‘The Rings Of Power’ Is Making A Mockery Of Tolkien’s Work

Amazon is adapting the appendices of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy in a similar way.

We would get four separate stories in the opening half hour instead of telling the tale of Frodo and his companions' fraught departure from their homeland.

A fierce baker would kill an orc with her rolling pin. She would gather the rest of the country to make for a ruined castle, where she would rally the Hobbits to fight against the orcs.

In Story #2, Aragorn and a crack team of Gondor Rangers would head for Mordor where they would soon be captured, but Aragorn would be free to take a message back to his people. Sauron is building a place where evil will prosper after all. Aragorn would be allowed to keep his weapons.

Galadriel would bedecked in full plate armor and head to Rohan where she would make quick work of Wormtongue and lead the Riders of Rohan to war. She would impress everyone with both her fighting skills and her people skills if she showed the warriors of Rohan how to sword fight.

Legolas wasn't aware that Elrond had a plan to trick the dwarves into giving them some precious jewels, but he was sent to the mountain to help.

Aragorn found a crown that wasn't actually a crown in each story. What is that thing?

The baker lady may or may not be a good guy or a bad guy, but she is almost definitely a guy.

Soon the Bilbos will be at war. The important thing is that. The war is on. The baker asked the unwarlike people, who had no reason to follow her, if they would stand by her.

The adaptation would double down on these branching storylines, making each as big and epic as possible right from the start, so that rather than bother to craft interesting or compelling characters or stories, it becomes a narrative arm.

Galadriel would go to the ocean for a long swim, then to the jungles of the Even Further South, and finally to the North Pole, where she would refuse advice from Santa.

She would make it to Rohan with Balhrand, a roguish rogue who may or may not be a good guy or a bad guy, but is definitely a guy.

We would get a lot of examples of incompetent sims in Rohan. owyn and omer would argue all the time. omer and his friends had an ongoing dispute because he tried to get kicked out of the Rohan Cavalry brigade and accidentally got his friend kicked out as well. Shouldn't his friend be in this version as well? They argue quite a bit. Yes, do they argue? Galadriel was nicked in the ballet sword fight byBoromir, so now he can abuse his friend even more.

Gimli and Legolas formed an odd but endearing friendship marred by the absolutely gob-smacking ridiculousness of Elrond's plan to trick the dwarves and neither would spend any time fighting orcs.

The love triangle between Aragorn, Arwen and the baker lady was caused by Aragorn falling in love with the baker lady. It is obvious that Aragorn is a representation of the patriarchy and how it turns women against each other. They both decided to ditch him.

The jewels the Elrond has sent Legolas to find are actually the Silmarils, because they weren't actually lost. What are you talking about? Don't be foolish!

Smaug was a good guy who guarded them for thousands of years. Really? That's amazing! After the One Ring was forged, he protected the Silmarils and didn't let the elves know, because he knew the dwarves wouldn't be trusted anymore. Smaug was turned from evil by the fact that Tom Bombadil was a dragon rider. The ADVENTURES OF Tom Bombadil and Smaug has a nice ring to it.

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Galadriel can wear a suit of armor made out of Silmarils when she single-handedly smacks down Sauron in a final battle to the death. It's not single-handedly because.

Aragorn and omer cheer from the sidelines as the baker lady and Arwen team up for girl power with Galadriel and owyn in the last fight.

In the last scene, Galadriel kicks Sauron into the lava after she stabbed him with her sword. She takes the ring and throws it after him. She said, "If you like it so much, Sauron, why don't you put a ring on it."

The Lord of the Rings adaptation would cut between the various storylines that have nothing to do with the original books at a fast pace. Rather than spending time developing any of these characters or establishing a sense of adventure or camaraderie, the script would ensure that they all bicker with one another, distrust each other, and trick and deceive at every opportunity, all to be grimdark.

Most of the time, Littlefinger's ring would get them all from one place to the next without bothering with outdated notions of travel.

Thankfully, it would all be dressed up in pretty costumes and a rousing score and would mimic the aesthetic of Peter Jackson's original film adaptation, so that we could describe it as "Tolkienesque" and call it a day.

There would be a huge pop culture war over whether or not this was an okay adaptation, whether the real problem was having some black Bilbos in it, and why anyone complaining was just a toxic fan who cares about the lore.

There are many problems with The Rings of Power, from its insufferable central character to its abysmal writing, and I have other pieces in the works. My review of the fifth episode is here.

The story itself is un-Tolkien like. I've done it with humor and hyperbole, but I hope you take my meaning. A small group of characters are being built around. Its world and people are carefully established. Most of the earlier chapters were devoted to befriends or encounters with ethereal elves. Do we hear the drums of war when the characters are separated? There is more work to be done in adapting appendices, but this doesn't feel like a fan-fiction.

It's not that Amazon has fiddled with the lore, it's that the show's writers and creators have told a story that simply wears the trappings of Middle-earth without understanding its underlying themes. Peter Jackson's films were not perfect but at least it was obvious that he was trying to adapt the works of J.R.R. as faithfully as possible. Jackson did a good job atTranslating the page to screen even though changes had to be made.

Middle-earth would look a lot like The Rings of Power. It is a generic Hollywood fantasy created by people who don't understand its source material. Maybe that is what is causing me so much distress. The creators of the show seem to think that they can do whatever they please with the source material, or that by ignoring it they can improve upon it. I find the liberties they have taken to be both offensive and unwarranted.

This is not good even as a generic fantasy. Even if you stripped the characters and world from this entirely and called Galadriel by a new name and made up a new villain, it would still be a bad plot with few characters to care about or root for. Since no mention of Rings has been made, it would be easy to just insert new characters and place names and turn this into a generic fantasy.

It doesn't have the bones of a great story. What makes our heroes want to do something? In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf shows up with dire news of the Ring, and Frodo is forced to leave the town in order to find Baggins. Is the same thing in The Rings of Power?

Galadriel finds a symbol on her dead brother and thinks maybe Sauron is still alive. That's the catalyst for her big adventure? The mystery man fell from the sky, but nothing has happened since. Setting off on a diplomatic mission to the dwarfs is not as interesting as Bilbo changing his mind and running after the company.

After the frightening appearance of a single, scary orc, it seemed that Bronwyn and Arondir might be off on their own adventure, but instead they got a group of unpleasant villagers waiting for an army. Even though Galadriel has been pursuing Sauron for hundreds of years, this massive army of orcs has not been noticed.

I spilled a lot of ink on this topic. Being reminded that you can't throw good money after bad is frustrating and disappointing. Even if you are the owner of the Washington Post.

The production values of the orcs are well deserved. You can't help but root for the orcs. I'm not joking.

I encourage you to follow my writing here.