Steve Dalton

With so much hullabaloo about the racial diversity of the cast, I thought that particular feature of the show would seem more present than it actually is. I’ve also seen lots of saber-rattling about how it is “important” that the cast is diverse, with the cast from the original LOTR movies posing for photos captioned with brain-melting copyganda about how “BIPOC people are here to stay in Middle Earth.” The nice thing about the show is that the inclusion of many races of characters actually isn’t a big deal. Which is what it’s supposed to look like. It’s not a “big deal” onscreen that the cast has numerous dark-skinned characters any more than it was a “big deal” onscreen that the original LOTR movie cast *didn’t* include dark-skinned people. (As a side note, there actually had always been “diversity” in LOTR - think about the different accents that people had. If we can have hobbits with varying degrees of Irish or Scottish accents, and dwarves depicted (as they always are, oddly enough) with thick, Glasgow-style Scottish brogue… then why the heck not visual diversity as well?) With my dread of being “preached to” by a television show allayed, I settled in for a good story. This is where this show is a catastrophe, and has only gotten worse as time went on. Large crowds of people have their allegiances easily swayed? A volcanic eruption is caused - permanently?! - by channeling water into a magma chamber? Warriors from Númenor charge in on horseback rescuing a random village just in the nick of time, when they had no means of knowing they’d be heading to an actual fight? The mysterious package is recovered from Adar, and NO ONE CHECKS THAT IT IS THE RIGHT ONE? Isildur is a stable sweep… who charges into battle alongside the queen??? The show has tons and tons of tell, but very little show. The reason LOTR was so compelling wasn’t because it had lots of dramatic music or slow motion shots of people fighting. It was because it had a rock-solid plot that made the stakes clear to the audience, a universe where the fantastical was made believable, and where action unfolded in a logical, step by step way. This series doesn’t seem to be guided by the same sort of strong story structure. It’s a victim of its own status as a TV show rather than a movie. The format just isn’t a great fit for this universe. It needs story arcs that are longer than episodes, and it doesn’t deal well with bite-sized increments of plot development.

I wanted to like this. But it’s disappointing. Far too much of a focus on fast-paced action and button mashing, which is a huge departure from the spirit of the original BOTW game. Every video game studio needs to institute a serious review process for whether the gameplay of their output is too frenetic. Although this game achieves the sort of easy push-button success that lets you progress through early stages by just charging at enemies and repeatedly pushing the same button, I venture to guess that’s not what most BOTW fans were waiting for. This is like finally seeing Yoda in a lightsaber battle: we all wanted it, but once it actually happens, we wish it had stayed imaginary. In case this makes sense to you, imagine that all over again, we have the transition from The Neverhood (a slow-paced puzzle-based cult hit computer game) to Skullmonkeys (a platformer that tried to capitalize on the popularity of the parent game, but failed miserably because it violated the original spirit so much). That’s what this is: they took an enormously popular game and slapped the same name on it, but gutted everything that made it good.