Alex Pérez-Tenessa

The Rings of Power takes us back to the time when Amazon announced that it would be making a prequel to the Lord of the Rings, or about 3,000 years ago. Worry not, however, as you will feel right at home in these ancient times. Amazon paints a pretty grim picture of the creative talent of the people of Middle Earth, where apparently absolutely nothing had changed during those 3,000 years. Same architecture, same attires, same cultures, same values then as 3,000 years later. It is a cruel comparison to watch Rings of Power side by side with House of Dragons, where so much care has been put into subtly adjusting the show's world to the fact that it takes place two centuries before Game of Thrones. The difference is that the mission of Rings of Power, you see, is not to invent new worlds or develop a new saga. Its sad mission is just to reproduce the trilogy from twenty years ago, with the commercial intent to capture viewership with the least amount of risk. Who better to fulfill this ungrateful task than JA Bayona, the Catalan director who almost killed the entire Jurassic Park franchise single-handedly with the deplorable Fallen Kingdom? Unabashed, Bayona dives head first into his master's request for plagiarism, reproducing entire shots, sets of the original trilogy, even in its cheesiest manifestations, and even doubling down on dialogues that consistently sound like a seventh grade re-interpretation of Shakespeare. Other reviews have mentioned that characters in the Rings of Power never really take hold. But frankly, how could they with that backdrop? It seems like the show capitulated on creativity before it even started principal photography, and the actors and crew seem to carry with them the shame of their creative surrender in every shot. What's left, at least this far in the show, is the data point of it being the most expensive TV show in history, a pretty dubious honor to be sure. And the feeling of watching a powerpoint slideshow of pictures downloaded from Fantasy Screensavers (a viable alternative to paying for a Prime subscription to watch this). Pretty sure that was not the legacy JRR Tolkien was shooting for.