For a long time there were some rumors of another Tolkien adaptation in a form of a series. And finally it has come to a point where Amazon is launching season 1 of Rings of Power with total costs exceeding 1 billion dollars. The series takes place in Second Age, about 1000 years before the events of the Lord of the Rings.
Looking at the teaser trailer and having read articles on it, I have several criticisms about series but let's start with
The good
In the beginning there's a scene that looks like Numenor, an island kingdom of men, a sort of Atlantis in Tolkien's legendarium. Aragorn is a direct descendant of the kings that ruled there.
Yeah and then there was apparently Gil-galad, a high elven king.
Unfortunately, that's about the good there is.
Now...
The bad
First of all, the series is screaming woke culture by trying to be racially inclusive by having ethnically as diverse of a cast as possible.
And I understand the motive, and would even agree that casting choices on an average show should be made based on competence, and not ruling anyone out because of any kind of attribute they hold.
However, when you have ready made extensive source material that you're going to adapt, I believe that being consistent with it is of the highest priority.
When Peter Jackson adapted the Lord of the Rings, he realized that, and he willingly stayed faithful to the source material and left any kind of politics whatsoever out of it. That's one of the reasons the movies were so succesfull. Whereas the approach to the Rings of Power is the opposite, and according to executive producer Lindsey Weber on the article
"it felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like."
What a buttload of bullcrap. Isn't fantasy supposed to be that: fantasy. Maybe you could leave the whatever-the-current-political-hot-potato out of it, so that people can have some escape from the shitshow if they want.
“Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together”, she adds
I agree, Tolkien is for everyone who loves his world. But do you need to have black people in the cast, in order for it to "be for black people"? If I watch a movie with only black people I don't think that "the story isn't for me", because I'm white and it doesn't have white people in it. That logic is honestly retarded.
Furthermore, Tolkien created his legendarium as a missing mythology of England that it needed, but never had. So naturally the people in that mythology are derived from the native people who lived there.
Funny thing is, they could've been woke as fuck by actually following the source material that they paid a frigging 250 billion dollars. In the Appendices it says that female dwars are so look-a-likes with male dwarfs that they are hard to distinguish from each others ie. they have beards. Fucking beards! What an opportunity to virtue signal to include an oppressed group: bearded ladies. But of course the female dwarf on the teaser doesn't have a beard because the woke culture is obsessed with skin color and sexual identity.
"What about bearded ladies though? They willingly butchered away the beard from the dwarf woman – that is complete supression and humiliation of bearded ladies all over the world!"
See how ridiculous that is. Yet that is the same logic when talking about the suppression of sexual and racial minorities. Defending bearded ladies isn't media sexy so nobody does that. Kinda hypocritical if you ask me.
What they also could've done is to explore some of the eastern nations, like the guys who rode with the big mammoth-like olifants in the Two Towers. They had darker skin. Maybe write about them? They could've flesh out them and include dark skin while being consistent with the source material.
Also, they haven't invested to different group's looks. You can't really tell if someone is an elf, human or a dwarf, whereas in Lord of the Rings when you looked at someone you instantly knew what race someone is just by their looks.
Also, what's up with stuffing some proto-hobits in there? "It doesn't feel like LOTR if there's no hobits in there." C'mon...
Why Rings of Power isn't a Tolkien adaptation
A quick google told me that the source material that they can use is The Lord of the Rings, Hobbit and The Appendices from The Lord of the Rings. Strange thing about it all is that they're making a series 1000 years before all of that. No Silmarillion though, which is the book that describes those exact events 1000 years before LOTR. Now, I don't know how copyrights work, and how much it limits to be able to be accurate to Tolkien by not having rights to Silmarillion. However, it's definitely certain that this series isn't about staying faithful to Tolkien since they're adding all kinds of unnecessary stuff even though there's more than enough characters in the historical events of Middle-Earth to work with. I think the directors said something like they're trying to picture a novel that Tolkien never wrote. Like, really. You are quite confident that you can just top up the work of Tolkien himself? That is a bit arrogant.
Such a shame that such a great lore and most influential work of fantasy gets butchered by identity politics. I'm honestly quite bummed about this, because Tolkien's legendarium is the fiction for me that I'm the most invested into, yet at the same time I'm not surprised. Definitely not spending a dime to watch it.
I could rant much longer, but I'll leave it at that.
A Billion dollar fuckup.