an issue. Tolkien was an English scholar in a time when England and Europe in general was not very racially diverse. His creation represents Europe in the time that he wrote it. That said most people I know that are angry about the series' continuity are more upset about the fact that Disa is a non-canonical female dwarf that doesn't have a beard, than the fact that she's portrayed by a Black actress. I remember when Vanessa Williams was crowned Miss America, and the media seemed to want people to believe that it was "controversial" that she was the first Black woman to be selected. Perhaps it was in New York and California. In most of the rest of the nation people shrugged and said "Why wouldn't she win? She's an amazing singer and is a beautiful woman." The "controversy" was a sickening attempt to sell papers. Of course, later on there was even more controversy, but Miss Williams has done excellent job of moving far past that.

As a Trekkie going all the way back to The Original Series reruns in the late 70's as a kid on the couch with my dad - and then being captivated by The Next Generation in the 80s and 90s, this series made me love Star Trek again after being bitterly disappointed by "Picard" and "Discovery". There are minor issues I have with the presence of a couple of characters that original Canon doesn't have aboard the Enterprise in the Pike Era, as well as the appearance of one of the classic enemies of the Federation, but they are very minor. I'm VERY glad there is a second season already in production, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing it.