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Author Topic: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video)  (Read 15990 times)
Khaldun
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Reply #105 on: September 06, 2022, 12:49:36 PM

So what we know about Sauron in Tolkien (since we're allowed to reference The Silmarillon fully and they aren't) is that in the First Age he's not the big scary motherfucker in armor that they show at the beginning of Jackson's LOTR films. He just isn't, never has been, because that's a One Ring look, which hasn't been made yet. In the First Age, he's beautiful and is described at least once as taking on a bat-like 'vampire' form (he has a servant who is a full-on, full-time vampire). Before he did the bat thing, he did the wolf thing, in the same battle (it's like being a pirate AND a ninja, right?). His whole schtick at this point in his career is being charismatic, seductive, inspiring, etc.. Also being a bit of a flunky to Morgoth, of course--he's not especially scary or badass compared to Morgoth's really AAA forces (balrogs and dragons).

So the show already fucked it up by showing Sauron in flashback as being the giant armored badass. At the end of the War of Wrath, Sauron begged for mercy and apologized for serving Morgoth, but before the Valar could get around to deciding what to do with him, he decided to quietly bugger off and hide because he figured he was likely to get chucked in the same Void as his former boss or worse.

We have no idea really what he's been up to. Sure, he could have been at Ice Station Darklord drawing arrows in stone or whatever. I feel like he's more likely to have been in the East and South of Middle-Earth doing some recruitment of future armies and maybe surveying where he wants to set up some strongholds/bases of operation. When he does appear in Gil-galad's kingdom offering to teach ringlore, we know that he's already has started to build up a stronghold in Mordor near Orodruin because that's where he's going to be forging the One Ring--he's already got that plan in mind. We also know from Tolkien that this is when Greenwood the Great starts to turn rather Mirky, due to some sort of Sauron fuckery.

If he's also up at Ice Station Darklord, that's presumably in part because Gil-galad's kingdom is in Lindon, which by the Third Age is a deserted wasteland after Arnor falls except for a little outpost at the Grey Havens.

The open question is how Sauron (aka Annatar) explains what who he is and where he comes from when he arrives in Lindon, which is the first place he tries to sell his ringlore. He can pass for an elf, so he could just claim to be a relatively reclusive Moriquendi who has never really been involved in various wars and so on, just studying the deep arts of the world or whatever. We do know that Gil-galad and Elrond smell a rat pretty quickly, so maybe his explanation, whatever it is, doesn't work.

But if he's the meteor man, I dunno; one would wonder how he forgets hobbits but also the Vale of Arduin is a long ways from Lindon, and Eregion is in-between them. Makes more sense for Annatar to come out of the North or from the east of Lindon.
Ashamanchill
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Reply #106 on: September 06, 2022, 02:12:22 PM

Pffffft. "Makes sense" "Lore reasons". You aren't thinking like a hack writer. Repeat after me: Subverting expectations. That will get you to where you need to be.

What if, now hear me out, this the Hobbits Harfoots are right now, or heading right to....MORDOR (guitar distortion)!!! That's right. The Harfoots aren't the ancestors of Hobbits at all, but of the Mordor Orcs!!!

Of course this can't be Sauron while respecting any lore at all. Unless Sauron was on his way back to Valinor with Eonwe and his plane ran into Earnedil's ship or something. I think Haemish is right. Which if he is kinda robs the whole situation of nuance, but like I said, they already did that with the Noldor departing Valinor, so what the hey?

A poster signed by Richard Garriot, Brad McQuaid, Marc Jacobs and SmerricK Dart.  Of course it would arrive a couple years late, missing letters and a picture but it would be epic none the less. -Tmon
HaemishM
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Reply #107 on: September 06, 2022, 07:31:28 PM

I thought about the stranger being Sauron, and I could see it. It would be dumb, certainly, but I don't think that would bother the writers in the least.

Tebonas
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Reply #108 on: September 07, 2022, 01:53:01 AM

They are coding him as Gandalf pretty heavy, though. Everything he does any other Wizard could do as well, but Gandald already did in the Jackson movies. Losing his memory after a traumatic event, raising his voice on a hobbit to intimidate him, talk to insects to give them tasks, rambling on about Sacred flames. If he starts smoking a pipe and creating fireworks the next episode we can be sure.
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Reply #109 on: September 07, 2022, 07:34:37 AM

Definitely either Gandalf or Sauron.  No one gives a fuck about Radagast or the Blues except for a few book nerds.  I only got to watch this last night, but I enjoyed it as an adaptation and without any concern that it would follow the book lore perfectly  We get that so infrequently that it seems silly to expect it from anything, especially genre fiction.  Even Douglas Adams kept writing new scenes for Hitchhiker's Guide every time it was adapted.
Ashamanchill
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Reply #110 on: September 07, 2022, 08:09:29 AM

Definitely either Gandalf or Sauron.  No one gives a fuck about Radagast or the Blues except for a few book nerds.

That was the case for Celebrimbor, Annatar, Eregion, Gil-Gilad etc as well, yet here we are.

We get that so infrequently that it seems silly to expect it from anything, especially genre fiction.  Even Douglas Adams kept writing new scenes for Hitchhiker's Guide every time it was adapted.

If they cast true resurrection and bring the professor back to write a few scenes, I will promise to be more lenient.

A poster signed by Richard Garriot, Brad McQuaid, Marc Jacobs and SmerricK Dart.  Of course it would arrive a couple years late, missing letters and a picture but it would be epic none the less. -Tmon
Soulflame
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Reply #111 on: September 07, 2022, 10:28:10 AM

Definitely either Gandalf or Sauron.  No one gives a fuck about Radagast or the Blues except for a few book nerds.  I only got to watch this last night, but I enjoyed it as an adaptation and without any concern that it would follow the book lore perfectly  We get that so infrequently that it seems silly to expect it from anything, especially genre fiction.  Even Douglas Adams kept writing new scenes for Hitchhiker's Guide every time it was adapted.

Adams talked about that, how something would work in a book, but wouldn't work on radio, or TV, or movie, and so refactoring had to occur to produce a better product in the medium the property was being adapted to.
Khaldun
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Reply #112 on: September 07, 2022, 12:43:16 PM

Which, I have to say, the professor obdurately did not get while he was alive--he fucking hated the entire idea of adaptation of his work and the few minor examples he saw (a preliminary script for a theatrical Hobbit, for example) made him furious. He sold the film rights because he really needed the money at the time when he did it, and he was unhappy about having to do so. You cast true resurrection on him and you're going to be dealing with a furious revenant who's going to murder everybody who has made a film or TV series from his work. Christopher Tolkien was pretty much repping dear old dad faithfully in this respect.

I don't think "nobody gives a fuck about X" is a good predictor of what they're going to do with this, because they have no choice BUT to introduce a bunch of folks that contemporary audiences of the Jackson films have never heard of, and at least some of them have some big narrative work to do no matter what. Gil-galad is with us all the way to the Last Alliance and he's got a bunch of Big Scenes, as it were.

And I have no objection to them making shit up if they want, if it's good. I mean, sure, take us to the East and come up with some freaky shit if you want. There ARE "Dark Elves" in Tolkien, for example, though they're not literally so like Drow. We don't know that much about some of them--they could be off in the East in the Second Age doing any number of oddball things. You could have Maglor wandering the beaches in the East singing sad songs, you could have Ungoliant in a spider-city, you name it. The Elves woke the Ents in the West, maybe the Moriquendi woke the stones or something. If they want to drop a Maiar we've never seen who isn't going to be a wizard into the middle of some proto-hobbits, that's fine with me too. It's just that when it turns out to be Gandalf, Radagast or Sauron that I scratch my head a bit and say hmmmmm what's the point.
Ashamanchill
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Reply #113 on: September 07, 2022, 01:41:36 PM

Yeah that. The thing is, I kinda thought that doing the Second Age, which is comparatively narratively dark, was a chance to write their own shit their own way, with (largely) their own characters, as long as the bigger chess pieces on the board move their already determined paths. If you want tho change existing characters as radically as they have changed Galadriel, I will say what I said concerning Wheel of Time*: what is the point of even using the IP. Artistically that is. We all know why it was done financially.

That is why I am glad they don't have the rights to adapt the First Age, and hope no one ever does. Because THAT was the tale Tolkien wanted to tell, even more so than LotR. He shopped that to publishers and they, wisely from a publisher's perspective, told him to come back we with something more readable. But the First Age was his baby, and meaningful enough to him that he has Beren and Luthien inscribed on his and his wife's headstones, and not Aaragorn and Arwen.

*I'm just going to say right now, before I have to answer it, as much as I dislike this, it is astronomically orders of magnitude better than the Wheel of Time adaption.
« Last Edit: September 07, 2022, 02:08:35 PM by Ashamanchill »

A poster signed by Richard Garriot, Brad McQuaid, Marc Jacobs and SmerricK Dart.  Of course it would arrive a couple years late, missing letters and a picture but it would be epic none the less. -Tmon
Khaldun
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Reply #114 on: September 07, 2022, 02:07:13 PM

In terms of pure visual craft, absolutely. And in terms of narrative coherence and frankly acting, also absolutely. The money does get you something.
Ashamanchill
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Reply #115 on: September 07, 2022, 02:07:50 PM

So the show already fucked it up by showing Sauron in flashback as being the giant armored badass. At the end of the War of Wrath, Sauron begged for mercy and apologized for serving Morgoth, but before the Valar could get around to deciding what to do with him, he decided to quietly bugger off and hide because he figured he was likely to get chucked in the same Void as his former boss or worse.

Yeah. According to Tolkien, in The Letters of JRR Tolkien Sauron claimed to be, by the end of the Second Age, Morgoth's representative, and by the Third Age Morgoth returned. Which makes sense why he would be a clad the way he was and wield a mace (something the written lore makes no mention of). By the time of Finrod's adventures in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, Sauron woulda looked more like a bad Vampire the Masquerade cosplayer. Imma level with you. I kinda wanted to see that.
« Last Edit: September 07, 2022, 02:12:14 PM by Ashamanchill »

A poster signed by Richard Garriot, Brad McQuaid, Marc Jacobs and SmerricK Dart.  Of course it would arrive a couple years late, missing letters and a picture but it would be epic none the less. -Tmon
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Reply #116 on: September 07, 2022, 03:27:38 PM

As a non-Tolkien semi-fan of Jackson's original trilogy, I watched the first two episodes and frankly was bored. Going into the Fellowship movie not knowing a whole lot about the actual story, I was at least entertained. This just seems boring - I had no desire to see the story behind Galadriel, and only faintly interested in how Sauron came to be.

Visually, it is pretty to look at but other than that I'll probably not watch the rest.

Does any one know where the love of God goes...When the waves turn the minutes to hours? -G. Lightfoot
Khaldun
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Reply #117 on: September 07, 2022, 06:20:07 PM

Sauron is unquestionably physical for a lot of his existence. When he's taken in chains to Numenor, it's not that long before he's let loose to basically run a sex cult in Ar-Pharazon's basement. I have to think the show-runners are sort of eager to get to that point because they're going to be able to come at Game of Thrones on its own ground and in a way that's completely lore-validated (well, I dunno how much they can actually use the gory details of the Akallabeth, where Tolkien is plainly trying to imitate some of the dirtier parts of the Old Testament...)  And for most of it, he's a seductive, dark, elvish-sort-of character who can change shape and deceive. He's much more Lucifer in his usual mythological sense, full of sinister beauty and temptation.

The giant with the mace makes sense in terms of the Last Alliance: he's lost all hope of seducing anybody not just because everybody still alive knows him for what he is but because he lost his fair shape when Numenor sank. (Just to give a sense of how fucking big that moment is, it's not just Numenor sinking, Eru makes the world into a sphere when it WASN'T before, it was a flat plane, more or less, and he evacs Valinor from being reachable by normal sailing.) And yet there's Sauron having physical shape and fighting the absolute top dogs of the Elves and Men to a personal standstill. So he's got to be some kind of fucking badass and he doesn't have an ordinary mortal shape anymore. Giant fucking armored deathmachine with a big mace is as good a visualization as you could ask for.
HaemishM
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Reply #118 on: September 07, 2022, 07:36:37 PM

I have no problem if they want to make shit up from scratch in the Tolkien universe - knock yourself out, as long as it's good.

The problem this show seems to have is the same one that most of the Star Wars properties after the original trilogy has. They aren't making ENOUGH up. They keep trying to show us new stories with the same old characters whether those stories make any goddamn sense at all. The Galdriel of this one reminds me way too much of the Solo movie.

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Reply #119 on: September 07, 2022, 10:19:05 PM

I agree that this is shitty.

I'm usually one to find something to love in the things people don't, but not here.

Still gonna have to watch it though because Tolkien. Not that they get Tolkien.
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Reply #120 on: September 10, 2022, 11:00:25 PM

WTAF was this scene? I had to pause and go looking for internet reactions!
Tebonas
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Reply #121 on: September 11, 2022, 12:53:03 AM

Elves are freedom loving people and can't endure being locked in. So after 5 minutes imprisonment by the Numenorians she is enjoying the new freedom after her long suffering. And apparently so is the horse.

Joke aside, this is the poster child for form over function. So I guess they thought it made a good visual?
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Reply #122 on: September 11, 2022, 08:27:54 AM

There's just such banal thinking going on. I'm still irritated about the entire Dain hates Elrond because he didn't come to the wedding from the second episode. I mean, for one, the appendices say: look this is the one time that Elves and Dwarves were generally friendly with each other and trading tons of stuff etc., so the whole K-D is closed and no elves allowed is just no, no, no. I mean, jesus, I know where they're going with this all--happy-go-lucky Elrond is going to be turned into grim stately Elrond by the enormous suffering of the war against Sauron, the Elvish-Dwarvish connection is going to be a very personal loss to him and Dain when it happens, but it's all about as subtle as a brick to the head and without any of the sense of mythic grandeur that Tolkien's work requires to keep it from being just Another Fantasy Epic like the ones he inspired.
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Reply #123 on: September 11, 2022, 09:41:57 AM

I fell asleep in the latest episode so many times. It was goddamn boring. I think one of those little snap naps was during the horse riding scene, because I don't remember that bit. The whole Elf-fu in the tunnels of whatever the fuck that is supposed to be showing is super boring. The Harfoot drama is very boring. The surprise appearance of Numenor is mostly boring, as is the appearance of Isildur. It's clear the showrunners are making all these reveals as if they expect the viewers to know what the fuck they are and thus be shocked and amazed by them, but I'm pretty sure 80% of the audience won't remember what these places and people are at all. I barely remembered the names of Numenor and Isildur, and though I'm not some super fan, I am knowledgeable.

It's like they made a show that they think is going to wow the hardcore Tolkien nerds but can't even keep the casual fans interested. 4 episodes in and I am just absolutely not invested in any single character or story arc whatsoever.

Khaldun
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Reply #124 on: September 11, 2022, 03:51:19 PM

Judging from the online conversation, they are very much not wowing the Tolkien nerds.
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Reply #125 on: September 15, 2022, 10:37:10 PM

Just got the new episode notification on my phone, and my reaction was "not another one". There's nothing to look forward to. But I suppose I'll watch it.
HaemishM
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Reply #126 on: September 17, 2022, 09:39:45 PM

4th episode finally felt like it went somewhere. The Galadriel/Numenor storyline didn't annoy me, nor did the Dwarven story. Hrondir and his clearly-half-elf love child in the Southlands, however, continued to bore the everliving piss out of me.

Ashamanchill
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Reply #127 on: September 27, 2022, 08:14:09 PM

Lol this thing is just dead, huh.

(I've stopped watching. I can't even get worked up about it anymore, as I did with WoT, it turns out.)

A poster signed by Richard Garriot, Brad McQuaid, Marc Jacobs and SmerricK Dart.  Of course it would arrive a couple years late, missing letters and a picture but it would be epic none the less. -Tmon
Samwise
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Reply #128 on: September 27, 2022, 08:26:27 PM

I see it every time I open up Prime Video, and every time I think "maybe someday I'll get around to watching that," and then I watch an episode of Columbo instead.

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HaemishM
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Reply #129 on: September 27, 2022, 08:32:10 PM

Not quite sure what it is, but it has been decent enough that I've continued watching. I still think the Hrondir story in the Southlands is garbage and has yet to be even remotely interesting or well-acted.

Tale
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Reply #130 on: September 28, 2022, 01:09:18 AM

Lol this thing is just dead, huh.

(I've stopped watching. I can't even get worked up about it anymore, as I did with WoT, it turns out.)

Episode 5 was comically slow. It ran long at 1 hour 12, but nobody did much. There were more weird slow-motion scenes to fill the time.
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Reply #131 on: September 29, 2022, 06:12:15 PM

To be fair, one of the episodes had Hobbit singing so I feel like all the Tolkien nerds should at least be happy about that.
Tale
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Reply #132 on: September 30, 2022, 09:20:02 AM

THINGS HAPPENED!
01101010
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Reply #133 on: September 30, 2022, 10:53:38 AM

After suffering thru Thursday night football and the forced advertising for the newer episodes, not a single scene they showed seemed interesting. Gorgeous scenery which I guess hits the correct notes, but nothing drew me in and made me consider picking back up with it. Just seemed boring, like the counter to the hyper-graphic Game of Thrones which I also watched 3 episodes before throwing in the towel but for the opposite reasons.

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Khaldun
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Reply #134 on: September 30, 2022, 11:55:16 AM

I have this vague feeling of guilt and a sense that I need to catch up but I'm not sure why I should. (I finished Ep 4.) It is really not grabbing me at all.
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Reply #135 on: September 30, 2022, 03:09:44 PM

Episode 6 is legit good and pays off a lot of the build up IMO.

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

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Reply #136 on: September 30, 2022, 03:35:34 PM

The very late unwrapping of the Macguffin was bad (and we'd also been unnecessarily shown to expect what was unwrapped - would have worked much better as an actual reveal).

Other than that, I'd now say episodes 1-5 were an extended first episode, and episode six was the second.
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Reply #137 on: September 30, 2022, 03:58:48 PM

But is it fun?

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Reply #138 on: September 30, 2022, 06:49:39 PM

No.
HaemishM
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Reply #139 on: September 30, 2022, 09:06:40 PM

Episode 6...



wut? swamp poop

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