"Everything is as it should be."

                                                                                  - Benjamin Purcell Morris

 

 

© all material on this website is written by Michael McCaffrey, is copyrighted, and may not be republished without consent

Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo

The Rings of Power Season One: Final Analysis

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1/2 star out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This series should be thrown into the fiery depths of Mount Doom.

Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which just concluded its highly-anticipated first season, was the tech behemoth’s attempted fantasy foray into the land of prestige TV.

So, was Bilbo Bezos’ billion dollar bet on building his one ring to rule them all in the form of a J.R.R. Tolkien TV universe worth those beaucoup bucks?

Nope.

It’s not hyperbole to declare that The Rings of Power is an unmitigated disaster as it’s gone over about as well as an all Hobbit (or Harfoot) team competing in the NBA.

It’s difficult to know the exact ratings for the series as streamers are coy about specifics, but it’s not difficult to see that the show was a catastrophe creatively and gained zero cultural traction except in generating memes that mocked it.

The sprawling series, which chronicled various, rather flaccid dramas across Middle-Earth in the Second Age involving Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Harfoots and Humans, felt astonishingly small for something with such large ambitions and attempted scope.

The final two episodes of the series were touted as the episodes that would vault The Rings of Power out of the morass of the miserably sub-mediocre episodes that came before it and into the public consciousness. But boy-oh-boy that ‘twas not to be.

Episodes seven and eight were just as painfully amateurish as the rest of the series.

The big battle billed in episode seven was in practice a small skirmish that felt foolish and looked absurd, like something scrapped together from the cutting room floor of an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, rather than something in a billion-dollar tv show.

Then there were the big revelations in the season finale that weren’t very revealing at all. Sauron was unmasked – even though any idiot with half a brain in their head already knew who Sauron was all along, and then there was the pseudo-mystery of the Gandalfian wizard who the lawyers haven’t figured out yet if they can actually call him Gandalf. Not exactly earth-shattering or even drama-inducing.

Aesthetically, the series, despite its bulging budget, looked and felt like a show on the low-rent CW network. The costumes and sets probably weren’t cheap but sure as hell looked cheap. And the paucity of background actors made every well-populated scene seem like a high school drama class rehearsal.

The writing on the series, in both the dialogue and the narrative, was shockingly pedestrian to the point of literary malpractice. Considering the showrunners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, only previous experience was fetching coffee at J.J. Abrams’ Bad Reboot…oops, I mean Bad Robot production company, this is less than surprising. The only surprising thing is that Amazon invested a billion dollars to do business with these two simpletons.

Payne and McKay were considerably more committed to adhering to Amazon’s cultural political agenda of diversity uber alles and girl boss empowerment garbage than to staying true to Tolkien’s luxurious lore.

The other enormous issue with The Rings of Power is the abysmal cast. Much internet outrage and counter outrage ensued due to the series casting minority actors in what had been white roles in Tolkien’s written works and in Peter Jackson’s film versions. The question for me remains regardless of their race or ethnicity, why cast such bad actors? At their very best these are soap opera level actors…at worst they should be digging ditches in community theatre. Game of Thrones and its prequel The House of the Dragon, have some massive talent among its acting ranks – both well-known and newly discovered…so why couldn’t Amazon shell out some decent money for good, never-mind great actors?

What bothers me the most about the failure of The Rings of Power is that it could have, and should have, been great.

Tolkien’s writing is a rich and glorious garden from which many fruits can grow and prosper, but when the pesticides of cultural politics are introduced, they act not as growth agents but as poisons that destroy.

The evidence of this is plain to see in Peter Jackson’s highly-successful Lord of the Rings films, which while not perfect, are at least foundationally committed to Tolkien’s lore. In contrast, Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy takes a bite from the culturally/politically poisoned apple and is thus neutered of psychological power resulting in the films faltering. The same is true of The Rings of Power, which fails to understand the power of Tolkien’s myth and instead embraces the superficial (cultural/political), and ends up producing an insipid, if not insidious, piece of vapid non-entertainment that’s incapable of being satisfying on any level, most notably psychologically.

The best way to understand how universally shallow The Rings of Power is, and what a failure it is, is that even the people who claim to like it will never watch season one over again. Another damning piece of evidence is that even the sad sack sons of bitches who vociferously defended the series from the get-go, most notably establishment critics who fawned over the series due to its cultural politics, are now admitting the show is a “stinker”.

Regardless of what I, or the bevy of Bezos bought media shills, have to say about The Rings of Power, Amazon has committed five seasons and more than a billion dollars to the series. But considering how bad the show is, and trust me, it really is bad, the biggest billionaire flex of all would be for Bilbo Bezos to not give a shit what anyone else thinks and just keep setting his money on fire to produce a show no one but he likes or cares about.

Ultimately, all I can say about The Rings of Power and about a philistine like Bilbo Bezos having all that money to burn is…what a terrible waste.

 

©2022

The Rings of Power: Amazon's Weaponization of Tolkien and Tokens

Oligarch Jeff “Sauron” Bezos is using craven culture war issues like “diversity, inclusion and representation” to deceive liberals/progressives into fighting for his diabolical corporation and the 1%.

The Agenda. The relentless, tedious, ever-present Agenda, has come to Middle-Earth.

Amazon’s long-awaited, highly-anticipated, extraordinarily expensive, Lord of the Rings tv series, The Rings of Power, has finally arrived, and thus far it is only notable for its artistic shortcomings and its slavish commitment to the insidious Agenda of diversity, inclusion and representation over quality.

Amazon’s Sauron-in-Chief, Jeffrey Bezos, wanted his own Game of Thrones type fantasy series, so he paid $250 million for the rights to the appendices from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and committed upwards of a billion dollars of his sweatshop empire’s gains for five seasons of elves, dwarves, hobbits (harfoots) and orcs.  

The first two episodes of the series premiered on Amazon Prime Video Thursday September 1st, and they are, to be kind, rather uninspiring. The series may well improve dramatically over the next six episodes of season one, I certainly hope it does, but thus far it has been slow and rather unsteady going.

What is most enlightening about The Rings of Power though is that the heated discussion around the show is much more energetic than the show itself.

In case you haven’t heard, the series has a diverse cast of “actors of color”, and features three feminist heroines as its leads, which some argue is contrary to the source material written by J.R.R. Tolkien.

This debate around the show’s “diverse” casting and its centering of three female leads, which has infuriated some and delighted others, at least has passion, whereas The Rings of Power feels diabolically staid and sterile.

THE PLAYBOOK

As for that debate and the ever-insistent Agenda, the reality is that for Amazon, or any studio releasing a product into the public, controversy around casting “minority” actors and featuring female leads is a feature, not a bug.

This is all part of the plan and right out of a well-worn playbook.

The playbook is as follows.

1.   Cast “actors of color” or women in roles that traditionally would be played by white actors or men and heavily market the “diverse and inclusive” casting.

2.   Claim victimhood, which in our current era conveys cultural status, by alleging “racist/sexist attacks” on the diverse cast leading up to the premiere of the film or series.

3.   Create the paradigm where liberals/progressives feel that supporting the film/series is a way for them to signal their virtue and believe they are being actively “anti-racist/anti-sexist” (in other words it makes them feel like they’re actually fighting injustice by watching a movie or tv show).

4.   Stigmatize all criticism of the film/tv show by conflating criticism of the film/series with racism/sexism, which results in critiques of any kind from fans and professional critics being stifled and self-censored.

5.   Claim all negative fan reviews on various review aggregator sites are the result of “review bombing” by racist/sexist trolls on have banned or banished.

6.   As the controversy heightens, put out inflated viewership numbers as well as a carefully crafted statement declaring the parent company/studio “stands with” the diverse cast and against racism of all kinds.

7. Declare moral victory (“we did the right thing!”) no matter how spectacularly the film/tv show fails.

That’s the basics of the playbook, which Disney and Amazon in particular, have used extensively in recent years.

THE OBJECTIVE

These manufactured racial/gender cultural conflagrations and their paradigm of stigmatizing criticism as racism/sexism, are meant to trigger conservatives/traditionalist into attacking and liberals and progressives into defending.

The most troubling aspect is the libneral/progressives who are triggered into vociferously defending a corporate entertainment product, and by default unconsciously or consciously aligning with the nefarious corporation behind the film/tv product, all because a film/tv series is now nothing more than a proxy battle in the culture war.

In the case of The Rings of Power, the racial/gender casting issue is meant to inflame conservatives/traditionalist and actually distract liberals/progressives from a bigger issue. Instead of noticing that Amazon is a company that exploits its workers to a shocking and disgusting degree and that Bezos is one of the most deplorable people on the planet, liberals/progressives now go to battle for their ideological opponents, in this case Amazon and billionaire Bezos, rather than against them.

This distractionary tactic works incredibly well because liberal/progressives have been conditioned to downplay tangible economic issues in favor of more amorphous, emotionally resonant issues like race, gender and sexual orientation.

In addition, liberals/progressives have also been conditioned to never actually debate or discuss these topics but rather simply resort to bigoteering and calling anyone and everyone who disagrees with you a racist/sexist. In other words, no argument need be made, all one has to do is give a reflexive display of righteousness, virtue signal and claim victory.

The liberals/progressives currently baring their teeth to alleged “racists” and “sexists” over The Rings of Power, are the ones who should, in theory, be outside Bezos’ mansion with pitchforks and torches (think of how hyper-racialization in our cultural politics completely destroyed the Occupy Wall Street movement and spirit), or at least trying to hold Amazon’s feet to the fire in terms of unionization, not defending them.

THE EVIDENCE

Make no mistake, all of this outrage and controversy is staged and manufactured for corporate benefit. The playbook is obvious.

If Amazon had wanted to make gobs of money it could have followed the very clear path already cleared by director Peter Jackson, who made three Lord of the Rings movies and three Hobbit movies which in total made roughly $6 billion.

But instead, Amazon pushed aside Jackson and decided to go for social engineering rather than servicing Tolkien fans who have proven their loyalty and commitment to mostly faithful adaptations.

This is similar to how Disney continuously chooses to alienate its Marvel and Star Wars fans with social engineering instead of giving them what worked in the past, which is what they want and what they will gladly fork over their money for.

Also note how Amazon has flexed its muscles to get media outlets to rush out dubious sob stories from The Rings of Power cast about allegedly facing “racist” or “sexist” backlash prior to the series premiere, just like Disney does with every Marvel and Star Wars movie or series.

Also notice how Amazon, like Disney before them, shouts from the rooftops about the insidious racist “review bombing” against The Rings of Power on rotten tomatoes. Amazon has gone so far as to halt reviews of the series being placed on the Amazon website in order to stifle “racist trolls”.

Of course, there’s no proof that any review bombing is going on, or that people leaving negative reviews are racist…but that reality is inconvenient to Amazon and so it isn’t just ignored, but disparaged. And as an aside, why isn’t it ever considered review bombing when it is positive reviews inundating rotten tomatoes?

In keeping with the playbook, Amazon claimed without evidence that 25 million viewers watched the premier episode of The Rings of Power (this is contradicted by a SambaTV report with significantly lower viewership numbers – 1.8 million in US). Amazon also just put out a brave statement saying they stand with their actors of color and reject all “racist attacks” from deplorable fans – who they claim aren’t really fans at all. As Dan Rather would say, “courage”.

THE AGENDA

The fact is that Amazon sullying Tolkien’s timeless myth with the insipid cultural politics of today is not the least bit shocking considering that in 2021 Amazon Studios released its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” playbook which lays out the rules and regulations regarding diversity quotas (50% of all creative roles must be women and/or from under-represented groups) on all Amazon Studio projects.

In other words, the plan all along was to turn Tolkien into tokens for Amazon and Bezos’ cultural political gain. They tried the same thing with their deservedly-much-maligned and ultimately ignored fantasy series The Wheel of Time.  Of course, to speak this obvious truth is met with even more shrill cries of “racist!” and “sexist!”

Amazon’s “Diversity, Inclusion and Representation” playbook makes it very clear that the company is committed to a cultural/political agenda and is not interested in the quality of their product or…and this is still shocking to consider…how much money it makes in its entertainment division.

Of course, one wonders if Amazon and Disney and all the rest will hit a point where their social engineering becomes too financially untenable to continue?

The answer to that might be as simple as “get woke, go broke”. Either that or this social engineering is here to stay because these entertainment behemoths are too big to fail and will only expand their monopolies and eliminate all opposing voices. The current sorry, sycophantic state of professional film/tv criticism indicates they’re well on their way to snuffing out dissent.

THE LAPDOG

The easily manipulated liberal/progressive Pavlovian response to all things race and gender related is perfectly summed up in a review of The Rings of Power from LA Times critic Robert Lloyd. Lloyd reveals his inability to actually think, nevermind have an original thought, by regurgitating the most weak-kneed, shallow and vacuous drivel imaginable.

For example, Lloyd writes of The Rings of Power,

“And sometimes (some) fans defend the wrong things, as when attacking the production for its foregrounding of female roles and casting actors of color where Tolkien (and Jackson, following his lead) only saw white.”

Tolkien “only saw white” because he was writing a myth for Northern Europeans using folklore from those regions where mostly, if not all, of the people are white. It should also be noted that Tolkien created the entire Lord of the Rings universe…so it’s his and his vision. Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, only saw white because he was, shock of shocks, trying to stay true to Tolkien’s written word.

Lloyd then actually unintentionally makes the case that the fans now being labelled “racist” have made all along, that Tolkien’s work is clearly designed as a founding myth for Norther Europeans/English, and casting it with “people of color” undermines the author’s intent.

“Evidence has been advanced to show that Tolkien was anti-racist in life, but there is no getting around the fact that in his books, Northern European types save the day from swarthy types from the South and East, who are characterized with giant elephants and (as in Jackson’s “The Return of the King”) quasi-Arabic garb.”

Lloyd’s use of the term “anti-racist” is revealing, as it’s a nod to his political tribe that he has “done all the reading”, including Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s egregiously vapid book How to be an Anti-Racist.

It’s also telling that the haughty and insolent Lloyd still manages, despite “evidence…that Tolkien was anti-racist” to smear the great author as a racist in the same sentence.

Lloyd then lets readers know that he’s truly one of the good white guys when he writes,

“To be honest, I was a little worried the series would continue in that distasteful vein and happy to see that it did not; Tolkien, some would say, was just a man of his time, but these are different times.”

Bravo Mr. Lloyd on the virtue signal! It’s glorious how Lloyd rides in on his white steed and tells us that he’s glad that Tolkien’s “distasteful” approach when writing one of the greatest selling books of all-time, has been discarded, which makes him “happy”. Lloyd sounds like like a toddler getting ice cream after his tantrum forces his parents to take the filet mignon away.

Lloyd then makes his intellectual insipidness completely clear as he writes,

“(I reject out of hand all arguments that employ the word “woke” or use “diversity” in a negative sense.)”

Replace the words “woke” and “diversity” with “Jesus freak” and “Christ” and this is the type of thing you’d say if you were some backwards ass bible-thumper.

Rejecting the notion that “diversity” can be anything but good is an indicator of one’s blind faith and strict adherence to dogma, not someone with a serious and vibrant intellectual yearning. “Diversity” to the woke is like the divinity of Christ to the Christian. It can never be up for debate. It only just is…and it is always good.

God knows I fear nothing more than being dismissed by Lloyd as an unserious critic, but I must say, Lloyd’s blanket banning of the term “woke” and his refusal to consider the nuances of “diversity” clearly outs him as a devout member of the Church of Wokeness and a frivolous, insignificant thinker to boot.

What is most amusing is that Lloyd then follows this supercilious inanity up with an admission that The Rings of Power does, in fact, do what many of the alleged “racists” claim it does.

“The Rings of Power” does, in a few instances, too obviously adopt the language of modern American prejudice to make a point, but that is a matter of poor writing rather than a bad idea.”

Because Lloyd is so self-righteous and has spent so much energy signaling his virtue, he believes he can make the same complaint other people have made – that the show is too contemporary in its cultural politics, but avoid being labelled “racist”, even as he himself calls those people with the same opinion as him “racist”. Incredible.

CONCLUSION

In the final analysis, all of this venting and vexing about “diversity’ and “inclusion” and “representation” is just meant to divide and distract.

Amazon uses the same bigoteering, divide and conquer playbook as Disney and every other major corporation in America which were so quick to shout “Black Lives Matter!” when it was a convenient way to signal their virtue and cover their asses. This is the same playbook the ruling elite use to maintain the corrupt power structure by keeping the proles at bay and constantly at each other’s throats.

Divide and conquer has kept the oligarchs and the American aristocracy on the throne of power time immemorial. And will continue to do so because the myopic, historically illiterate American populace is being relentlessly indoctrinated by an insidiously deceptive corporate media day in and day out, thus rendering the majority of Americans, who are emotionalist fools, completely incapable of any critical thought.

Ultimately, the sub-par series The Rings of Power is not entertaining, but it is enlightening, because it’s an obvious example of the strings of power being pulled by the elites to manipulate people into fighting for their true enemy (Amazon and Bezos), rather than against them.

©2022

The Rings of Power(Amazon) - Ep. 1 and 2: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Thus far the series is decidedly sub-par, so best to wait and see how the first season plays out in its entirety before committing to watch it.

The first two episodes of Amazon’s highly-anticipated Lord of the Rings tv series, The Rings of Power, premiered on Amazon Prime Video this past Thursday, September 1st.

The series chronicles the trials and tribulations of various Elven, human, Dwarf and Harfoot characters in the Second Age of Middle-Earth as briefly described in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings. The time period for the show is a couple of thousand years before the Third Age events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The main characters in the series are Galadriel, an Elven princess warrior (you might remember her in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy portrayed by Cate Blanchett), and her half-Elven friend Elrond. Human woman Bronwyn, and her Elven maybe-love-interest Arondir. And Nori, a young Harfoot woman with an adventurous spirit.

The first two episodes of the series are shockingly pedestrian considering the source material and the price tag. The nicest way to put it is that The Rings of Power has given itself a considerable amount of room to grow.

One of the more curious aspects of the production is that Amazon, after having spent $250 million alone on the rights to the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, and essentially committed to over a billion dollars for the entire five season run of the show, has put in place two unknowns-to-the-point-of-being-amateurs, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, as showrunners.

Payne and McKay’s background is with J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot (or as it’s known in some circles – Bad Reboot) and their only listed credit is a less-than-inspiring partial writing credit on Star Trek: Beyond. That Amazon gave these two nobodies a billion dollars with which to play in the Middle-Earth sandbox shows a staggering level of executive incompetence…if not hubris considering how underwhelming the first two episodes are.

Not surprisingly considering their unimpressive background, Payne and McKay have managed to do little more than paste together a structurally unsound narrative populated with fundamentally flawed characters out of the Tolkien treasure chest purchased for them by Lord Bezos.  

In some ways it’s impressive how Payne and McKay have managed to strip Tolkien’s work of all its intrigue, interest and insight into humanity, and serve the public up just another middling fantasy series indistinguishable from the rest except for the fact that it has the Tolkien name attached to it.

There has been much ballyhoo about the casting of “actors of color” in The Rings of Power which would seem to go against Tolkien’s canon, which was built as a myth for English and Northern Europeans. There’s certainly a debate to be had about that topic, but my biggest question isn’t about casting actors of color but why cast such bad actors of any color?

Across the board the acting in this series is just dreadful, most notably Morfydd Clark, who plays Elven warrior-princess Galadriel. Clark is so devoid of charisma as to be a thespianic blackhole. And yes, I know it’s fantasy, but Clark’s unathleticism and unbelievability as an action hero are staggering to behold.

She also seems incapable of actually opening her mouth when she speaks, so much so that as the episodes wore-on I became more and more concerned that she might be so physically slight as a result of her being unable to put solid foods through her forever-frozen-shut piehole.

Equally awful on the acting front is Ismael Cruz Cordova as Arondir, an Elven warrior in love with a human woman, Bronwyn. Cordova looks like he’s moving his bowels as he strains to give his Arondir an inner life and yet none appears. Cordova’s creative constipation as Elondir manifests in a vast vacuity in his lifeless eyes, which reveal a vacant soul where gravitas dare not tread.

Markella Kavanaugh plays Nori Brandyfoot, a Harfoot with a “yearning for adventure”. Kavanaugh’s big, blue eyes are nice to look at but don’t shimmer with any semblance of sentient life. In fact, all of the Harfoots are like talking Ewoks from Return of the Jedi, except they are, as impossible as this seems, even more annoying than their cutesy Star Wars dopplegangers.

To be fair to the cast, it’s extremely difficult to act when given such staggeringly cringe-worthy dialogue. And to be clear, as much as I found the acting lacking, the writing is by far the worst thing about the show. The dialogue is god-awful and the narrative flaccid and uncompelling.

Almost as awful as the writing and acting is the editing. The editing is so visually disjointed that it thwarts all emotional connection and coherence. Viewers are deprived of any sense of space and time or intimacy as they are shuttled back and forth between expansive wide shots and suffocating close-ups, with nary any middle-ground to be found, it’s all quite bizarre.

Not surprisingly, the pacing of The Rings of Power is thus far lethargic and laborious. Only two shows in and the hour-long episodes feel like a Bataan death march to Mount Doom.

While watching the show my bored eyes were like Sauron’s, darting back and forth looking for anything of the slightest interest, and usually settling off-screen and out the window at a fuzzy caterpillar making its rhythmic journey across my window sill, which was significantly more captivating than the snoozefest unfolding on-screen.

Maybe the most troubling aspect of The Rings of Power is its overall aesthetic. Except for some truly spectacular CGI shots of various Middle-Earth locales, the show looks and feels shockingly shoddy and cheap, like some second-rate series on the deservedly-maligned CW network.

To be fair, there are six more episodes to go in season one and the show most definitely can, and Eru Ilúvatar willing, will, get better.

My advice as of right now is to wait until the first season is complete before you commit to watching The Rings of Power. The first two episodes on their own are simply not worth your time, and if you let fools like me watch the rest of the series and report back whether it improved, then you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.

The bottom line is I’m definitely not optimistic for The Rings of Power after seeing the first two sub-par episodes…but who knows? Maybe the show will surprise me and be worth the effort after all. I’ll let you know what I think as the show progresses.

 

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 74: The Rings of Power

On this episode, Barry and I get our hairy Hobbit feet moving and head to Middle-Earth to talk about the first two episodes of the new Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Questions discussed in this episode include, is this what a billion dollars buys you? Why is the acting so bad? And, why is this adaptation of Tolkien so terrible so far?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 74: The Rings of Power

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Get Back: Documentary Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS - BUT ITS A MOVIE ABOUT THE BEATLES SO THEY AREN’T REALLY SPOILERS UNLESS YOU’VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. At first meandering, this immersive, experiential documentary becomes utterly mesmerizing as it chronicles the beginning of the end of the Fab Four and basks in the the glory of their musical genius.

The recording of Let It Be, The Beatles 12th and final studio album, in January of 1969, is often regarded as the moment when the Fab Four finally fell apart and began the process of going their separate ways.

After watching Get Back, the new exhaustive, nearly eight-hour, three-part documentary mini-series from Academy Award winning director Peter Jackson which chronicles that allegedly tempestuous recording session, I can report that Let It Be didn’t leave The Beatles broken, but you could certainly see the cracks.  

The band’s next recording session, for the album Abbey Road (which would be released before Let It Be), took place just months later in 1969 and that led to The Beatles, the most important band in rock and roll history, officially breaking up.

Originally, Let It Be was ambitiously conceived as an album, a TV special and a live concert, all of which were to be captured over a three-week span in January of 1969.

Documentarian Michael Lindsay-Hogg was there with cameras rolling as John, Paul, George and Ringo, a walking, talking rock and roll Mount Rushmore, tried to write an album’s worth of material from scratch and prepare for a live show all while being under the microscope of cameras.

Lindsay-Hogg shot and recorded 60 hours of film footage and 150 hours of audio, and while the tv show idea was scrapped, Hogg eventually released his own hour and twenty-minute length film titled Let it Be which came out just after the album of the same name in 1970.

Peter Jackson, of The Lord of the Rings fame, has taken a deep dive into Lindsay-Hogg’s ocean of material and come up with Get Back which was meant to be two-hours long and theatrically released but morphed into the massive eight-hour mini-series now streaming on Disney Plus.

Get Back opens as The Beatles move into a rather lifeless, makeshift recording studio at Twickenham Film Studios where the band attempts to write songs and rehearse for their album and their impending live show, which will be their first in nearly three years.

The documentary at first feels rudderless, as there’s no talking heads or guide to narrate the action, it’s just The Beatles and their entourage hanging out, eating toast, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes and getting little accomplished as the clock ticks.

This opening episode is relentlessly frustrating, but that’s the point. Peter Jackson turns The Beatles’ malaise into the viewer’s malaise, and while the documentary at first feels meandering, as it moves forward it becomes mesmerizing.

Remarkably, Get Back makes you feel, if not like a silent member of The Beatles (like Ringo!), then at least like a fly on the wall as these icons wade into and out of the morass of the magical mystery tour of music making.

The cast of characters and archetypes of The Beatles drama is well known and they’re all on display in Get Back. There’s the rebellious genius, John. The brilliant, ambitious nice-guy, Paul. The quiet yet gifted and sometimes disgruntled middle-child, George. As well as the under-appreciated, lovable lug Ringo.

There’s also the omnipresent Yoko, looming like a gargoyle succubus whispering into John’s ear and occasionally screeching into microphones.

As you spend nearly eight hours with The Beatles, the one thing about them that becomes crystal clear is how incredibly normal and good-natured they appear to be. They certainly disagree with one another but even their clashes are mostly respectful and polite, especially when you consider how pampered and wealthy they were, how much pressure they were under, and how sick of each other they must have been by that point.

And while there’s a decent amount of gossipy band drama on display in the documentary, like watching Paul trying to be the boss, George asserting himself, John withdrawing and Ringo just being an all-around great guy, that ultimately feels entirely secondary to the joy of simply experiencing their unadulterated genius.

Watching The Beatles, the godfathers of basically every pop and rock song over the last fifty years, jam and create music, such as when Paul takes mere moments to conjure out of thin air the song ‘Get Back’, is astonishing and exhilarating.

It’s also pretty fascinating watching the inter-personal dynamics of the band change when the brilliant Billy Preston enters the sessions as a keyboardist and when the venue changes from the cold and cavernous Twickenham to the comfortable confines at their Apple studio.

There are a few moments in the mini-series that stood out. For instance, the audio recording of John and Paul’s conversation after George exits the band radiates with a palpable emotion built by an intense personal history and is undeniably captivating and compelling.

Other moments too stand out, such as when Paul says to the crew, “it’s silly, fifty years from now they’re going to say that ‘The Beatles’ broke up because Yoko sat on an amp”, which is ironically insightful. In contrast, after George leaves the band and John is missing from rehearsal, Paul says to Ringo, “and then there were two”, and it feels ominously prescient considering the eventual murder of John Lennon and George Harrison’s untimely death from cancer.

Ultimately, if you’re a Beatles fanatic or even just a fan of music, then Get Back is most definitely for you as it’s a powerful nostalgia hit that reminds us what musical genius truly looks like. In our current age where “rock is dead” and musicianship and musicality, never mind musical genius, are sorely lacking if not utterly devoid from popular music, that has tremendous value.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

 ©2021