Review: The Rings of Power
TL,DR: I didn’t like the show for what I would call storytelling or narrative issues. If you’re looking for some racist screed about the colour of the actors, you’re not going to find it here, best move on.
Spoilers Follow
I thought I had novels figured out when I was young. Stolid tombs assigned by my teachers sketching stories of people wrestling with some societal ill. A theme or moral was the heart, and the characters — meant to be someone easy to relate to — grappled with it. Catcher in the Rye is a perfect example. Novels made you think because, apparently, young people didn’t think about their lives unless the issues were packaged as a “relatable story.” It was all rather dull.
I was twelve when a friend introduced me to Lord of the Rings. It changed everything. After being immersed in this incredible world filled with its own languages and mythology, I’d never look at a novel the same way. I know a lot of “lit people” don’t see the point of the fantasy genre — and I’m not here to defend it — but for me, LOTR taught me what a book could be. It opened my world and created an interest in books that would never go away. A novel could centre around the struggles of some navel-gazing twit named Holden, or it could be a universe. After LOTR, I’d never take fiction for granted again.
I enjoyed the Peter Jackson movies, despite their occasional departures from the books, and I waited for Rings of Power with a “brace for the worst, hope for the best,” attitude. You have to believe me when I say I really tried to like this show. LOTR was my Harry Potter. I wanted to see more of it on screen. But alas, as I watched the first few episodes of RoP, I couldn’t escape the conclusion that it’s simply not a very good show. It’s not epically bad; it’s worse: it’s boring. Here’s where I think the major problems lay.
A world-building paradox.
So how did Tolkein do it? How did he go about building that world that was so big and immersive? The stories are famous for their wide, sweeping and magical world, but you’d never guess it by looking at Tolkein’s storytelling techniques. Despite couching his world in mythology and thousands of years of history, the two primary vehicles for bringing that world across (LOTR and The Hobbit) are very short, focused narratives with just a few point-of-view characters. The storyline of LOTR is relatively short: from leaving the Shire to destroying the ring is a six-month journey for Sam and Frodo. Only four months if you subtract the two they spend in Rivendell. In The Hobbit, Bilbo’s roundtrip journey is thirteen months. In both, the essential plot is very simple: destroy the ring, defeat the dragon. In both, the point-of-view characters are fairly restrained. In LOTR, things generally stay with the hobbits, and in The Hobbit, the focus is almost continuously on Bilbo, although there are exceptions in both works. Sure, other books outline the world (The Silmarillion etc.), but most people haven’t read those.
Nevertheless, Middle Earth feels like a real place. It seems expansive. When I asked friends what they thought about RoP, a constant refrain was, “it seems small.” I think this is because most of the “action” occurs in a few sound stages, and the characters simply “teleport” around to locations. They jump from Lindon to Eregion in a scene cut. The story is built around characters chatting in various rooms. The shots of wide-open vistas and mountains that anchored the Jackson movies are practically non-existent. There’s little movement. Occasionally, RoP gives the audience a flyover of the Middle Earth map to situate the proceedings, but is that really sufficient? Sure, it tells us where we are, but it doesn’t really show us where we are. A map gives you the place, but not the sense of the place. Tolkien built a huge epic world, filled with mountains, swamps and rivers in his relatively small, tight narrative by simply having the characters walk around in it.
No enchantment.
Outside of giving a sense of place, Tolkien uses the passage of his characters as a way to establish a sense of enchantment. Middle Earth isn’t just a place; it’s a magical place. Yet very few explicit examples of magic use are exhibited. No one shoots fireballs or lightning bolts from their fingers. Rather, magic just seems to saturate the world. For me, it’s not what Tolkien did here so much as what he didn’t do. Tolkien didn’t spend much time explaining how things worked. I can still remember the outrage when the Star Wars prequels explained the force with “midiclorians.” People everywhere — not just fans — just sighed and said, “why, George?” In a few lines of dialogue, The Force went from spiritual phenomenon to high school biology experiment. I know there are branches of fantasy that put a premium on explaining things like magic systems and insist every creature has a backstory, but Tolkien’s world is not one of them. The words “mystical” and “mystery” are closely related. When you explain something, you kill the mystery. The enchantment dissipates. It turns into technology. In RoP they pan over some interesting architecture, but they don’t foreground the feeling of wonder the characters in LOTRs feel when they pass by The Argonath, for example. I feel if RoP has a similar scene, one of the characters would have to explain the whole origin of the statues, who they’re meant to be, why they’re there etc. Just sitting with the characters and taking in the grandeur of the moment just wouldn’t be enough.
In fact, one of my biggest concerns when the series was announced was that they’d try to give the rings some kind of detailed origin story. My worst fears were realized. Sure the rings have a story in Tolkien’s work, but in RoP they get so detailed about the creation of the three elven rings that they’re practically just a technology. They do the same with the ludicrous origin story of mithril.
The characters aren’t handled well.
By removing any meaningful interaction with the world as a whole, RoP turns into a completely different story than the works it’s based on. More importantly, with the world out of play, the storytelling is going to fall hard on the characters.
A great show can be based on simple chit-chat, but to do that, you need some pretty compelling characters. In both LOTR and The Hobbit, Tolkein uses the quest story trope to build his characters and story tension. All that walking around isn’t just showing off the terrain; it also builds the stakes. As I said above, the plot of LOTR is simple: drop a ring off a cliff. But the difficulties of the journey centre the story. As Bilbo and Sam trudge over hard ground and through rough weather, surmounting the dangers of the road, they weaken. Every step becomes a personal challenge as they tire, run out of food and wonder if they can make the next ridgeline before their luck and willpower run out. The famous military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz wrote a whole chapter in his On War, just describing that kind of struggle:
Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war…. take the weather. Here, the fog prevents the enemy from being discovered in time, a battery from firing at the right moment, a report from reaching the general; there, the rain prevents a battalion from arriving, another from reaching in right time, because, instead of three, it had to march perhaps eight hours; the cavalry from charging effectively because it is stuck fast in heavy ground... Just as a man in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in war, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity.
Like Clausewitz, Tolkien was an experienced soldier and knew the essence of any quest was that the world — life— sets itself against you. The simplest of things — just going from A to B — which we take for granted in our cosy, well-engineered lives, becomes a significant test of willpower when you’re outside the familiar. And willpower and a commitment to doing what’s right are the core of Frodo’s journey.
In RoP, there really isn’t any kind of stakes. Everyone has a problem to solve, but none of those problems is really very interesting. Galadreil’s plot line is the worst of the bunch. She’s out for revenge, and that’s super interesting because we’ve never heard of that plotline before. Not that a good revenge story can’t be fun, but a revenge arc has its own story beats and tropes that need to be hit in order to resonate with the audience. At the very least, there needs to be a set-up to get the audience involved. A perfect example is the first John Wick movie. The bad guys kill Wick’s cute, defenceless, innocent puppy. As a viewer, you hate those guys. You’re completely involved. You’re riding shotgun with Wick all the way to the end. RoP doesn’t set anything up. Galadriel is out to avenge her brother, who we barely see (he’s literally a rando, on screen for about two minutes in the entire season). As a viewer, I just don’t care.
Trying too hard to be relatable.
What makes the treatment of Galadriel and the other powerful characters, like Elrond, even worse, however, are the efforts to make them relatable. I’d argue that “characters” like them aren’t really characters at all. Their level of power and mythical role makes them more like parts of the world, in my opinion. In the books, they’re essentially fantastical creatures who swan in from stage left, do something astonishing, and then swan out stage right. The POV in the books is anchored on the hobbits because they’re meant to be the relatable ones. They’re literally small folk surrounded by immortals and heroes. By the time of RoP, Galadriel is approximately 8000 years old (it’s hard to tell due to the compression of the timeline in the show and the fact that she was born in Valinor and one Valien year is equal to about ten solar years) and is one of the most powerful sorceresses in Middle Earth. How do you make an 8000-year-old eleven sorceress relatable? You don’t. People go on about how millennials and baby boomers can’t get their heads around each other, an approximate 30-year age difference. Eight thousand? RoP handles this by just changing the nature of the characters, essentially mutating them into generic thirty-somethings. As with the world, there’s no enchantment in the way they’re portrayed, either. The Jackson movies went to great lengths to portray Galadriel’s otherworldliness, but RoP doesn’t even try. I agree; watching all that surreal etherealness every week would likely wear thin, but all the more reason to focus the story around a non-canon, non-mythical character. Relatable characters aren’t automatically interesting. I can’t relate to Walter White, Tony Soprano or Carrie Mathison, but they’re all very interesting characters, and I love to watch them in action; wondering what they’re going to do next keeps me engaged.
And all the rest.
There are other problems with this show: because it’s a prequel, we know the fates of Galadriel, Sauron and Elrond, making it very difficult to build tension around them. For example, in one episode, Galadriel is floating in the ocean with a giant sea creature, but since we know she’ll be around in the Third Age to talk to Frodo et al., we know she’s going to escape. The same thing can be said about the whole “Elves need Mithril to survive” storyline. Clearly, it all works out because the elves are still around in the third age. I know you could say the same about the characters in LOTR, particularly if you’ve read the books, but that’s where the quest trope comes in. In LOTR, It’s about the journey, not the final result.
Another major problem is that RoP has several other plots: Dwarven and Elven diplomacy, a mysterious starman, and orcs attacking stuff, but none of them really connect. They’re all separate threads unto themselves. All are potentially interesting but forced to share screen time, they’re hopelessly chopped up. None of them gets enough time to really breathe. I’m sure in about season three or so, they’ll all come together, but honestly, so what? I’m not even going to make it to season two.
Conclusion.
At the end of the day, I think the RoP production is desperately short on writing skills. After nearly thirty years of essentially making adaptations, Holywood seems to have a dearth of storytelling talent. It’s hard to think of a show or movie made in the last decades that wasn’t an adaptation of a book, comic book or a reboot of some older IP. I’ve some friends deep into Game of Thrones who’ve said the quality of the later seasons went downhill fast: right when the showrunners ran out of book to adapt and were left to their own devices. I think — fundamentally — RoP has the same problem. Amazon only bought the appendices. Without a story to hang the show off of, they found themselves adrift at sea.