I had no idea how much disdain there was towards The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power until I started watching it, really hating almost everything about it, and then looking online to find out if there were other people that felt like I did or if I was just being grumpy and I tend to be.
Well it appears as though I am not in the minority here and it appears as though most people like this billion dollar series is a complete flop.
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it's not all bad, but almost all of it is
Let's just take a quick peek over at RT and IMDB
No real surprise there: The professional reviewers were always going to be slopping the knob of this show because of the fact that Amazon owns it and also out of fear of backlash from the diversity police, because the only way that a person could ever not like this show is because they are a bigot, right? You know it is possible to both be not bothered by black elves and dwarves and also recognize bad writing when you see it.
A 6.9 on IMDB is considerably higher than I was expecting but that shouldn't be much of a surprise since Amazon owns IMDB. I could dig into the comments to see what is going on with those 10 star ratings but I am not going to bother. I have a hard time believing that anyone could give this show 10/10 unless they did it for politically motivated reasons. I wonder how many of those people who gave it 10/10 actually watched the show. it would be interesting to hear an honest representation of how it is that they came to that conclusion.
One of my favorite things that reviewers will say is "I read the book and I love the show so far." You read the book did you? Well that is pretty remarkable considering there is no book about what they are portraying here. Some of it pulls from Tolkien work but they are actually legally forbidden from pulling from any Tolkien books other than LoTR and The Hobbit. What we are looking at here on screen takes place hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years before that so that is amazing that you read this non-existent book.
I did like this comment the most though
If you read any of the reviews out there you will quickly find two (or perhaps 3) camps out there. The people who know a lot about the lore and are obvious fanbois and for the most part, hate this series. Then you have the camp of people who are professional writers and can't take the risk of backlash for daring to not like it - most of them appear to have very little knowledge of the Tolkien universe at all. The third camp that kind of exists is the people that are being nice and really want this to turn into something good - even though they recognize that it is not that right now.
The camp I enjoy the most are the people that are super knowledgeable about the lore and really put a lot of thought into what they are writing. The criticize Rings of Power not just from a Tolkien perspective but from a perspective of what would make sense in any imaginable real-world scenario type way and how Rings of Power violates this on a regular basis. They also point out physical impossibilities such as teleporting on the part of people who are in a chase.
Adar takes off on horseback. Galadriel mounts a horse and takes off in pursuit as does Not-Sauron. We have a pointless chase scene for a bit and then, I shit you not, Not-Sauron freaking teleports himself in FRONT of Adar so he can unhorse him by tripping the horse.
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This is something I hadn't noticed while it was going on but I'll take the author's word for it because I am not going to go back and re-watch that, or any other Rings of Power episode. They are irritatingly bad. The one that was supposed to be the best was episode 6 and 7 in the way that GoT would often throw us a curveball by making the 2nd to last episode the big-battle one instead of the last. 7 is supposed to be the most impressive.... and I fell asleep during it. I never fall asleep during movies!
If you love to hate on Rings of Power and most particularly episode 7's birth-of-mount-doom sequence of events, I strongly recommend that you read The Rings of Power Episode 6: The War of the Retards. I laughed so much when I was reading this and the author has clearly done his homework. I wish I could find more of his stuff online because he is amazing.
I'm not looking forward to season 2. I will likely treat it like I did season 1 in that I will watch it, but only once I am out of everything else to watch and only once the entire season is already released. I won't need to be worried about spoilers from friends because I don't know anyone that watches it.