“All’s well as ends Better,” old Ham Gamgee says in The Return of the King. While I am not persuaded of the better, the first season of Amazon’s Rings of Power—all eight episodes, nine hours, and $500 million dollars of it—has, mercifully, ended.
Reviewing the series is a daunting task, not only because of its scale but because it is such a thoroughgoing artistic failure. Critics of all stripes have been quick to note the show’s many defects: ludicrous action sequences, amateurish cinematography, and—as Forbes Magazine put it—“inexplicably terrible” writing. A study of the failures of The Rings of Power could very well serve as an introductory course in filmmaking—but would certainly be far too much for a single review. Instead, I will focus on those aspects of the show most likely to concern Crisis readers: its fidelity to the source material and its success in translating Tolkien’s literary vision to the screen.
It will surprise no one that I have little positive to say (see my past commentaries on the series here, here, and here). There is Tolkien in the show, to be sure—but only because the writers treat Tolkien’s work like the emperor Constantine treated classical Roman monuments. When he sought to erect a triumphal arch to rival those of his forebears, the great emperor found that he lacked workman skilled enough to the task. The solution? To strip reliefs and figures from earlier monuments and use them to adorn his own: thus, the earlier monuments served not as a model or an inspiration but merely a quarry.
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