A Long-expected Review: The Rings of Power Season 1

Let's start the conversation with this: name your favorite & least favorite thing from Rings of Power S1. I'll start: Fav: Khazad-dûm & the characters/stories there Least Fav: the creation of the rings

32:30 "If you've landed in a place in your Tolkien adaptation where the most evil character in the show is seen as more heroic than your main hero, you've fallen off the Middle Earth map entirely." Such an excellent observation (among many in this video.)

Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas' quest to rescue the Hobbits was SO memorable for me because they really showed the scale of their chase. Even as a kid I felt their desperation and how they were always barely managing to keep up.

Something the original movies did so well at portraying the other-worldness of the ethereal Elves. They are beings who never die and therefore do not change in the same time-frame as human beings. They do not experience time in the same way and so the movies demonstrated how strange it would be to walk among them in their homes. In the show, it was basically like Linden was the Tree Place with the Pointy Ear People. Nothing about them seemed different from human beings except for their pointy ears and maybe slight differences in their motivations, but they didn't strike me as strange and somewhat scary like when the Fellowship enters Lothlorien and meet Galadriel.

There is so much wrong with the portrayal of cannonical characters in RoP. Gil-Galad, Celebrimbor and Galadriel are of similar age, in fact Gil-Galad is about 100 years of the trees younger than Galadriel. Celebrimbor's year of birth isn't recorded, but all 3 were Noldor who left Valinor in their youth during the exile. Celebrimbor is the last living descendent of Fëanor in middle earth - the most warlike house of the Noldor - he fought in & survived most of the first age's key battles, and the war of wrath, which Galadriel was not involved with particularly. Galadriel is powerful in mind and spirit. She was never a sword wielding warrior in Tolkien's work - no female Elf was. The portayal of her, one of the eldest and wisest Elves remaining in middle earth, as some impetuous young warrior beside the calm and kindly uncle figures of Celebrimbor and Gil-Galad, and making Elrond her sidekick as some young foppish civil servant, is awful. Elrond married her daughter, and that just sounds weird when you compare it to their RoP portrayals. If any of the 4 was to be warlike and impetuous at this stage, it would be Elrond, easily the youngest, a half-elven descendent of the warriors of the house of Bëor, and it would be Galadriel who counselled HIM to behave.

Celebrimbor is younger than Galadriel; a brash, confident smith, who forges a society of smiths and a massive following... this show gave us a semi-retired art instructor.

I think we can all agree the worst moment for the screen writing was Galadriels decision to jump overboard in an attempt to swim 300 miles back to middle earth

Tolkien saw his closest friends die in horrible ways. He doesn't glorify killing and death, doesn't dwell on it. Just like any decent human being who has seen it first hand. He focuses on the before and the after. Lord of the Rings is a story about facing almost certain death and making peace with it. About going past the initial primal fear, and about characters with heroic qualities calming the fear in their hearts and choosing to face the end with dignity and valor. The Rings of Power makes light of these themes or ignores them entirely.

I feel like the journey WAS part of the story in the other Middle Earth stories. Bilbo crossed 2 mountain ranges with a team of dwarf commandoes and made the return trip in 13 months...Frodo and the Fellowship met and formed and crossed half of Middle Earth and discovered the power of friendship along the way...Rings get passed down between blood brothers across nations... Rings of Power seems to simply dislike taking time to enjoy the Lembas.

I just couldn't stop laughing when the hobbits say that their hearts are bigger than their feet, when in fact moments ago they were talking about sabotaging someone's cart, leaving a family behind because the father hurt his leg, making fun of people that died, and expelled the Stranger because his magic broke a tree branch on top of a stupid kid who stayed under the tree while he was performing magic AT THEIR REQUEST. And I also can't forget that Halbrand had to tell the greatest smith in existence about... mixing metals. Jesus Christ...

"Mithrilchlorian" should be a term. Absolutely nails it.

The fast travel part was what broke the universe of GoT in the end. Literally felt like a half a season just to get to kings landing in the first season, and by the end of it multiple trips are made in single episodes

I finished reading the Silmarillion for the third time, and had Rings of Power in the back of my mind as to why it failed. To this day, will never understand 95% of the decisions made

During the early seasons of Game of Thrones, the world felt huge. It would take half a season or more sometimes to travel from Winterfell to King's Landing. Later seasons saw characters teleporting around like Rings of Power. It makes the world feel small.

I don‘t understand why NOBODY talks about the fact that Galadriel is known in the books to be able to READ MINDS!!! Even more, she knows the hearts of people and can see their potential before they know it themselves. And she already had these abilities before she came to Middle-Earth. The showmakers were not just ignorant about what Galadriel is capable of, they chose to have their „great plot twist“ completely negate it!!!

If they wanted a "ha Sauron was Halbrant" moment why couldn't they have Sauron being both Annatar and Halbrant, that way once Sauron is revealed as Halbrant to Galadriel she trusts Annatar more, even though both are the same being. For someone with such strong powers of illusion having two different appearances appear in the same place at the same time, should be viable.

Clinging to the books is exactly what the show needed. Showing some faithfulness.

As someone who worked on the music team for this show, thanks so much for the shout out! Music rarely gets brought up in reviews of most media even though it plays a pivotal role. Feel free to hit me up if you wanna chat any more about the music of the show.

I liked how cleverly Galadriel hid her Northern Armies that she was commander of so that we didnt see it in the show

With how passionate you are about tolkien I'm shocked you even want to see a season 2