House of the Dragon - The Current Undisputed Fantasy TV Champion of the World

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

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A well-made, well-acted series that gets better as it goes along. The best of the current fantasy tv bunch.

House of the Dragon, the prequel to HBO’s massive hit series Game of Thrones, concluded its ten-episode first season on Sunday night.

My first impression of House of the Dragon was tepid, as I found its first episode to be rather middling, but I’m happy to report that as its first season progressed the show got progressively better.

The series is not as good as its esteemed predecessor, but it did benefit by being in direct competition against another much-hyped prestige fantasy tv series, Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which debuted a week after House of the Dragon.

The Rings of Power was an embarrassing, amateurish, unmitigated disaster, and by comparison, House of Dragons is absolutely stellar. House of Dragons defeated The Rings of Power like Mike Tyson obliterated poor Michael Spinks back in the day - by brutal first round knockout, and now stands as the current undisputed, undefeated Fantasy TV Champion of the World.

In our current art/entertainment destroying age where cultural/political issues such as diversity and representation rule the day and talent and quality are rarely considered, it can be easy to confuse competency with mastery. House of the Dragon is not a masterful piece of work, at least not yet, but it stands out due to the mere fact of its baseline cinematic competency.

For example, in the season one finale the closing scene is a joy to behold because it is so deftly written, directed and acted, something which never occurred in The Rings of Power.

In the scene, where Daemon brings tragic news to Queen Rhaenyra, there is no dialogue. The story and the drama are conveyed to the audience through visuals. It is a rather simple scene, but it is very effective because of its simplicity. And that level of simplicity is a sign of the director and producer’s confidence in their storytelling and their filmmaking, something that was very evidently missing in The Rings of Power.

The confidence and competency of the producers and directors of House of the Dragon, who put together the cast, writers, costume and set departments, is in stark (no pun intended) contrast to the hapless and helpless bunch of buffoons who ran the good ship The Rings of Power into the rocks. The writing, acting and filmmaking that elevated House of the Dragon are what you get when people know what they’re doing are in charge, and the two-bit, throwaway soap opera of The Rings of Power is what you get when Bad Robot interns trying to fill diversity quotas are at the helm.

To be clear, House of the Dragon isn’t perfect. For instance, the time jumps were often jarring and scuttled some dramatic momentum, and some narrative choices, like when Rhaenys fails to torch the Hightowers on coronation day, beggar belief as it was not only the most emotionally satisfying thing to do but also the most rational thing to do. But House of the Dragon captivates because it boasts both superb aesthetics, most notably the costumes and sets, and most importantly, sublime acting across the board. Paddy Considine, Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans, Emma D’Arcy, Olivia Cooke, Milly Alcock and Eve Best were all superb on the show.

Considine’s performance as the conflicted and often feckless King Viserys was a triumph and a testament to his abundant talent.

Matt Smith’s dark turn as rogue Prince Daemon revealed his impressive level of skill and craftsmanship.

The transition from young Rhaenyra and Alicent, played by Milly Alcock and Emily Carey respectively, to adult Rhaenyra and Alicent, portrayed by Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, could have been catastrophic, but went off without a hitch. Alcock’s growth into the role of young Rhaenyra was glorious to behold and when D’Arcy took over the role, she didn’t skip a beat. Carey struggled to captivate as young Alicent, so when Cooke took over the role it blossomed and became pivotal to the drama of the show.

Rhys Ifans and Eve Best as Ser Otto Hightower and Princess Rhaenys respectively, are two fine actors and their craftsmanship elevated their roles to glorious heights.

All of these actors and even all of the ones I haven’t mentioned, were vastly superior to the second-third-and fourth rate actors hamming it up on The Rings of Power. Which begs the question…why didn’t Amazon spend at least a little bit of their billions bagging big-time actors to fill their Tolkien fantasy world?

As for House of the Dragon, its first season ended on a dramatically potent note, and portends that the best is most definitely yet to come, which will no doubt generate excitement when season two comes around. By contrast, The Rings of Power stumbled and staggered through its flaccid first season and never generated any significant drama so it’s hard to imagine anyone but the most die-hard sycophants tuning in to its second season.

Game of Thrones, particularly its earlier seasons, was a truly masterful piece of television, and while House of the Dragon doesn’t measure up to that high standard, it is a faint enough of an echo of that glorious show to still be considered appointment viewing. There is definitely room for improvement, and hopefully season two can make that leap. Considering the arc of season one, I’m actually optimistic that House of the Dragon will grow to be even more worthwhile as it progresses.

©2022

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) - 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