The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Review: Episode 1-2 An Epic Series! Beginnings, Departures and Small Great Revolutions
Stars: Morfydd Clark, Markella Kavenagh, Daniel Weyman
Director: J.A. Bayona
Streaming Platform: Amazon Prime Video
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Analyzing The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the TV series streaming on Prime Video starting September 2, 2022, is accepting that the world narrated in it is other than what Peter Jackson showed us in his monumental film trilogy. It is also realizing that there is no direct link between the works, a transposition that resonates as universal, that profoundly exudes a sense of satisfying completeness to the point of surviving time since our time, with all its petunias and feel-good infiltrations, has contaminated that universe so ancient, fragmented and tormented, giving it the shape that befits modernity: brilliant, sparkling, digitally flawless, politically correct, feminist enough. A form forged in far-sightedness, accommodated by a budget of about 465 million dollars, anchored to the small screen by quite reassuring names (one above all that of director Juan Antonio Bayona) and by the spirit of JRR Tolkien, one of the best-known and most famous fantasy authors appreciated.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Review: The Story
Two episodes are few to give even a vaguely complete opinion. But two episodes can be enough for so many things. First of all the gaze, which flies from the detail of a leaf to the universal of Tolkien’s landscapes. Visually, The Rings of Power is everything we would have wanted, a majesty on canvas that triggers the first real short circuit: the small screen is tight in this prequel. Seeing it at the cinema immediately brought us back to last year when we told you about the return of The Lord of the Rings to the cinema. The breath of this new series is in fact from a large (indeed, very large) screen, to plow through valleys from the sky or huddle together under the mountains. The production sector is immediately perfect, giving us the first emotional peace of mind on the fact that yes, and how if you perceive the economic effort of Amazon and the desire to make everything tangible as the Jackson of the trilogy and at the same time exploit the CGI without abusing it, as had happened in The Hobbit. Already in the first two episodes, you can breathe greatness, with that intrinsic desire of fantasy to raise your eyes to the sky and see what lies beyond.
In this regard, the first knot to be solved is the work from which the series starts. Unlike what was thought in the beginning Amazon Prime Video has no right to Silmarillion, the work that Tolkien loved most of all, as well as the most mistreated, troubled, criticized; forge of fantastic ideas to draw from to create new books (according to its publisher!). This mythology struggled to reach bookshelves due to the distinctly different style from the acclaimed The Lord of the Rings – more bombastic, archaic and therefore difficult to understand – as well as for the intestinal fragmentation from which it suffers. For this reason, it was published posthumously in 1977 after being reworked by his son Christopher together with writer Guy Gavriel Kay.
But this book, as we said, is not the source from which the Prime Video series draws, which instead has full power over The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, The Hobbit, and the Appendices of the Lord of the Rings. To talk about the mythical Second Era in which the show is set, we go beyond the slippery and misunderstood ground of the aforementioned work and at the same time avoid getting entangled in rigid narrative schemes to arrive at a more usable style, for a story that distances itself as much from the films as from the particularity of the listed works, delivering to the viewer a sparkling and elaborate cocktail that resonates as innovative, while always looking at the originality of the mother work.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Review and Analysis
Why The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is not a series for a select few but a series for all, which speaks the language of the elves stripping it of cryptolalia; sneaks into the Misty Mountains, the forests of Lindon, and other amazing places with cunning, showing us unseen perspectives (such as the city of the dwarves) and characters never met before (the Pelopiedi, for example, who are one of the three races of the hobbit) and does so with a style that both honors and renews our canons of reference. We could in some ways define it as an origin story, as it takes us to a cinematographically unknown time, first peaceful then afflicted by wars, by enmity between peoples, by the dark presence of Sauron. It is a time that we have not yet lived directly: it seems familiar to us, some actors can easily place them in the timeline, of others we know almost nothing; we know how it will end but we cannot know for sure how it all began.
How does a war start? How is the thirst for revenge shaped? How are misunderstandings created? And friendships, alliances? The Prime Video show tries to answer all this by sowing small pebbles along the way and taking care of the graphic rendering of the story down to the smallest detail through a photograph that defines the boundaries of every animated or inanimate being that appears on the screen, in visual windows so clear that recall certain adventure video games. In this carousel of images and limited to the first two episodes seen, JA Bayona (here also as executive producer together with Lindsey Weber, Callum Greene, Belén Atienza, Justin Doble, Jason Cahill, Gennifer Hutchison, Bruce Richmond and Sharon Tal Yguado) he shows he is doing what he does best: trapping in the camera monsters who are not afraid to be seen in the face and in whose physical details the essence of mystery, fear, evil is wedged that perennially touches the living, leaving them on a razor’s edge and causing tensions that heal in sudden changes of scene, perhaps sometimes with too much predictability. After all, what opens up to our eyes is, as we said at the beginning, a world that rests on modernity and that needs to shine, to make us perceive the serenity enjoyed by the Earth in this era. The result is fewer dirty frames, less realistic than what we have been used to.
The world of Tolkien that is staged in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is sweetened by perfection, which is a virtue but is also a limit in the very moment in which it does not fully delude us that this world is possible; that there exists, has existed or can exist a time when elves, hobbits and dwarves lived alongside humans and evil was a dark lord named Sauron to hunt and fight. The sky of Pirandello paper has torn and we are mere spectators, aware that we are being trained by a fiction from which there is no possibility of escape: we are astonished by that interlocking of authentic perfection that does not belong to us and therefore does not rise to the task that the seventh art (albeit declined in seriality) should have: and make us feel part of an otherwise non-existent world.
The acting rehearsals are impeccable, we sincerely appreciate the skill of a heroine who fights against the will of her people to support her mission and her true self: Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel spreads courage and determination and knows how to capture attention while not showing (always limited to the first two episodes) an overwhelming inner tribulation. An option that can be justified by the choice of presenting on the small screen all the protagonists of this journey, each with their peculiarities, such as the reckless Nori played by Markella Kavenagh(a Pelopod who always sticks her nose where she shouldn’t!), which has the merit of accentuating the feminine notes of the series together with Sophia Nomvete (Princess Disa, wife of the prince of the dwarves Durin IV, played by Owain Arthur).
Everything is epic, sparkling, and promising. What is missing then? The feeling that in these plots there is no “forever” drawn, that there is no truly recognizable place to call “home”, there is no invisible hand that takes care to embrace us and make us open our eyes towards a confrontation that it is current, related to our species, to our modus vivendi. If the color of the skin is enough to place us in our time, it is certainly not enough to penetrate beyond the blanket of all times to dictate universal teaching. This is not the place to climb into useless comparisons, but it is necessary to emphasize that, if Jackson’s world worked for that meticulous craftsmanship that made it plausible, the one assisted in the Prime Video series is clearly from another pasta.
But it is immature now to judge. What we see is net of a necessary and already announced detachment, a choral series, able to take root in our attention, to amaze and entertain us. Those who expect a faithful transposition will be disappointed, those who see it with eyes stripped of memories and pages of books will instead appreciate every detail, enjoying the adventure and flattering those characters who heroically do not resign themselves to appearances, fighting so that the world is the best place. The small screen, for the moment and in this case remains a place in which to expand narrative universes and satisfy our thirst for visions and knowledge. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which sees JD Payne & Patrick McKay as showrunner and executive producer, arrives exclusively on Prime Video, with the first two episodes, on September 2, 2022, and then every week.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Review: The Last Words
The first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings – The Rings of Power are visually impressive. A product that the small screen is close to, designed for the most complete cinematic experience possible. A homecoming equal but different, which manages to distance itself from Peter Jackson without abandoning his spirit and vision. Two first episodes that act as a gigantic prologue to what is to come, able to align the pieces on the board for a game that will take its time without haste, giving ample breath to a huge fantasy world, where the epic already burns under the surface, ready to erupt.
