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