Season 2 "Rings of Power": Amazon forges fool's gold
All signs point to the most expensive TV series ever being a hit. Sadly, Amazon is lacking a crucial element: a compelling story.
(Image: Amazon)
Based on the first four episodes, the second season of Amazon's Lord of the Rings series "Rings of Power" follows on seamlessly from last year's series opener. This not only applies to the narrative, the cast has also remained largely constant and the production quality is also very similar – if anything, it has improved.
In the second season of "The Rings of Power", it becomes all the more apparent how much the show's producers have rebuilt and compressed the source material. To understand why this is the case, you have to consider the very complicated copyright situation that Amazon has maneuvered itself into.
Searching for the target audience
The makers of the series have the rights to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, including the appendix and the Hobbit. However, due to an agreement with the production studio of the Peter Jackson films, they cannot use material that directly overlaps with these films – which leaves only the part of the Lord of the Rings Appendix that deals with the second age of Tolkien's fantasy universe as source material for the series. Tolkien's major works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, are set in the third age of his chronology. The source material available for the series spans almost three and a half thousand years of Tolkien's mythology. However, this only served as a prequel to his two main works, which means that the events outlined in the appendix are spread rather sparsely over these three millennia.
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The Amazon producers have solved this problem by pulling together characters and events that are actually hundreds and thousands of years apart and trying to forge a coherent narrative out of them. In itself this is not a bad thing, but in the case of "The Rings of Power" there is a fundamental problem: that of the series' target audience. After one and a half seasons of this exorbitantly expensive series, which is obviously intended to be a drawcard for Amazon's Prime Video streaming service, you have to wonder who is actually supposed to be watching this series.
Not for casual viewers
The series is bombastic, you have to give the producers credit for that. The special effects, both in the tracking shots across epic landscapes and in the fight scenes, are magnificent. In some places, you almost wish Amazon would remake the Peter Jackson films at this level. The actors also do a good job, almost without exception. The dialog is well-thought-out and consistently at a high literary level. Problems with plot holes, which plague so many modern Hollywood productions like a Nazgûl in The Hobbit, can be largely ignored here. After all, in Tolkien's world, many inconsistencies can simply be wiped away with mystery or magic.
So the series is actually quite watchable. Unfortunately, the story that is told is not necessarily gripping for the normal TV viewer who is not necessarily a huge fan of Tolkien or Peter Jackson's films. The entire series is an incredibly convoluted introduction to a storyline that culminates in Frodo having to bring the ring to Mordor. The significance of the nineteen rings that Celebrimbor forges in the series, which gives it its name, is that they are controlled by the One Ring. However, its story is mainly told in source material that the series is not allowed to use. So if you haven't read Lord of the Rings or don't remember the movies, the plot of the series will probably leave you cold. The series draws almost all of its suspense from the fact that the viewer knows who Elrond, Galadriel and Isildur are and why certain events cast their shadows ahead. It's hard to imagine how confused a viewer who never really cared about Lord of the Rings and just wanted to see a new fantasy series aggressively promoted by Amazon must be.
Die-hard fans will continue to grumble
At the same time, Amazon has for the most part already alienated die-hard Tolkien fans in the first season, mainly through its casual treatment of the Tolkien chronology and deviations from the mythos. The producers try to hint at certain elements from the books and films, and are clearly working towards their series being accepted by fans as a prequel to the films. They are also clearly trying to incorporate situations and characters that are obviously popular with Lord of the Rings fans. For example, the fourth episode of the second season introduces a legendary character from Tolkien's books that fans have repeatedly and painfully missed in the Peter Jackson films. Despite all the fan service, devoted Lord of the Rings fans will probably find more to complain about in Amazon's realization than the series makers would like. The second season of the series does not reverse the trend, criticized by many fans, of moving away from the source material and towards progressive, new narrative elements.
Hollywood has spent a lot of time in recent decades producing prequels, sequels and remakes of old material. It's primarily about pinning a well-known brand to the product – There will be money to be made. So the key question is: would I be interested in this story if it was told in a generic setting with random characters and didn't have the name of my favorite franchise on it?
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In other words: Would "The Rings of Power" be a good TV show if its story was set in an entirely new fantasy setting and none of the characters had a familiar name? After one and a half seasons, we have to answer this question with "no". As good as the special effects, sets and costumes are, as much as the dialog tries to emulate Shakespeare and as hard as it tries to fill colossal moments of an epic fantasy chronology with historical significance, it all fails if you take Frodo and Bilbo's adventures (which are not part of the series) out of the equation.
All the pathos of the series is meaningless without this huge credit Amazon has taken from Tolkien's magnum opus. No movie studio or publisher would even consider the plot of this series if a previously unknown fantasy author peddled it as a work in their own fantasy universe. The story of the series is simply not very good on its own. Which is hardly surprising when you consider that it is based on just under 100 pages of an appendix to a 1000-page book.
You can watch "The Rings of Power", and if you're reasonably interested in Tolkien, you can have a good time doing so. But you can also leave it alone and be just as happy with it. For the most expensive television series of all time, with a budget of well over a billion US dollars, this is a pretty poor showing.
The first four episodes of the second season of The Rings of Power have been released exclusively on Amazon Prime Video. Four more episodes of the second season are to follow by October 3
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