Rings of Power was Worse than You Thought
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- čas přidán 5. 06. 2024
- In this video, we look at why Amazon's Rings of power was worse than you thought. How and why the show failed and how they bastardised Tolkien's work
Enjoy
#Galadriel #ringsofpower
0:00 Intro
1:42 - I. Follow this or else
6:18 - II. The Fans
9:31 - III. The Lore - Zábava
A $1 billion budget, yet the hair, makeup, and wardrobe have an unmistakable community theatre vibe.
First, there's obvious money laundering going on, and second the shitty quality can easily be explained by the exact same document that justifies Amazon's "one-of-each" diversity: their Diversity and Inclusion Playbook. This freely available document imposes precise racial quotas on every aspect of their productions. That includes suppliers, contractors and staff. Instead of hiring the most qualified person for the job, Amazon hires the most qualified in a narrow segment of the population, leading to rampant mediocrity.
Don’t get it either.
I thought the elves looked decent. But in Numenor, it looks like everyone got their costumes from Zara and for some reason only got their hands on one size. Just kitschy in the worst of ways
Yep. Elven ears for example... they look ridiculous (also more exposed thanks to short hair). 1billion and their ears are worse than Spock from Star Trek 50 years ago...
I have a special hatred for the costumes in RoP 😂 Celebrimbor looks like he’s wearing a maternity gown (and he works on a forge while wearing flowing flammable fabric?!), the costume they put on Disa is straight up ugly and very modern, the armour on the queen of numenor is not only ugly but deeply impractical for battle, the chick who’s in love with an elf wears a dress with tank top sleeves and no chemise underneath 🙄 which would be scandalous and again completely impractical (when you wear a chemise under your clothes and sweat and whatever you only have to wash the chemise by hand not your entire wardrobe).
Oh, and the greatest offender and the actual reason I gave up on the series 😬 FEMINEM. I tried to give it my best shot but noped out the second I saw that thing. Has middle earth always had access to peroxide? 😂😭
Honestly Galadriel does the best costume wise. Her costumes are either simple and don’t draw attention or actually kind of cute and at least feel elvish (she wears a dark green dress with gold details at one point which is gorgeous and feels very middle earth, and I personally actually liked her armour).
So yeah TL;DR: THE COSTUMES ARE BAD AND THE PERSON OVERSEEING THEM SHOULD FEEL BAD
Diversity is more important than talent
it is scientifically impossible for this show to be worse than i thought.Not even the most powerful psychedelic could open up my mind to the possibility
Oh you sweet summer child, never underestimate Hollywood’s bottomless pit of stupidity 💀
(Remember Velma and She-Hulk)🤮
You have not seen what I have seen.
season 2 says:
"hold my beer"
@@recapnerd2657She Hulk has many flaws, but being worse than this is not one of them.
Lol I was thinking the same thing! 🤣
The dumpster-fire Rings of Power aside, I will forever be grateful to Jackson and his team for the humility they approached Tolkien's work. They didn't get everything right, but they did it with respect and love for Tolkien's work, and they earned every bit of admiration Rings of Power wishes it had.
Amen!
He messed up the hobbit tho
@@con_boy No argument there, though in fairness to him, Fran and Phillipa, they were helicoptered in at the last minute to try to save the project after Del Toro left it, and Jackson ended up working 21 hour days whilst they were literally making it up as they went along.
I'd blame the studios for that mess. Jackson, Fran and Phillipa are the reason the Hobbit movies were not a completely unwatchable mess, if not for them, those films would have been a lot worse. I just wish we lived in a world where Del Toro got to direct both his Hobbit films, as those would have been awesome.
@@fiction5559 Yeah, one of my regrets is that we never got to saw the Del Toro treatment. The guy has such a unique visual style, and while I can't say whether it would have worked for Tolkien, I would have loved to watch it regardless.
Truth be told. By the time Rings of Power actually came out, my expectations were already so depressingly low, that when I started watching it, I hadn't the slightest worry that they could possibly be subverted. Spoiler alert. It was soooooooooooo muuuuuuuuuuuuch woooooooooorse than I thought! xD
No the writers also deserve a lot of the blame. They swore they went back to the books all the time. Clearly that was a massive lie, but even ignoring that, its just...bad. Really stupid, inconsistent garbage. Like putting hundreds of horses on three ships that could hold maybe 20 apiece plus all the equipment. My arse they did that. They chose what they chose. They chose a fucking pyroclastic cloud hitting humans and most of them surviving inexplicably, without burns even!
Basically, everyone but a few of the actors, the people who made the sets, props, clothes and cgi did a terrible job.
They made Galadriel into a 3000 year old psychopathic narcissistic teenager, removed 99.9% of her magical ability, erased her husband and child(who is very plot relevant), wrote this weird nearly romance with Sauron and then have her...keep it a secret for some reason etc etc etc..
Theres probably a thousand mistakes with the story of this show and a thousand more that shows how inconsistent or illogical it is.
those two were showrunners. Whatever that even means. But yeah the writers are equally redicilous. I think one of them said tolkiens version of annatar was bad and they fixed his writing in the way they depicted the rings being made. Like I said. Truly redicilous people.
You're completely disregarding the fact the it *WASN'T* the writers who decided what could and could not be done. No matter how many times they look back at the books, the executives would've forced them into changing it anyway. This video is rightfully pointing that out (along with the ejection of the expert who tried to save the lore as well as any attempt at making sure it followed the actual story). Writers are 'hired guns' who get paid to write what their customer wants, regardless of their own feelings. If they decided to go against that, then they get fired and starve. By themselves, they are collateral and the blame does not rest with them. Some of them might to decide to support the the bastardization, you can blame those particular writers for that and lump them in with Amazon's "Ideological"-faction. But, generally the writers blame is minimal here, somebody else would've immediately picked up the slack and the rightful bearer of the blame would've still been in control.
There’s a quote from Bezos floating around out there where he says Pain and Decay refused his suggestions and he was glad they did. I wonder what those suggestions were and whether he’s still in communication with his son who told him not to f-up Lord of the Rings.
If the hobos behind this thing were as passionate as they claim, they should’ve stepped down. Why would any fan of anything want to be remembered for crapping all over someone else’s hard work?
@@jaded9234 you're wrong - the writers *absolutely* deserve blame for the terrible writing they showed completely aside from the forced agenda of the producers. You can make well written content within the ridiculous constraints studios are forcing these days and it is very clear that the writing was amateur and incompetent in places.
@@jaded9234The piece of dialogue about seeing evil things is all you need to know about the quality of writers job. It's laughably bad.
the clip of galadriel on a horse is still scary AF. WTH were they thinking? did nobody see this obvious flaw in post production?
It also just comes out of nowhere which makes it feel even more sus 😬 like if Galadriel was acting elvish and all connected to nature and animals before it may have been less weird. But that’s the only moment in the entire series we saw her happy and it was awkward.
Ikr she looks like a freaking psycho ready to kill everyone who defies her demands
I couldn't make it thru the first episode. The fight they have with the snow troll thing was unbearably cringy. The dialogue was embarrassing. The acting was hideous. The story is blasphemous.
You have to change your mindset. I kept watching just to see how bad it would get, which was kind of entertaining, but not the way as intended by the creators.
same here brotha, I gave up after 16 minutes
Our family won’t be watching this garbage.
Instead we will just re-watch the movies that were done so beautifully and brilliantly.
Hard pass.
Can’t call it fan fiction. Fans actually like the source material. The people who made this ‘show’ clearly hate Tolkien and everything he cared about.
That's why I call it a stencil or even a ripoff of Tolkien's(and Jackson's) creations
Like Witcher and Wheel of Time, it's like the writers had their own lackluster fantasy stories that got rejected so instead they superimposed their crappy stories and characters over existing properties with already well-established fanbases and hoped nobody would notice. The shill media didn't as they praise these turds whose source material they didn't know.
NONSENSE.
The minute a show runner or writer starts talking about “reflecting the world we live in,” just walk away. They have no interest in entertaining you; they’re just there to lecture you about their favorite political issues and are already planning on gaslighting you for disliking it.
Indeed. When you hear buzz words like "modern audience" or @portraying the world we live in today" just stay away.
this needs at least a thousand likes. It's so true.
And wasn't this the show they fired the "intimacy coaches" because of tolkien fans complaining, for very obvious and extremely good reason. I was already suspicious (I WAS a rabid star wars fan until Disney; i know how this goes) but the fact they even hired intimacy coaches in the first place meant they absolutely were going to massacre Tolkien.
A friend of mine is a huge Tolkien nerd, who have read all his books and could not stand even half an episode. I know no crap about Tolkien besides Peter Jackson 's movies and was more tolerant than my pal: I could stand one and a half episodes!
I gave up after 20min in 1ep
@@dantobias9164 It seems that I wanted to suffer a little more ...
Have you seen One Piece Nerflix series? This is the live action adaptation of manga that was made in the close cooperation with the creator of manga. He accepted the cast, he told them to build real ships instead of using CGI and he could make them reshoot some scenes that he hadn't liked. The outcome is really fun to watch.
Never seen the anime but I loved the live action. One of the best and most uplifting shows I’ve seen in years 👍
Honestly the only way to "redeem" the RoP is to literally pretend the first season didn't happen and starting from scratch actually attempting to follow the source material. But we all know Amazon is not going to do that
Or just dont watch it.. pretend it and they dont exist. Dont give them your money so its fails and they will stop trying.
If people keep watching then they have already won.
@@azoniarnl3362 also correct
Same as the Star Wars sequels unfortunately. Id love to be proven wrong though but they will never do that for either series.
There is no way Amazon’s Rings of Power could possibly be worse than how bad I knew it to be; The vast majority of people saw it for the affront to Tolkien’s legacy that it was. It was a bad (very bad), extremely expensive yet tacky fan-fiction that completely disregarded Tolkien’s lore. Good video, thanks 🤘
ROP did not ruin Tolkien. It never even touched him, never even entered into the same space as Tolkien. It had absolutely nothing to do with Tolkien, and should not be mentioned in the same sentence with him. Tolkien remains unsullied.
nothing but the names of characters and places, i agree
Th worst part is it isn't just Tolkien they've ruined with their soulless message shows. In fact Rings of Power is so far removed from the source that its less painful than what they did to Wheel of Time. A Book series already replete with the diversity and strong women that they want to push, and yet Amazon still felt the need to change everything to suit their own message narrative.
Yeah, their WoT "adaptation" hurt me way worse than RoP
It's not so much that they want to push strong women. It's more that they want to make the point that there is no such thing as strong white straight men. And Wheel of Time had the message that men and women had to work together. That is the LAST thing Hollywood wants to say.
Absolute tragedy
jup, they got WoT rights and busted...
they got TLotR rights and busted it...
and now they appearently got the Warhammer 40k rights and ... well let's say they are 0-2 right now and my hope is very "meager", even with Henry Cavill involved...
@@belegur8108Fallout as well. I have no problem with having a Female Protagonist, as long as its well written and not just a Mary Sue Girl Boss.
So far the Trailers look fine, but the lack of the NCR when its set in LA is a HUGE concern.
Hollywood is a weird place where people pay billions of dollars to obtain a franchise that they hate with a fanbase that they despise.
Then these same people try to make something based on the IP that panders to people that never gave a shit about said IP and whatever they do also ostracises the fans of the original IPs. When these fans politely say that they don't want or like what's being done, they are accused of being racist, sexist, whatever.
And here's the crazy bit: The Hollywood people do this again and again, hoping for a different outcome every time.
I'm just happy that nothing can take away the originals from me. I can just buy them and enjoy them. Amazon might buy the rights to make a shitty LOTR-knock-off series, Disney might buy the rights to Star Wars, but they can't force me to consider a single damn sliver of what they made to be canon.
Tom Shippey was naive, but I can still sympathize with what he must've felt the day he realized what they were trying to do to the work he'd been studying all his life.
and to think Amazon Studio claims to have fired Shippey because he did an unsanctioned interview with the German Tolkien Society and talked about his worry, that the studio only had the rights to the trilogy, the appendicies and the Hobbit and he saw great concern to settle the show in the Second Age, without the rights to the Silmarillion and the Tales, where this Age is covered in more detail... well we all know it is BS...
BTW, Tom's "Road To Middle-Earth" is a great view into Tolkiens work process and mind.
I dont know that I've ever disliked something as much as i dislike this show. The acting , the story , the characters , the way all of it abuses the lore. I hate it.Stopped after epidode 4 and hope with all hope that it is evenutually canceled soon enough to embarrass every decision maker on that team and they have to dig ditches the rest of their careers
That's literally impossible for RoP to be "worse than I thought" since it's the worst thing I ever seen.
in Germany we have a saying " Schlimmer geht immer!" - "it always can get worse!"... so i hope you didn't jinx S2 🤣🤣
I was iffy on Rings of Power going into the series, especially when I saw that there were 10+ writers on the project. Never a good sign. But I think it can all really be summed up in the training fight between Galadriel and the Numanorian recruits.
From the beginning, when you write a training sequence the focus is supposed to be on the trainee not showing off how bad-ass the instructor is; the writing in Rings of Power just focused on all the wrong things in the story, even Galadriel's theme of 'touch the darkness' is discordant with Tolkien's original message of hope triumphing over despair.
Secondly, there was just not enough time. The training fight could have looked good but it was very obvious that it was some quick and dirty choreography without much time to polish the rough edges, and the dialogue that Galadriel has is not matching what she's doing: "Fight with your feet not your arms" but no shot or move to show the importance of footwork and then a very underwhelming disarm that looked more like the guy just let go of the handle, but Galadriel has two swords now, I guess that's cool? In the production as well it was very obvious there was nearly as much time spend on the production deigns outside of the CGI. The costumes look like costumes, not clothing that these characters are wearing everyday and it all has this strange quasi-Roman look to everything. And I still haven't forgiven Elrond's haircut. The plot threads are so scattered all over with 10+ writers that there was no way that they could have connected it all into a cohesive story with the amount of time they had. But hey there's color-blind casting a female warriors, that's cool right?
Lastly, it was all just failure of understanding. Action scenes are supposed to move the plot forward and other than promoting a recruit to lieutenant, nothing came of this training fight. Galadriel's "come at me bro" moment was particularity egregious because it all just looked like a reason to give her another fight scene for no other reason than to show that she can fight. Something we've already know for quite a while. Similarly, Ring of Power just failed in so many ways to understand Tolkien's works and why people are still fan of LOTR. Hope over despair is huge, huge theme in Tolkien. The production I think saw this in the backlash because they went from 'touch the darkness' to 'power corrupts' and back pedaled like mad, but darkness didn't have to present for the light to show, no one wants to live in a time where they have to face down horrors, but "so do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
I like how you mention about the real meaning of adaptations. It means those who brings stories to the screens need to show how they understand the story from the original source and staying true to the original source. This explains on the articles of why The Last Of Us show adaptation was better than The Walking Dead show. The last of us show added new scenes, new characters, explaining what caused the apocalypse, new storylines that connects and highlights things that would lead to the events from the original source, and consistency. The fans of the original called it better than the game. The Walking Dead show failed because it wasn't adapting but changing everything that made the comic great. Characters important to the events were killed off or left off-screen, they commit boomering storytelling, they don't be consistent to the original source, most characters don't have arcs similar from the comics, and everything the characters had done have turned pointless. HBO made the Last Of Us show perfect by caring and staying true to the original source. AMC on the other hand had a lot of creative differences and rather use The Walking Dead Show only to make money showing how much they don't really care about The Walking Dead Story.
I will throw shade at the writers. You, yourself, said they focused on flashy FX rather that good story. Can't gave good story without good writers. We were told over and over again that they would "go back to the book" but all the actual lore was thrown out the window. The first season completely ruined any efforts at a second season. It was irrevocably damaged from the beginning. Everyone involved with it had no idea what they were doing.
My parents were teenagers in the 1960s. They both owned copies of these stories. Trendy media wants to portray "Tolkien fans" as 40 year old white bearded nerds. My mother is not that. But let's face it, this show was not for her, it was for "modern audiences", who "want to see themselves on screen", and like "references to things they recognise".
My mother and I will never get a visual adaptation of Tolkien, because TV/film producers simply don't "get it".
Jackson's LotR movies?
I "like" how "often" you "use" "quoatation marks"
I've heard they ordered five seasons to be developed before the first season was even out but I still had hope they would cancel this thing because of the backlash, but alas we shouldn't be so lucky. The fans of the series that do agree it has shortcomings always tell me we should wait to judge this first season together with the other seasons because it's all one big story they want to tell, and I always say I respectfully disagree, I've lost count of how many 8 episodes shows I've watched that had vivid characters and interesting storyline and cool worldbuilding, in modern TV where we have so many options for entertainment a series needs to grab it's audience as quickly as possible or risk being cancelled by the network. The fact Rings of Power got another season even though it's so bad makes me so angry because I always think about the amazing Tv series and streaming series that got canceled in the past because they couldn't reach the numbers the network wanted, but Rings of Power gets to be so bad and suffer no consequences for it, I won't go easy on it because the source material was difficult to adapt or because the showrunners had no experience, it should be judged by the same parameters as it's peers.
If i remember correct 5 saisons was a must have dealbreaker in the contract for the Tolkien Estate, otherwise no rights for Amazon.
And FWIW, Peter Jackson did try altering Tolkien at first, bending the story to 'modern day' issues. (Making Arwen a warrior like Xena, putting in gay considerations into Sam and Frodo's relationship, for instance.) But to his credit, when fans loudly objected, he listened and let himself be pushed back to the place the original books were at.
Rings of Power refused to listen to fans, and got what they deserved.
The RoP creators are still drawing breath. They absolutely have not gotten what they deserved.
in a recent interview Gilmi himself John Rhys Davis ripped the show a new one. He had the balls to say it when others wouldn't.
I'm a huge Tolkien fan & also incredibly petty. Due to this abomination I'm done with the studio. I'll never watch a production of Amazon again.
same.
I have always felt that the intestering way to bring The Silmarillion to the big screen would be as a (series of) chamber plays - focus on deep character development with only sporadic references to the epic events. Don't know if it would make sense though 😀
Edit: typo
Oh I love this! I just finished reading the Silmarillion for the first time and I honestly think this form would be well suited.
It's baffling, to be honest. 'Rings of Power' and 'The Witcher' - both made by big production companies Amazon and Netflix - were dismal, but another Netflix production, 'The Boys,' which didn't get anywhere near the hype the former two did, is absolutely bloody BRILLIANT. Which just shows that they CAN get it right, even when it's an adaptation of an existing franchise (which 'The Boys' also is.)
Amazon produces 'The Boys', but I understand you sentiment
One Piece was also pretty good
@@manoz6194That’s because the creator made it clear they’re not getting the IP unless he’s breathing down their necks to not fυck it up.
@@alexman378 That is true, that's how it should be, Tolkien's dead though so I blame his family for giving away the rights to Amazon to fuck itup.
well his son passed away during production. And as soon as he passed away they fired their entire writing team and let go of Tom Shippey. Their Tolkien expert. It happened basically immidiattely like they were pack of wolves salivating next to an animal that was ready to keel over and die. @@manoz6194.
Unfortunately his grandson had really bad relations with his father and grandfather and was always bitter that he could not get a career as an author. Their relationship got so bad at one point that he was moved from the will as an inheritor.
I don’t know why they didn’t at least try working the diversity into the story. They could have said Durin’s wife was from another dwarf clan. Say they were an arranged marriage but it turned out they ended up genuinely loving each other. See, that’s not that hard.
Another problem with contemporary writing is that it does not derive from any real life experience, necessity or acquired wisdom on the part of the writer or writing team. It is very simply media quoting other media. The general death of craft aside, this is a different type of watering down. No new blood is added. It is simply the same old hollywood paradigm, in terms of dramaturgical structure, with some flashy references poured into it along with a few current “themes” of choice.
Opinion here feels articifical and injected because it is thrown into the structure rather than emerging naturally from the premises and the traits of the main characters. The story is treated as a framework upon which you can hang any old random tidbit of ideology external to the story world, presented in quick reference with no meat, nuance or development or true anchoring in the actual narrative.
When you make plot, character and story the bitch of ideology, drama ceases to exist, because an ideology does not seek drama, conflict, ambivalence. Ideology seeks its own perfection and unopposed hegemony and is thus antithetical to any internal discursive tension and to exploring the cracks in the armour which storytelling and character development is actually all about. Ideology does not ask difficult questions or seek answers. It poses as THE answer from the beginning, annihilating any petty resistance along the way which was really only there in the first place to offset its perfection against something clearly impure and imperfect and incompetent. There is no drama there. The flat Mary Sue characters, with their absent character arcs, their proposed inborn narcissistic perfection and intolerance to being questioned grow out of this static premise of ideology. There is no real love for the story world and its’ premises. They exist not to be and evolve on their own terms but to provide an aestethically enticing scaffold for hamhanded underdeveloped allegorical jabs, not to the world internal to the story, and barely even to the world outside the story but rather to the world outside the story as perceived through the lense of ideology, with all the rattling biases that entails.
The real drama on the ideological view is the perceived social drama in the world outside the story and the solution to the social drama is provided by the ideology. The dramatic tension is not inside the story - it is between the scantily storyclad ideology and society. The story and its’ character exists only to evoke and channel basic emotion into sympathy or disgust for their proposed ideological positioning - a contemporary contextual shout-out in the shape of shallow, postulated references that preaches for the choir encouring the pretense that somehow new realities will be installed by throwing around images of the ideological utopia and destroying cliche opposition usually in the form of incompetent, dehumanized, petty and dysfunctional versions of the perceived ideological opposite.
All of this is usually external to the actual story. It is a prison of ideological glaze holding it in. Pudding but without the proof. In a word - it is propaganda. It will never truly become story because it’s premise is not the story premise, but the story-external political premise. The real world observations are not translated into functioning a narrative logic. The story does not interrogate, embody or demonstrate it. It simply postulates what is good and what is evil without ever really showing us how or why. Such “stories“ does not create a sense of wonder or greatness - it tells you: this is great and wonderful, that is very, very bad and you better take our word for it or we throw you in with the bad guys.
Real stories are unruly, not facile. They explore and prove their terms in the inherent ambivalences of the premise. They explore the imperfection of the lead character. Not the easy, superficial imperfection, but the deep, existiential and perhaps irreperable imperfection not only as it applies to an individual but as it applies to the human condition.
It is not about art vs. Politics. It is not hard to make art that is political - it just simply has to be natural to your actual subject matter. If a story is truly inherently political and demonstrates exactly how along the way by its very nature - all you have to do is tell it truthfully and artfully. The ideological movie has neither the humility, the patience nor the inclination to do that. It simply asserts and accepts no opposition which is not painted exactly as the melodramatic mirror image to it’s own righteousness. And it speaks to the nature of such proposed righteousness when the antagonist is not an actual, dramatically meaningful force to be reckoned with - but simply petty, incompetent and ultimately rather easily dismissed without any deeper questioning of the self.
The trap of the ideologically motivated and superficially political art is showing everywhere these days: If your premise is that “everything is political” and you see everything through the same ideological lense and you present everything with reference to it’s (storywise unaccounted for) set of values - YOU ARE ALWAYS TELLING THE SAME STORY, REGARDLESS OF WHERE YOU GO AND IT IS NOT THE STORY OF OF THE STORYWORLD, IT IS NOT THE STORY OF REALITY EITHER, IT IS THE STORY OF THE IDEOLOGICAL LENSE ITSELF, MANY TIMES REGURGITATED TO THE POINT OF COLLAPSING IN ON ITSELF.
I work in the arts and I see this all over the place now. Shallow boring, didactic pieces pretending to be critical, pretending to be intellectual while being intolerant to nuance and ambiguity and any mode of self-criticism that does not take place within the framing and presumptions of some type of post-colonial, identity political, power analytical theoretical framework. It’s all good but it’s not the only story to be told about the world and it’s not the only perspective on the subject matter.
I also supervise scientific student projects at university. The story/ideology problem really can be summed up as one similar to bad, entrylevel academic work: If you start with a specific theoretical view of the world and use it to formulate and research a problem, but you then avoid deep and (self)critical entanglement with sufficient amounts of complex empirical data during analysis - your starting point is not moved by the data and observations, no unexpected new knowledge disturbs the initial bias, and theory consequently does not facilitate interpretation of the data, but simply reproduces itself, becomes the textual core of the analysis and not surprisingly the content of the conclusions. As academic work goes this more or less invalidates the whole effort - the theory already existed prior, and it was already just a model of reality not reality itself. So really reality in the form of additional empirical data was just written out of the project. It’s academically irrelevant and also super boring to read, because essentially nothing is going on, but repeating better work less aptly.
Stories that do not entangle deeply with their subject matter in a relevant way suffer from the same reproduction, especially where the starting point is not an true investigation or detailed interrogation of a problem but a preconceived ideological talking point which asserts itself without accounting for its’ proposed efficacy. It simply has more in common with strategic communication, than with actual storytelling or artistic aspiration. So - it comes across inept, pathetic and super boring when it pretends to be what it is essentially not.
this must be one of the longest comments i ever read in any comment sections i visited so far, but i enjoyed every single word.
Thank you for giving me so much insight into the art of writing and so many thoughts for me to work through...
much appreciated.
@@belegur8108 Hey thanks man. Yeah it’s long, sometimes stuff pours out - but great you found it useful ☺👍
@@belegur8108 YOu made me re-read it now - yeah I was proper annoyed when I wrote that, but I think I still mostly agree 😂👍
Here's a really simple, key factor:
Make sure that the person showrunning/writing/directing your adaptation actually LOVES/CARES about the original material they're adapting. If they meet this requirement, they'll likely meet all the others because of it.
At this point, "subverting expectations" would be honouring the source material, good casting and an excellent story.
And THIS is why Jackson's LOTR will be forever remembered and forever seen as a classic while RoP will sink into oblivion. If it hasn't already.
what made it even worse was the fact that rings of power was running next to house of the dragon so u could really see just how bad it was i think i got to like ep 4 maybe of rings of power an i just forgot about the show were as with house of the dragon god himeself couldnt stop me from running to watch the new ep every week its just sad
For anyone who wants to experience the real second age of middle earth please do yourself a favor and get the book “The fall of Númenor” it’s a nice chronological account of the second age using all the stories from Tolkien’s work
"Behind the walls of the Pelori the Valar established their domain in that region which is called Vanlinor; and there were their houses, their gradens, and their towers. In that guarded land the Valar gathered great store of light and all the fairest things that were saved from the ruin; and many others yet fairer they made anew, and Valinor became more beautiful even than Middle-earth in the Spring of Arda; and it was blessed, for the Deathless dewlt there, and there naught faded nor withered, neither was there any stain upon flower or leaf in that land, nor any corruption or sickness in anything that lived; for the very stones and water were hallowed."
And then we get the opening scene of child Galadriel getting into a fist fight with other elves....
FML that was CHAPTER 1... the showrunners/producers couldnt even get that fr into the Silmarillion to understand the basics
Rings of Power was an expression of overt malignant narcissism.
"This series could not be that bad -"
You haven't seen what i've seen
"But sure they get something-"
You Have Not Seen What i Have Seen!
What is worse then dumpsterfire season 1, i guess we will know when season 2 begins. It seems Sauron is going to experience being nurfed even more. Even Morgoth would consider the dumpsterfire to be unfair torture.
With ya up until the utilizing social media feedback... let the artists (or supposed artists) make the art they are going to make without the entitled perspective that our opinions should matter to the creative process.
Let the artists create in their own fashion, and then either succeed or fail based on their creations.
Learn to have no expectations so that instead of constantly being let down you can instead have an occasional pleasant surprise.
When you come to accept that The Rings of Power was conceptialized ENTIRELY around social media feedback you will realize your mistake.
In the years following the success of the Peter Jackson trilogy the works and legacy of Tolkien were under perpetual social media attacks as sexist and racist. That near two decades of "social media feedback" is precisely what programmed the Amazon project.
Absolute gems like Firefly, The Expanse, Babylon 5 and Farscape get cancelled by their studios. Yet garbage like RoP and the New New Doctor Who keep going.
The studios are always disconnected from what the audience loves. The studios choose to dictate to us what we should enjoy. And when we express our opinions, we get labelled as toxic. The only way to teach the studios is to cancel our streaming subscriptions en masse and reward any that make what we want.
RoP is flop and will be forgotten while LotR is timeless and will be remembered forever.
the only thing this show does with excellence is being the most powerful sedative on the planet, when I can't sleep due to insomnia I just watch it for 10 minutes and I sleep like a rock
Theres a huge writing mistake that almost nobody is pointing out for some reason. In this show the Mithril found in Moria is capable of purging evil forces away from it's presence. Even healing pestilence in living things. Yet the largest bare vein of Mithril on the planet has a literal whole Balrog sleeping beneath it. The Balrogs followed Morgoth even before the world was made. They're literally more evil than Sauron, but the Mithril didn't even make it itch?
that's hysterical, tbh.
Yep Amazon people f... it up. Pure stupidity what they have done and the show can't be saved and won't be saved
Kudos on the intricately edited video that followed your audio's message so elegantly. This very accurate observation is worthy of much more than it has received.
Disney can try next to do Lord of the Rings and who knows, they could change a couple of things such as the ring of power to be a nose earing and instead of Gandalf the grey we would have Gandalf the pink
Viggo Mortenson was asked if he wanted to reprise his role as a younger Aragorn in the later seasons. His response was badass. First, he stated that Aragorn isn't in the second age (yes, he has read the books), so his presence is pointless, and secondly, he knew it would cause a shit storm among fans of the trilogy and knew better than to get involved with it.
Great video, I’m shocked to see you only have a thousand followers. Really well done.
5:29 - The reason is very simple: Executives are morons.
Okay, it's a bit more complicated than that.
But, basically, executives are there to make money. Their ideal show or movie is the one which has a certain return on investiment. And to that end things like reboots, adaptations, etc. are extremely seductive. Because they have an in-built audience. But they also often think that audience is too small, so they instruct their writers to "mainstream it" with the idea that it can draw in a bigger audience and more money that way. Only in reality that usually means watering it down and pleasing no one.
On top of that executives think they can come up with a formula for a successful show.
Popular source material + famous actors + flashy CGI + big budget + diversity = profit
Unfortunately for them, art doesn't work that way. Art thrives off of trying new things and taking risks. Good art is everything executives are terrified of.
i watched an analysis about the show and it revealed that in rings of lameness Gladrial is the villian and she is a phsycopath that is pretty much on a revenge path where she does not give a flying F who dies or lives on it
Ah, how IS the Despot of Antrim?
I think the big problem is that too many people these days are happy with a movie or tv series as long as it's looks pretty and has plenty of action scenes. This is why the fast and furious franchise is so incredibly succesful. The big difference between the fast and furious franchise and stuff like rings of power is that the fast and furious franchise is not pretentious. It doesn't pretend that the movies make any sense, it doesn't pretend that the story is anything more than just a thin excuse to get from one action scene to the next. Rings of power and it's ilk on the other hand want you to believe that there are some great messages in them, that they are works of art when that couldn't be farther from the truth.
They didn't put the spotlight on good storytelling because they wouldn't know what that is if it punched them in the face.
My Rings Of Power conspiracy theory: there were no writers. The entire thing was a gambit by Bezos to develop the first fully-capable AI scriptwriting bot. Whoever first manages to develop a scriptwriting bot that can actually produce shows people want to watch, will corner the market and make bazillions. This also explains why RoP has unknown showrunners, unknown actors, cheap plastic props and shonky CGI - where did that billion dollars go, because it sure didn't end up on screen. It went on a team of AI engineers, that's where.
In addition: there were plenty of rumours that leaked out of the production in New Zealand of a shambolic badly-run production with an extremely toxic work environment. And that's the real reason they left NZ: "covid restrictions" was just an excuse, they were running up against employment laws and about to get massively sued by workers AND the NZ government.
They knew this was an absolute turkey long before shooting even wrapped, and had their ridiculous media attack campaign lined up months before anybody in the outside world suspected anything was wrong.
There is no way AI would write something so completely and utterly wrong. Just a horrible combination of human arrogance, ignorance and narcissism.
i bet mine against your theory... I think the experiment with 1.000 chimpanzees tipping on typewriters for the last 50 years brought up cohesive sentences for the first time and Amazon just ommited the fact, that they did not check for inconsistencies or any sense at all ... now they just try to cover up the lapse and blame around with any word ending on "ist" they come up with
proove me wrong 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I think even Peter Jackson went off the rails a bit with The Hobbit. That could have easily been done in two films or even one epic length movie. I have no problem with adding in some of the "appendix material" to tie it in more with LotR but there was no reason to have Legolas, certainly no reason to have a made-up female elf falling in love with a dwarf . Also, Azog was long dead by this point. That is a major plot point in Middle Earth, yet here he is alive and well. However, The Rings of Power is a total dumpster fire that makes the Hobbit look like a cinematic masterpiece. There is so much excellent material Tolkien gave or left unexplored that would have made an awesome series.
For me rings of power was the final nail in the coffin Hollywood had build itself in recent years. I turned to a new source of entertainment with a wide variety of shows, dramas and series you can enjoy in a sheer endless train of productions - Chinese dramas. In 2023 the Chinese industry produced about 220 drama series and while there is a lot which was not really worth watching there was even more with high quality, excellent story telling, great actors and entertaining stories.
The only setback is that you need to use subtitles if you are not fluent in chinese.
I hated that they fundamentally changed the working of Tolkien's world. Because of their ideology. Colonization the way they put it into their series doesn't make sense. Remember the scene where the human boy in the pub keeps screaming at the elf for colonizing the human's land? In Tolkien's work, Middle Earth was the land of the elves. Actually humans were the ones who migrated there from the East. XD
A recent adaptation that was well done was His Dark Materials. They updated it setting the human elements in present day but kept the themes and ideas of the books at the centre. All new scenes fitted the story and worked to adapt elements which would work in live action and expanded the characters in the right way.
Three. That is where i ended, episode three, literally SCREAMING.
ROP isn't fan fic. It's the writers' failed fantasy series that they tried to force into someone else's work so they could steal some credit. What's worse is their creative hijacking where they take lines from the books/films and make their versions of the characters say it first such as Sauron's pick-up lines to Galadriel at the end of the series. That was extremely disrespectful to Tolkien's writing. how this garbage is getting renewed with such low viewership is a mystery.
It cannot be worse then I thought i absoloutely hated it and I know my Tolkien lore.
2:37 If ever there was a psycho smile this is it!
Although everything said in this video was correct, and it's well articulated, it failed to provide anything new that made me believe the show was worse than I thought. This show was exactly as bad as I thought.
I'm also a little miffed that Prime's Wheel of Time series didn't make it into this video, because it has all the same wrongs of this show, or even worse I'd say, because RoP is based off of a few footnotes from the books, giving them a freer reign to _create_ storylines in the given time period. But with Wheel of Time, they have access to the full 14/15 book series and they're failing at an adaptation in every way. Not even remotely staying true to the core elements or themes from the books.
I read most of Tolkien’s works before I was 20. The rings of power sucked.
Well produced and smart. New sub
No it wasn't. I thought it was unforgivable garbage and an absolutely unbelievable joke to where I started questioning reality from the very first episode.
Call me mad, but I think if I thought I had better thematic and plot concepts than an existing work, I'd write my own thing rather than adapt said existing work.
The writers who defaced Tolkiens art should have just said no and quit, now nobody should never ever hire them to even write a birthday card.
That's precisely why they hired nobodies who had never worked on fantasy or even fantastical productions before.
This video has a good message, but it misses the thinly-veiled secret at the heart of Amazon Prime : their shows are scripted by AI.
Each time the characters pop out of nowhere or walk 300 miles between two scenes, that's the limitations of AI tools you're seeing.
If you're not convinced, just know that Amazon started shooting season 2 during the writer strike.
That should be illegal, since at least one of the lead writers has to be on set according to Californian film production laws, unless you're secretly using an AI writer.
@@TheZapan99 Thats probably true :O the stuff seems like its been pooped out by chatgpt now that you mention it.
Just look at Orlando bloom as Legolas vs whoever that guy is as Elrond. Night and day how a younger adventurous elf was portrayed.
It couldn’t possibly be worse than I thought.
Whenever I see the face of that black "elf" and black "dwarf", it makes my blood boil. Tolkien world is not New York City.
The new direction of 'Rings of Power' from when Shippey left... it didn't just threaten to turn it into something unrecognizable, it turned it into something repugnant.
Not exactly. The direction was already going that way. Shippey complaining how wrong it was is the factor that got him booted out.
@@troffle Yes, it was on its way... and he complained, trying to correct course... I meant it didn't threaten, it went whole-hog. The video made it sound as-if the 'current' Rings of Power only ~threatened~ to make its self Unrecognizable to Tolkien, I was saying it was Repugnant.
if they would have followed The Silmarillion closely enough and did it right.... would have been the most epic show to date...The Silmarillion is absolutely incredible!
WOW what a show it would have made!
some would now make the argument "but they did not have the rights for the Silmarillion, so they HAD to make up all the stuff" ...
not me however...
my stand is "So why set your show in the Second Age WITHOUT the rights for the according source material... it exists, you do not to have make up things (and in the most horrible way imaginable) !"
I can feel the "modernity" on most any production , event if they have jsut make a copy/paste , theirs always something different, more cynical ..That the world we live in, full of fake gentle but instead grudge and always to look down or looking for a culprit.
It's kinda MAGA, right?
I think we all share the direction of your argument. But the writers are equally to blame. The people who hired the writers too. And the directors. And the producers. And the show runners. It’s not just “studio”. Otherwise you rob them of agency… and responsibility.
ROP was so awful i couldnt even bring myself to finish watching the first episode. Whereas i have just watched the whole of House of The Dragon in 3 evenings since i got the DVDs for Christmas. The writing and acting in Dragon is soooooo much better than what I saw of ROP. I cannot bring myself to watch the rest of ROP because it was clear it would all be as bad as the first episode.
Jackson's LOTR films are modern classics, and deserve multiple viewings.
Happy to say I've never watched them.
I'm curious, what made you say that the studio and not the writers were essentially in control of the narrative for the show? (2:50 minute mark in your vid)
I haven't seen much 'making-of' material, but what I have seen didn't indicate that the writers were creatively stymied by outside influence. Where did you learn that the studio strictly dictated the storyline? Regardless, the writing itself was So Bad, even if all the writers did was script a pre-existing plotline, they did a terrible job of it.
Humility is NOT a trait that anyone in Hollywood has. Well, maybe a few folks do, but most do not.
The LOTR trilogy exponentially increased the number of Tolkien fans. They did this by recreating what was already an amazing story with minimal alteration. Amazon not only had all the source material they needed but they also had the formula for how to adapt it to the big screen in a manner that is both artistically and financially successful. There are literally zero excuses for creating the trash that is TROP
2:34 they actually didn’t have much second age stuff there, a lot of it is contextual, but they just ignored it all.
"Rings of Power was Worse than You Thought"
No, because i spend no thoughts on it....
I can't wait to mock season 2.
Lord of the Rings is the best fantasy movie adaptation in the history of cinematography.
The Rings of Power is the saddest lost opportunity in the history of cinematography.
the jury is still out there ... WoT is a running contender to the latter title...
It is wrong to defend the writers. Of course they will have been given strange guidelines by Amazon, but that doesn't excuse fundamental mistakes in the script writing. The principle of "show, don't tell" is constantly disregarded. The characters behave inconsistently throughout and the dialog is atrocious. The characters are constantly talking to the audience (the "As you know, Bob" phenomenon). In fact, the writers are the main problem.
I knew this show is gonna be bad when I heard it's made by Amazon for a streaming service.
Galadriel has anger issues 😅
i refuse still to watch Rings of Power,
This show was made with no care to details, they let the elf have a modern fade which is just dumb
The only advatage it has is that I started to read again. Wither and wheel of time was the same.
Was anybody responsible for the production of RoP actually a fan of Tolkien? I don't understand how a billion dollars can be spent on production without any passion & respect for the source material. Those at the top of Amazon Studio are fully responsible. You do not undertake a project like this without putting passionate people in charge. RoP is blatant culture cancelling.
Subverting expectations seems to be code for so dull and unoriginal that I fall asleep
Even Gen Z prefers Peter Jacksons trilogy.
RoP is a wreck as soon as it released its 1st trailer. a wreck will always be a wreck.
Well put.
Queue the song “gloom, despair and agony on me.”
RoP was basically a Tolkien story written b people who hate Tolkien, and wanted to "fix" him.
i think when you watch the "German Superfans" clips available, you see the exact ammount of Tolkien knowledge at work on RoP...
and yes, as a German myself i should not point out such utter morons from my own homeland...
Excellent commentary!