The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power review: Amazon's prequel is kind of a catastrophe
There are ways to do a prequel, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power does them all wrong. It takes six or seven things everyone remembers from the famous movie trilogy, adds a water tank, makes nobody fun, teases mysteries that aren't mysteries, and sends the best character on a pointless detour. The latter is uber-elf Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) who spends the premiere telling people to worry about Sauron. In response, people tell her not to worry about Sauron. That's one hour down, seven to go this season. Sound like a billion dollars yet?
J.R.R. Tolkien imagined Galadriel as an immortal who leaves a sunswept garden paradise because she yearns "to see the wide unguarded lands" of Middle-Earth and "to rule there a realm at her own will." Cate Blanchett played her in Peter Jackson's movies as a Vulcan Witch for Justice. The new Prime Video series (debuting with two episodes on Friday) soldiers her up on a vengeance kick. Millennia before Gollum, Galadriel is "Commander of the Northern Armies" and "the Warrior of the Wastelands." She free-solos up a frozen mountain alongside an ultra-mega waterfall. War claimed her brother and drenched the world in blood. She suspects vanquished Sauron still lingers and has hunted him for ageless decades. Most other elves think Sauron's gone forever. A lieutenant begs her to end the quest and go home, because their search party is approaching a land "where even sunlight fears to tread." This is not the only accidentally funny line, but it is the most brazenly dumb. Um, Mr. Elf Lieutenant, isn't the sun-scaring shadow country exactly where you should look for the wicked godmonster?
Ben Rothstein/Prime Video Morfydd Clark in 'The Rings of Power'
Galadriel narrates a history-lesson prologue. There is a battle montage, Mordor weirdness, then a hard cut to halfling antics. This is the precise structure that began 2001's The Fellowship of the Ring feature. Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh) even looks like Elijah Wood's Frodo, all wide eyes and bushy hair — and the little Harfoot's journey begins with the arrival of a bearded outsider (Daniel Weyman). Obvious reference points do this show no justice. In Fellowship, Jackson cranked a trip to underground Moria into a cinematic horror-action-comedy rock opera. When an equivalent setting appears here, it's big, bright, and bland. It is where a dwarf complains to an elf: "You missed my wedding!" The mood is stilted, dull. They ride an elevator.
Despite all the streaming-war headlines, this series is nothing like HBO's concurrent Game of Thrones spinoff. House of the Dragon is a family drama plus dragons. The two Rings of Power episodes I've seen feel more like an eight-hour Infinity War, with disparate goods coalescing toward a big bad. The one thread that feels new concerns Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), star-crossed in a disputed land. He's an elf patrolling unruly humans who call him nasty names like "Knife Ears." She's a single mom whose sweet chats with Arondir cause social ruckus. Tensions are generational. Arondir remembers when the locals fought for evil. Bronwyn's fellow villagers despise the occupying force leftover from a conflict no human remembers.
I don't think Tolkien intended his elves to seem a tad fascist. And Jackson didn't worry about casting an ensemble of white British guys and white Americans talking British. Rings of Power casually diversifies its fictional races, a casting decision that's thankfully normal in contemporary fantasy. But unlike, say, House of the Dragon, this series also briefly takes fantasy-world racism seriously. The humans don't like Arondir. The Harfoots fear everyone else. "What have elves ever done to you?" Galadriel asks jerky Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), a human running from a brutal past.
Foregrounding inter-species anxiety is certainly a new Middle-Earth take. I worry it won't last. Violent forces converge quickly around Arondir and Bronwyn, which means those actors get one flirty scene before the action ramps up. A dwarf-elf alliance looms. There may be bigger things to worry about than, like, interpersonal relations. People keep finding a strange scary sigil, so congratulations, Rings of Power writers, you brought Sauron to television and made him a TV serial killer.
Matt Grace/Prime Video 'Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power'
What do we want from The Lord of the Rings now? Tolkien tapped a well of myth at once elemental and post-modern, dragooning ancient moods of dark wizard fairy lore toward brave new worlds of super-powered planetary terror. He produced four proper novels, followed by The Silmarillion (posthumously collated, totally awesome) and then a half-century of the dead-writer version of lost Tupac tapes. (Rings of Power is officially "based on The Lord of the Rings and Appendices.") Age only enriches his vast imagination; somehow Sauron's All-Seeing Eye now perfectly summarizes the digital surveillance state. And Middle-Earth is still full of tantalizing mysteries along the margins, with subcontinental centuries of eldritch history broom-swept under phrases like "the South" and "the East."
You'd think a new tale would want to explore less-traveled corners of Tolkien's wide unguarded lands. And Rings of Power does conjure the elves' previously unseen homeland, Valinor, in two embarrassing ways. First, it's a babbling brook where cute kids frolic. Then, it's a heavenly light ray pouring out of parting clouds. The latter is almost a Monty Python special effect — and that's before one person decides, against the furthest stretch of fantasy logic, to swim across an ocean. Otherwise, the first two hours stick to seen-it-before places and boring situations. Officious cliff-adjacent elves proffer blank wisdom: "The same wind that seeks to blow out a fire may also cause its spread." Nori says Chosen One things: "It's like there's a reason this happened! Like I was supposed to find him!" Rising politician Elrond (Robert Aramayo) starts prepping a long-winded industrial project which will require "a work force greater than any ever assembled."
Tolkien's saga was anti-industrialization, which makes it hilarious that Rings of Power is an Amazon product. (Imagine Saruman throwing an Arbor Day party.) Much press has swirled around the production cost, but if a huge budget made great TV, we'd be on Terra Nova season 12. Showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay show no instinct for pacing. Some characters seem to teleport far distances, while others walk slowly between villages (despite horses, like, existing). A big sea attack looks unfinished, introducing a massive threat that's quickly forgotten. Director J. A. Bayona finds isolated moments of grandeur, but the helicopter shots get repetitive fast. The fights aren't quite up to the Walking Dead level, and the battles won't make any Crab Feeders nervous. Frequent cuts to an explanatory map are more funny than informative.
Amazon only made the two episodes available to critics. Maybe things pick up. New locations could feel less like Now That's What I Call Middle-Earth! karaoke. Owain Arthur and Sophia Nomvete have a sitcom-couple spark as Moria marrieds, while Peter Mullan is recognizably eerie under layers of dwarf makeup. Clark's a rising star who was unfathomably freaky in Saint Maud. She imports that film's obsessive mania to a role that (so far) mainly constitutes of the kind of random-encounter duels that torment Final Fantasy players. The other characters are so lame I was rooting for the orcs.
Viewers hungry for Middle-Earth Anything could be satisfied, and I guess you could argue Rings of Power is no worse than all the other expensively empty genre adventures (Altered Carbon, anyone?) that have proliferated through the streaming era. But this series is a special catastrophe of ruined potential, sacrificing a glorious universe's limitless possibilities at the altar of tried-and-true blockbuster desperation. Grade: C-
Read more about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on EW.com:
Meet 13 key characters from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Step into Middle-earth with EW's exclusive The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power photos
How Tolkien's Second Age sets up The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Welcome to Númenor: Get an exclusive look at The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
How The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power crafted a new (old) Middle-earth
