The Rings of Power Season Two (Amazon): TV Review - One Ring to Bore Them All
/****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A truly terrible piece of television that desecrates its source material.
The Rings of Power, the billion-dollar Jeff Bezos-vanity project television series on Amazon Prime based on the footnotes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, just finished its second season.
The first season of The Rings of Power was a cultural irritant and major disappointment…the second season is…not surprisingly…equally as bad.
I confess am not a Tolkien fan boy. Yes, I have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and I’ve seen the Peter Jackson LOTR movies and enjoyed them but I am not obsessed with or protective of Tolkien’s creation even though I greatly admire his craftsmanship and artistry.
Because of my admittedly thin grasp of Tolkien’s lore, I am not the type of viewer who will be deeply offended when lore is subverted or contradicted. I’m usually too uninformed to notice or to uninvested to care.
I say that only to clarify that when The Rings of Power plays fast and loose with Tolkien’s lore, and it does so quite a lot, I am willing to forgive (or forget) if the show were simply a successful dramatic endeavor that was at least minimally entertaining, never mind enlightening.
But The Rings of Power is neither entertaining nor enlightening. All it really is is embarrassing for the creatives involved and infuriating for viewers, like me, foolish enough to tune in.
The second season, which has eight episodes, follows a bevy of storylines with a diverse array of Middle-Earth’s populace. There are storylines involving Elves, Dwarves, Harfoots, Wizards, and even Orcs and Sauron himself.
Not a single one of these narratives is even remotely compelling, intriguing or dramatically potent.
The entire Numenor storyline is nauseatingly vacuous and has all the dramatic depth of a soup commercial. The palace intrigue in the Numenorian court and the family drama surrounding it is astonishingly bland.
The “Gandalf but don’t call him Gandalf!!” wizard/spaceman storyline that is the definition of dull. The Harfoot sub-plot of this storyline is a flavorless gruel.
Arondir the Elf is back and no one gives a flying fuck because that character is repulsively stupid and inane, and his travails as interesting as watching soup chill.
The entire Dwarf storyline is so gut-wrenchingly terrible that anytime those annoying little bastards were on screen I wanted to light myself on fire and jump off the roof.
The Celebrimbor and Sauron storyline is a tedious and tiresome slog that has all the gravity of a telenovela.
The acting in this show is just obscenely atrocious, no doubt accentuated by the truly amateurish and abysmal writing.
Morfyyd Clark plays famed Elf Galadriel…and this poor women has no business being on screen anywhere. Her performance is nauseatingly trite and vapid. Her snarling, girl-power take on Galadriel is, frankly, as ridiculous as it is uninspired. To be fair she isn’t aided by the egregious writing, but still, she does herself, and the character no favors with her flaccid performance.
Charles Edwards is an utterly appalling as Celebrimbor. Edwards looks like a lesbian gym teacher helping special needs kids put on a school production of As the World Turns.
Sophie Nomvete plays Disa the Dwarf and she is so bad it literally made my stomach hurt watching her. It is beyond belief that this character exists and this actress was tasked to play her.
Not a single cast member on this series has even a glimmer of magnetism, dynamism or charisma. The entire cast is not only devoid of gravitas, but is deathly allergic to it.
For a series that cost a billion dollars the question I kept asking myself was, why does everything, from the sets to the costumes to the props to the dearth of background actors, look so unconscionably cheap?
The sets look like they come from stage play put on at a public junior high school in a middle-class suburb. But it’s the paucity of background actors that gives the game away, as scenes are sparsely populated and feel amateurish because of it.
Unlike say, HBO’s Game of Thrones or The House of the Dragon, The Ring of Power looks and feels, and is written and acted like, a fantasy-themed soap opera.
Game of Thrones and The House of the Dragon were both able to find fabulous actors, mostly British, and mostly from the stage, and give them top notch scripts to work with. The results were and still are fantastic. That The Rings of Power has been unable to find the same level of acting talent at all (there’s not a single noteworthy performance in the show – not one), and write even remotely average quality scripts, has been the albatross around the neck of the series from the get go, stopping it from even being good, never mind great.
The reality is that The Rings of Power is an abomination, and a disrespectful degradation and desecration of Tolkien’s glorious work. It is so suffocatingly trite and amateurish it feels as if it were actually designed to both fail and infuriate.
The creatives behind the series, most notably showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, and to a lesser extent the cast, the directors, the writers and producers, should all be ashamed of themselves and deeply embarrassed at what they’ve produced.
If you’re a Tolkien fan you will hate this series…and rightfully so. If you aren’t a Tolkien fan but are considering checking out The Rings of Power…don’t…it is a waste of time and a deeply frustrating and grating viewing experience.
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