Sauron revealed! Orcs mobilizing! Mount doom erupted! Oh my. What a way to end season one of Rings of Power.
Okay so I have to be honest and put my cards on the table here. On paper Rings of Power has sounded like something I should love. And even that enumeration that I just did, which I found out about because I watched a YouTube recap sounds amazing. However, it hasn’t been for me.
That said, I promised as I got access to this latest season of Rings of Power that I would approach it with an open mind and give it a fair shake. I wanted to be so fair in fact that I tried to watch the first season again (the first time I gave up after three episodes). I found it to be something with really great production value and some interesting performances. But it was ultimately a slog for me, and at times drove me mad in the way that it just wasn’t getting through to me. I didn’t finish it, hence resorting to a recap so I would’t be watching S2 blind.
Now I can give credit where credit is due. S2 of Rings of Power has some real and definite improvements. First off is that its pacing has improved. While this season still suffers from some pacing problems, it moves much slicker than the last one.
In addition, the performances feel a little more aligned with each other. There were times in the first season where we would go from some prestige TV aspirations to what felt like community theater. Now it feels like they are all in the same show and this also means that the tone of it is a little more consistent if still at times shaky. So good on that.
And really, while there are many things that I might not appreciate about this show, it’s clear that the actors are showing up and giving the best possible performances they can given what is often thin material. The acting elevates some very weak writing. But acting can only do so much.
There’s a lot of conversation around how much Amazon is spending on this series. It’s obviously spending a lot on production design and visual effects. Yes, a lot of the staging looks great and a considerable effort is clearly put into making sure that the various settings convey how diverse the world in which these characters live is.
In addition to that, I also find the action sequences to be mostly fun. There’s a lot of cool elves doing cool things.
That’s the problem though. You can throw a bunch of money at something and make great sets and do cool sequences, but if you don’t invest enough in both the story and the storytelling then it won’t hit for viewers like me.
I think one of the challenges here is that it confuses lore with narrative. As a reader and viewer, I am so bored of lore. I’m bored of interconnected-film multiverses. I don’t need to know the history of a thing and how generations before this thing did that thing. If you’re going to make connections, well and good for you. But the narrative of the current story being told has to be compelling and interesting, and then the lore is just bonus stuff for fans to dig deeper into.
In that sense I think Rings of Power puts the cart before the horse. We get more lore, we are expected to care about how the rings of power are crafted because these are important pieces in the larger LotR story which we do care for. But really, I don’t care how they rings were crafted so much as I do, say, with how much eventually Frodo struggles to carry them to Mount Doom.
The responsibility of Rings of Power then is to take the crafting of the rings and all of these other stories from the past and make them compelling to me. Of course that’s been the promise and the pitch since the first season. They held out that “Who is Sauron” bit, although it’s frustrating how that’s turned out.
And all this supposed suspense around “the Stranger” character. The “how Galadriel becomes Galadriel” is buoyed by a fantastic performance, but dragged down by a character whose decisions (never mind her dialogue) are frustrating and often, well, boring.
What we get here are a number of settings, a number of set-ups, and a variety of interconnecting conflicts that all lead toward the creation of the rings of power. Again, on paper this is fine as a pitch. But once I’m watching it all, it’s like the series makes either the most predictable or the most nonsensical choices for the story.
Even worse, sometimes it seems we just have one scene, followed by another, and then another, and I’m left wondering, why am I watching these scenes. Though some sequences might be in and of themselves interesting, they don’t chain together to create a larger tension that pulls me along and keeps me watching.
So I guess where this leaves me is there’s a bunch of stuff going on, there’s some cool stuff that happens every once in a while. But I’m not exactly sure why I should care about these various things happening. Perhaps that’s an inherent challenge to prequels, that because the outcome is clear, it’s difficult to create drama and make viewers care?
But then we could easily point to Rogue One and Andor among many other successful prequels that have managed to make compelling stories around IP where we knew where things were going.
The show has to carry a lot of weight. It’s supposedly the most expensive show ever made, based on one of the most beloved fandoms in all of literature and film. By default it is expected to be epic and massive and powerful. While it’s understandable that it might fall short of such lofty expectations, I can’t help but be frustrated by where it could be better and it isn’t. If they could afford so much for production design, you would hope they could invest more into that writers’ room.
It’s doing enough to have its fair share of fans who really dig it. My opinion is on the other side of it, wishing that it were a more interesting, more compelling show. – Rappler.com
