Review: Rings of Power improved in its second season. Almost at the level of Xena – List of Messages

No, Amazon bought the rights to it the lord of the rings. So she had no right to it the lord of the ringsas in his Appendix – which is just over a hundred pages of Tolkien’s favorite short stories, genealogies and language notes. It’s not just stuff that inexperienced creators could build a big story around. The confidence with which the presenters Patrick Mackay and Iain D. Payne tried to retell the history of the creation of the Circles of Power and through that the history of the Second Middle Age is very admirable. Unfortunately, confidence lacked other necessary ingredients, such as storytelling talent, personal insight, or even a basic understanding of the material they were changing.

The result was terrible. However in the genre magazine, where I am deputy editor and where we basically cover every major fantasy or sci-fi project, we couldn’t get anyone to find someone willing to write for us about the second season. . A completely strange situation for a series in which about a billion dollars have been sunk and millions of fans are waiting.

After two years, the same creative team returns with a second season. The good news is that the series has improved. Bad news? Well, the damage that has been done is so great that he is unhappy than A circle of power we can only look if we refuse to admit to them the descent from the same catlub the lord of the rings and we prefer the comparison to a “cult” type series. Xena. We all knew the warrior princess was going to take away the legacy of an ancient legend in a big way, but it was so silly it was fun. Unfortunately, also because just after That’s all stood Sam Raimi, a horror classic, who was never afraid to show his sense of strange and completely black humor. A circle of power however, they are unbearably heavy and bloated.

To be clear, I basically feel sorry for the creators of the show because they entered a battle that they could not win. Personally, I believe that the sale of “wrongful rights” was a serious disservice on the part of Tolkien’s heirs (after all, only Simon Tolkien, who has a long-standing reputation as a black sheep the family), working as a consultant. .

The first reports were already warning. From those, it was clear that the creators were trying to put a Machiavellian style drama on the world of Middle Earth. Game of Thrones – but Middle Earth has always offered very Faustian dramas and the author of the first ke game of thrones George RR Martin has repeatedly said that he wanted to write an antithesis the lord of the rings.

At first – and in fact just a glance – he managed to fail with expensive effects and pleasant images that pushed nostalgia for the Jackson trilogy and the work of famous photographers John Howe and Alan Lee. At second glance, however, even beautiful backgrounds look… just like backgrounds.

At the same time, the main problem was not twisting the template or thinking new stories. Even in the second series, the best thing about the “father of the uruks” is Adar, which is not found in Tolkien. His story is fascinating, sad and scary at the same time – even as it stands tall above other stories that are much more connected to Tolkien. However, due to the nature of what the creators were entitled to, it could not be otherwise.

However, it is true that the ability to make a shoe in anything is fundamentally interesting. This also applies to things that are slightly similar to the language spoken by the goblins in the series. What is called because the black speech of Mordor was created by Sauron deep in the Second Age of Middle-earth and – of the world, be surprised – in Mordor. However, the series may consider it a relic of the First Age, since dark creatures speak it long before the creation of Sauron’s kingdom, and he himself is not mentioned in any way as the creator.

The main problem is that the series was made and it is not made badly. The acting is ridiculous, the attempts of most of those involved to speak with an “elven” accent is heartbreaking (characterized by the high king of the elves, Gil-galad, who makes sounds more fitting for a rabid St. Bernard than a celebrity By whom) and the fight scenes are slightly better than the ones I laughed at as a teenager Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And space-time doesn’t make sense for that. For example, according to Tolkien, the creation of the rings of power took several centuries, as did the corruption of the Númenóreans – and these were later events, not simultaneous. In the series, unfortunately, we have to believe that everything will be done in a few weeks. The whole second age, thousands of years of events, complex relations between nations and terrifying events when whole empires rose and fell, are crowded together. In today’s world of physics, this would probably lead to a big bang and the birth of a new, infinitely expanding living universe. Unfortunately, what happened here was that any soul that might have been in the story was squeezed out and distorted, and the rest of the characters and place names a random identifier corresponding to a sardine can.

Moreover, played by creators who do not understand the mythological dimension of the original so little. And of course it’s not even a game about the Middle Ages that we got into the lord of the rings. Their climax is high school rows with a strange intelligence about who will be the prom king. Or the worse franchise entries Star Trek.

The second season tries to jump less between storylines and focus more on telling and ascending the infamous story that was established two years ago. It’s still hard to believe that the thousands of years old characters are wise elves or noble Númenóreans, but at least you can see the attempt to go a little deeper. However, this is often brought down by the cheap execution and the game for victory, which killed the flashes of logic and internal coherence of the fictional world in the first place.

For example, the opening of the first part of the new series goes back to the beginning of the Second Century – which could easily be a year, but also several thousand years before the current events, it is difficult to say . Sauron gives a speech to a gathering of goblins and more than anything else it sounds like a parody of Donald Trump’s rallies. I doubt it was meant to be a metaphor, it’s more like how the creators think of the attractive and attractive person and his abilities.

The fun, however, occurs when Sauron is “murdered” by Adar, or removed from his physical form. This is based on Tolkien, where it happens to our Dark Lord several times. However, Tolkien then describes it as beauty, a shadow fleeing to places where it can regain strength and physical form.

In the series, however, they said it was too abstract (although the horror master JA Bayona was involved in the first series, who could be proud of it) and, on the hand other, than worked in comic films like Venomit will certainly work in Middle Earth as well. And so the essence of Sauron lives in a slimy black form that eats various small creatures until it becomes stronger and goes out into the world. Unfortunately, only in the intentions of the fairy tale “The Donut Went on a Tramp”. Then again, the series cost hundreds of millions of dollars, so watching Sauron drag himself against the rocks in the style of spoiled curd dumpling dough is a little wrong.

It’s like a lapse in performance, when a killer sequence becomes horribly stupid by accident, which breaks the neck of the second season. It happens every time Galadriel repeats like a spinning wheel that everything is Sauron’s fault (who has something to do with the awakening of evil throughout Middle Earth the load is not -creative makes no attempt to prove it and just dismiss it by saying that it is so); but also when the brave elves come across reanimated wraiths who are conveniently waiting for their victims to break into their graves at walking distance and the weapons that they need to get it back. Or when the Stranger (later known as Gandalf) reaches out to his favorite proto-hobbies to save them from a tornado, looking like a child playing out a natural disaster in his ‘sandbox behind the block of flats. Or really at the time when Galadriel and co. they “accidentally” bump into something pseudomooder to say, and everyone involved looks more like characters from old video games that only come to life when a player steps up to them and asking them something.

The series, which lacks soul, logic and basic craftsmanship, depends heavily on money. Which, however, emphasizes everything above. Because basically all places and clothes, if they do not refer directly to Jackson’s design the lord of the ringsends up feeling artificial and sad digital. The classic would say sparse and stretched.

Amazon has long since given permission for a third season, but even due to the decrease in viewers, the only question is now on the agenda: Will the creators be able to develop enough in the coming seasons to serve us at least an average fantasy series, Or will their project be canceled early? That just depends on how firm Amazon’s leadership is and how willing they were to admit that this was just a mistake.