Rings of Power General Commentary

Rings of Power had been considered a failure before it had even launched. And indeed it turned out to be a failure, especially where following Tolkien’s lore is concerned. Rings of Power isn’t just bad, it is basically nonexistent. The main reaction to the show is apathy. Plot is empty and forced, characters are flat, and so is the world. Show does not promote or provoke emotional investment in the watcher – it is not even so bad that it would provoke hatred, except if one is angry about politicizing the show.

Rings of Power are essentially Lord of the Rings without the soul. The series has the window dressing, the aesthetics of the Lord of the Rings – but that is all it has. It fails at understanding even those messages that Peter Jackson had managed to translate to screen, and completely misses Tolkien’s deeper philosophy, very thing which gives Lord of the Rings its life.

Everything is sacrificed on the altar of progressive political messaging. Galadriel is made to seem to be a “strong woman” – or at least, “strong woman” in the hypermasculine manner which progressives consider the only way for a woman to be strong – yet more often than not, this either a) makes her look like an idiot, b) makes everybody around her look like an idiot or c) both at the same time. Every single society is ethnically and racially diverse – be it elves, dwarves, humans, they all look like they dropped straight out of the downtown New York instead of Tolkien’s medieval creation.

Dialogue in general is unnatural and stiff, in large part because showrunners are trying hard to be constantly poetic. But even Tolkien didn’t do that, and for a good reason: constant poetic dialogue is so weird it throws people out of the story. And less said about practical things, the better. Numenorean armor is pseudo-Bronze Age garbage, yet an exact replica of pseudo-15^th century (if still objectively bad) armor can apparently be crafted in matter of hours. Or maybe Galadriel has hammerspace. Worse, this same exact thing also happens to Arondir.

Another issue is that show does not understand when and why to do something. There is mystery simply for the sake of mystery, as seen with the example of multiple Saurons.

Elves

Being “flat and uninteresting” is a major problem with the elves in this show. They don’t feel like elves, they feel just like humans. In reality, this is where elves should be at their most powerful and most dignified, as they had only just left Valinor (though wisdom was somewhat lacking a the time). Yet Rings of Power elves look, feel and act just like humans. In fact, for significant portion of the time they are less dignified than average Joe one can meet on the street. Even the most basic details are wrong. In Tolkien’s Legendarium, all elves have long hair (yes, they do). In Rings of Power, only Gil-galad has long hair among the male elves, and all other male elves have short hair. In fact, Peter Jackson took pains to make his elves appear ethereal, otherworldly, even to the point of making them glow. Rings of Power on the other hand take pains to make elves appear human and earthly.

Elves have been turned into crack addicts, instead they are addicted to mithril. Apparently, if they do not get their hands on enough mithril, they will just wither and die. And dwarves accept this reasoning with no question. But even worse is the treatment of Gil-galad. Gil-galad was one of the noblest characters in Tolkien’s legendarium, but here they make him into a scheming politician and overall not a very upstanding person.

Numenor

Numenorean ships apparently have gunpowder onboard, but without cannons being in evidence, it is difficult to understand what the gunpowder would be for – other than making their ships randomly explode. And when the mighty fleet finally sets sail we see that it has… three ships, as two had blown up. And considering we later see that Numenorean forces consist of cavalry – which, by the way, Tolkien had said Numenor didn’t use in its overseas wars – these ships could not have carried more than a couple dozen troops. A mighty force indeed.

Geography

Even most basic elements of geographical worldbuilding and presentation are either stupid, ridiculous, or intentionally modified. In one of the first episodes, Galadriel goes to Valinor… only to jump off the boat just as she is about to arrive and start swimming towards the Middle Earth. Now, this is the Second Age of Arda. It takes 39 days from fleets of Ar-Pharazon to reach Tol Eressea from Numenor. Ships in age of sail could cover some forty to eighty miles a day, and galleys could row at 3 – 4 knots or 3,45 – 4,6 miles per hour, which may give them travel speed of 28 to 55 miles per day. Thus distance from Numenor to Tol Eressea is about 3 120 miles at maximum, but could be anywhere between 1 000 and 3 000 miles. For reference, distance from New York to London is 3 625 miles (or 3 150 nautical miles).

This is the distance that Galadriel would have had to swim at minimum – assuming she was swimming towards Numenor, managed to keep a straight line, and actually reached it. But if she missed Numenor – very likely due to currents – then the actual distance would be far greater, maybe several times greater, as Numenor was in fact much closer to Valinor than to the Middle Earth. Now, thanks to a ridiculously lucky happenstance she ends up not having to actually do it, but this means that Galadriel is either a superwoman or an idiot.

And of course, people travel a lot – yet nobody has any baggage with them. It is almost as if everybody is living in an RPG with hammerspace enabled. Elrond and Celebrimbor just walk to Khazad-Dum, on foot, with no weapons, no supplies, no pack animals, nothing. Even with stuff like lembas and murvivor, they should have had backpacks at least. Not to mention the sheer insanity of having a figure as important as Celebrimbor walking over open terrain without a single guard for protection, when everyone already knows that Orcs are still around. This is a problem that will be seen throughout the show: sometimes the world is presented as a peaceful utopia, and other times it will be nearly as dangerous as the War of the Ring Middle Earth. And just like here and the case with Galadriel, characters teleport near-constantly.

Galadriel ends up being randomly saved by a random floating wreck that was a random result of a random sea monster attack. And when Halbarand (?) has to save her, she ends up saving him anyway… somehow. Because of the Girl Power or whatever.

General Storyline

Show is diluted in terms of storylines, not just geography. There is Galadriel, Elrond, Arondir, Harfoots, Dwarves and Sauron storylines, and in each episode any storyline gets at most half an hour. In fact, show seems determined to tell literally every story known to man, except do it badly and with no emotion. And while stories itself are bad, the overarching plot is even worse because there is no real relation between said stories.

When queen Miriel gets rendered blind by volcano explosion, she at first rejects wearing a blindfold so as to not damage morale – but is then shown wearing it in the very next scene. This is soon topped, however. Halbrand is discovered basically dead on the side of the road with an infected wound and is dying. So of course the logical thing is to put him on a horse and ride off at gallop.

Too many characters have plot armor. When Harfoot village is burnt down, not a single one of them dies because the entire village is just conveniently absent. Humans, elves, dwarves and orcs may die, but Harfoots are apparently protected by Hand of God. Apparently, instead of sleeping in the middle of the night – as they should have – Harfoots were off partying and conveniently came back only to watch their village burn. Galadriel is an even bigger offender – she survives a pyroclastic flow from the explosion of Mount Doom, something that in the real life is lethal pretty much 100% of the time. Of course, extras nearly all die.

Speech

Even the speech makes it clear that the story has absolutely nothing to do with Tolkien. Elves normally speak like normal humans – but few times when something is actually taken from Tolkien, their speech changes completely. Only dwarves have some soul, but even that is shallow. They do have accents, and weird agriculture that makes sense for them, as well as some semblance of culture. Elves meanwhile are just arrogant hippies, Harfoots are dirty hippies.

General Characterization

Characters in general feel like cardboard cutouts, or puppets with no soul. Very few feel actually alive, and fewer still can actually make watchers care about them. Galadriel is slightly better (or worse?) than average in that she is flat and annoying, while other characters are just flat. There are few exceptions such as Halbrand – who later turns out to be Sauron.

In terms of various races, only male dwarves actually look and behave the way they should. Female dwarves, male elves, female elves, male and female Numenoreans, male and female hobbits… they all lack defining characteristics that Tolkien had given them, physical and psychological alike. And this is true for the show as well: it is bland and forgettable, a pale copy of Game of Thrones, but without anything that actually made Game of Thrones stand out. Regardless of whether it is acting, lines, design, costumes, sets or environment itself, it is just bland. Even the camera work is repetitive, with few or no examples of playing with perspective (such as always shooting hobbits from above) that Lord of the Rings did.

And the show is full of bad stereotypes. Harfoots look gray, gross and dirty, much like one would imagine medieval peasants to have been… except medieval peasants were not like that at all. In fact, they wore colorful clothing (at least on important occasions), washed themselves regularly (if not very often – but at least once a week), and water was in fact usually safe to drink. It was only cities that would actually be dirty. Yet Rings of Power Harfoots look much like roman legionnaires at the end of Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield (for the unaware, these poor souls had spent whole day digging through coal). It is bad, but not so bad as to be amusing.

In episode 3, we move back to racism. Namely, we see orcs. And while the good people are all diverse and come in all colors, orcs are uniformly pasty white. This is a direct contradiction to the books, where orcs were described in multiple colors. Tolkien himself describes orcs as “sallow-skinned” in one letter, and elsewhere they are described as “swart” and “sallow” – so dark brown or dirty yellow (“sallow” is unhealthy yellow-green color). Sam and Frodo see an orc in Mordor who is described as black-skinned, and Treebeard also describes orcs as black-skinned. In short, it is the orcs who should be diverse in their coloring (much like multiethnic Mongol armies that were likely the origin story of the “monsters from the East”, and for a good reason) – but the Rings of Power filmmakers were apparently of the opinion that all evil people should be white. And not only are orcs white, but they also wear uniformly white clothing, and all human-looking characters associated with the orcs throughout the series are also white. Rings of Power have essentially turned the orcs into the Ku Klux Klan headed by Adolf Sauron Hitler III. And these orcs also don’t have Tolkien orcs’ weakness to the sun. They are also slavers (which is one of few things they have in common with Tolkien’s orcs), forcing captives to work in the mines and elsewhere. And of course there is a slave revolt which fails.

There is a lot of casually thrown racism and sexism. Specifically, white males in the show exist only to be a) useless or b) irrational, and to be shown up by – usually female – voices of reason. Basically, for a character to be allowed to be anything other than useless, it needs to be either a) female, b) black or c) preferably both. Whether it is Gil-Galad and Elrond not believing Galadriel that Sauron has returned, Elrond being an absolute non-entity, or Elendil being overall useless, or Ar-Pharazon and Durin being yes-men for their much more awesome queens, the agenda is clear. And those men that cannot be rendered useless are blackwashed – suddenly, Isildur is a mestizo or something. Numenoreans in general don’t look like Numenoreans. Where in the books they were described as tall, pale and predominantly gray-eyed, Rings of Power Numenoreans look like some crazy US-esque mixture from all over the world: there are white Numenoreans, black Numenoreans, yellow Numenoreans, mestizo Numenoreans… question is only why producers didn’t go the whole nine yards and include Numenorean orcs as well. This is complete opposite of the original trilogy, where they – usually – actually got actors who looked like the ethnic group they were portraying. In fact, having a diverse cast was clearly a priority over having good actors, though at least some actors are decent.

Galadriel

Galadriel got forced into a position of Cassandra – she is the only one that knows Sauron is still around. And nobody believes her. In order to make Galadriel into a strong, competent woman, all men around her had to be reduced to idiots. Rings of Power Galadriel is like a vampire, sucking competence out of other characters and taking it for herself. That is not something that had to be done to Tolkien’s Galadriel, or Eowyn – or indeed Peter Jackson interpretations of these characters. The only possible conclusion is that either showrunners are incompetent, or they have a political agenda.

The opening scenes of the first episode consist of basically Galadriel going on “I know Sauron is alive, because reasons” and everybody else “we don’t believe you because reasons but we are going to carry out with your near-suicidal quest anyway”. And of course, they continue their mansplaining even when Galadriel does provide evidence.

Even physically, Galadriel’s men are holding her back. She is always at the head, and has to wait for her companions. When they encounter an ice troll, all the elves got their assess kicked – yet Galadriel just kills it in a single blow.

Now, Tolkien did have strong women: Eowyn fought at Pelennor, and Galadriel herself led armies and even fought. As he wrote in Letter 348 (From a letter to Mrs Catharine Findlay 6 March 1973):

“Galadriel, like all the other names of elvish persons in The Lord of the Rings, is an invention of my own. It is in Sindarin form (see Appendices E and F) and means ‘Maiden crowned with gleaming hair’. It is a secondary name given to her in her youth in the far past because she had long hair which glistened like gold but was also shot with silver. She was then of Amazon disposition and bound up her hair as a crown when taking part in athletic feats.”

But even during her “Amazon” days, it was always Galadriel’s wisdom that shone through the most brightly. She was the first to reject Feanor, and the first to see through Morgot’s machinations – which Feanor also saw through, yet still let them affect him. Yet in Amazon’s Galadriel, there is literally none of that wisdom. She may be smart – by authorial fiat – yet wisdom is nowhere in evidence; and her intelligence too feels forced. Instead, her most visible character traits are her aggressiveness, propensity for beating up stuff and everything else that, in a male character, would nowadays be considered an example of “toxic masculinity”. But apparently Galadriel was bullied in childhood so everything is justified.

Galadriel’s childhood as shown is also bullcrap. Apparently, she was bullied by other kids, and then proceeded to beat them up. But there is absolutely no indication anywhere in Tolkien that she had been bullied as a child. And a girl beating up boys of her age is very, very unlikely due to simple biology. And of course, while we see the elves are diverse later on, all the children that bully her are white. One really has to wonder.

Galadriel, despite being thousands of years old, is acting like a bratty immature teenager. This has been obvious since the first episode, but is really brought out in the Episode 4, where her childishness gets her and Halbarand thrown into prison. And she also gets into the spat with the Black Numenorean queen about who is bigger boss – or rather, bigger asshole. Yet soon after, Numenoreans just uncritically accept that yes, Sauron is back and Sauron is now in the Southlands – with no indication as to how this shift in opinion happened. Likely explanation: Girl Power, because of course it is. And whether it is a flaw with the character or the actor, but she is only capable of one expression: Perpetual Grumpy Goblin Face. Worse, writers had turned Galadriel into a Klingon. According to what she says, she does not fight to protect her people. She fights to crush her enemies, see them driven before her and hear lamentations of their women.

She just isn’t Galadriel, she is just a psychopath wearing Galadriel’s name, fighting with no goal but simply to keep fighting. It seems as if the show is trying to make Sauron more sympathetic and positive character than Galadriel – a deconstruction and inversion of values driven by typical Marxist hate.

Arondir

Arondir the black short-haired elf is everything but an elf. He does not look elven, as Tolkien did not have black nor short-haired elves, let alone both at the same time. He also does not act elven, and his overall storyline and entire existence are entirely pointless. And we first meet him in Southlands – which are populated by people who predominantly look European, where Tolkien’s southlanders really looked closer to Arabs (or black people, if one went sufficiently far south). And of course, show just had to have Arondir and Bronwyn – white human girl – look lovesick for each other. Nevermind the fact that in the entire history of Tolkien’s universe there were only three times that an elf and a human were in relationship (Luthien and Beren, Idril and Tuor, Arwen and Aragorn). But of course, show needs to check off the “interracial relationship” checkbox, regardless of the actual lore they are supposed to be basing these things on. And the “white people are racist” checkbox is checked when Arondir complains that Bronwyn was the “only one nice to him”, as everybody else is racist and calls him various “slurs”. It is a fact that everybody basically hates the elves in this show, but why is never explained.

Arondir later, upon discovering cows are secreting black ichor, decides to just go and walk with Bronwyn for few hundred kilometers to see if a “nearby village” is safe – instead of, for example, alerting nearby elven garrison. And then he goes into the tunnel, like the last village idiot, yet (unsurprisingly) emerges practically unscathed. Meanwhile he has sent Bronwyn back to alert the garrison – which she doesn’t do, but instead goes straight to the bar. When people don’t believe her, she goes, kills an orc to prove she is a “strong independent woman” and then takes orc’s corpse to the bar and slams it on the table. It is in essence a copy-paste of Galadriel’s plot, where a smart woman has to prove to a bunch of male morons that yes, evil is still out there. Orcs for their part appear to know that Theo is on their side as they never try to track him down.

In the episode 4, we again see that Arondir is an idiot. While showrunners try their best to portray him as awesome, it is clear that they have no clue what they are doing. So they have him catch arrow from the air, and kick a wounded kid to the ground so hard his spine nearly breaks. Theo on the other hand is either emotionally stunned or a psychopath, as when he and Rowan return to abandoned village to forage for supplies – Rowan is on alert and watching around, clearly afraid, while Theo just walks in like he is on a stroll with a girlfriend along the romantic seaside.

Sauron

Sauron plot is completely wrong. Galadriel is searching for Sauron and trying to convince others that Sauron is back. But if this show is really set in the Second Age – and with the name “Rings of Power” and existence of Numenor, that is a fairly safe assumption – then question isn’t whether Sauron is back, because he had never left. Sauron survives events of the First Age, fakes reformation, and is alive in the Second Age. And everybody knows he is alive – question is thus not “does Sauron exist”, but rather “what is Sauron thinking” and especially “what is Sauron doing”. Because not only Sauron had faked turning to good in order to fool Eonwe, he then went and created alter-ego of Annatar, emissary of Valar – and nobody knew that really was Sauron. And while Gil-Galad and Galadriel were suspicious of Annatar and did not allow him entrance to their kingdoms, Sauron won over the smiths of Eregion, including Cirdan. And that is how the Rings of Power were made. Without Sauron’s fake reformation, very existence of rings of power becomes doubtful, if not impossible, and existence of One Ring becomes just that – flat-out impossible. It is thus quite obvious that the filmmakers do not understand Lord of the Rings, let alone the Legendarium as a whole.

Conclusions

Overall, the show as a whole is basically an exercise in deconstructing and demistifying Tolkien’s work. Instead of a fantasy epic, we get a fantasy-ish soap opera. Diversity and modern politics are death of fantasy in general, but this show goes out of its way to spit on Tolkien’s legacy. Human, idiotic elves; beardless dwarves; simping kings; pale orcs; dirty Hobbits; multiculturalism and feminism – this show goes directly against everything Tolkien had respected and wanted to celebrate.