LOTR: Rings of Power - New Teaser

[Palanan]

Just dropped:





Scenery is lovely, not so sure about some of the acting.

[Saintheart]

I'm looking forward to this year's latest CGI cowpat almost as much as the experience of critics telling me that I'm sexist/racist/transphobic because I don't like poorly-acted/poorly-plotted/poorly-directed cash grabs by one of the world's richest men!

[Fyraltari]

I remain cautiously non-plussed.

[Psyren]

I have the same problem I do with all of these expansionary prequels: we know not-Blanchett is right, that war is coming, and how it ultimately ends. Much like Star Wars, I'm ready to explore what things are like after the big conflict - and while that can be risky (see the ST) sometimes it can be extremely rewarding (Mandalorian).

I appreciate the conscious effort to include POC - including elves! - though.

[runeghost]

More true than ever at this point.

[Ramza00]

I'm looking forward to this year's latest CGI cowpat almost as much as the experience of critics telling me that I'm sexist/racist/transphobic because I don't like poorly-acted/poorly-plotted/poorly-directed cash grabs by one of the world's richest men!

{Scrubbed}

[DavidSh]

It looks like there will be a fair bit of flashbacks to the First Age. I didn't know that was allowed.

[Trafalgar]

What is this based on? The Silmarillion?

[InvisibleBison]

I'm kind of annoyed that they're forcing hobbits into the show, but whatever. It's not going to be all that good regardless, so another way in which it's not that good isn't worth getting upset about.

What is this based on? The Silmarillion?

It's set in the late Second Age, IIRC. So to the extent it's based off of anything, I guess it's based off of the timeline in the end of Return of the King.

[Dire_Flumph]

It looks like there will be a fair bit of flashbacks to the First Age. I didn't know that was allowed.

There was some indication that things have changed with the involvement of the Tolkien Estate, but I'm not sure if it was confirmed. They would likely at least had access to what was in the appendices to Return of the King.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that things changed with Christopher Tolkien's passing.

[Ramza00]

What is this based on? The Silmarillion?

Nope, Amazon and Bezos do not have the rights to The Simarilion for the Tolkien Estate only sold the rights to the Second Age stuff where Sauron and the Eleves make the rings of power.

2019 https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa7y...e-rings-series I mentioned the date for Christopher Tolkien died in 2020 and things can be renegotiated at any time if the world's second richest man wants to spend more money.

It has to be roughly timeline compliant following the same major touchstone events of the second age. And references to the first age with Morgoth and the Silmarils have to be plot relevant to what is happening now in the 2nd age.

[Trafalgar]

It's set in the late Second Age, IIRC. So to the extent it's based off of anything, I guess it's based off of the timeline in the end of Return of the King.

I guess that means they have a lot of freedom and won't be stepping on any lore landmines....

[Divayth Fyr]

It's set in the late Second Age, IIRC. So to the extent it's based off of anything, I guess it's based off of the timeline in the end of Return of the King.

Very loosely it seems...

[Trafalgar]

Nope, Amazon and Bezos do not have the rights to The Simarilion for the Tolkien Estate only sold the rights to the Second Age stuff where Sauron and the Eleves make the rings of power.

2019 https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa7y...e-rings-series I mentioned the date for Christopher Tolkien died in 2020 and things can be renegotiated at any time if the world's second richest man wants to spend more money.

It has to be roughly timeline compliant following the same major touchstone events of the second age. And references to the first age with Morgoth and the Silmarils have to be plot relevant to what is happening now in the 2nd age.

Ahhh, Vice magazine. I love their headlines.

"Tolkien's Estate Has Brutally Strict Rules About Amazon's 'LotR' Series"

I guess that means the Tolkien Estate gets to bash Jeff Bezo's hand with a hammer if the new series violates the rules.

[warty goblin]

It looks better than I was expecting based on what random images I've seen. The shot of the Trees is very good.

But I'm only secondarily concerned with looks. I'm mostly concerned with whether this feels like Tolkien. I think the LoTR movies did fairly well on getting the feel right - and remain pretty amazing pieces of film making even when they don't - while the Hobbit films get it... much less right. In no small part I suspect because there was a huge amount of time they had to fill in Hobbit movies, and nowhere near enough original material to do it with. Not surprisingly, where they stuck with the original stuff, the movies were excellent - Riddles in the Dark works perfectly for instance. But the new stuff in the Hobbit, charitably put, does not feel like Tolkien. It feels like, well, the sort of cheap modern drama people wrote to fill up time with exciting plot twists people can live-tweet about.

So I know this is a completely different team, and I I'm not holding the failures of the Hobbit films over them. But they have even less actually original Tolkien material to work with here, basically every single scene and line of dialog has to be written from what amounts to a pretty terse plot summary. I have limited faith in the ability of a team of modern writers doing that and successfully capturing the feel of Tolkien in the context of something as flexible and unconstrained as a novel. It's not impossible, but unless I know a lot about the specific people involved, I'm skeptical.

Which gets to the second area of concern; this isn't a novel, or even a movie. It's streaming TV. In recent times streaming TV tends to ingest good ideas and mulch them into Processed Entertainment Paste Product*. You all know what I mean, you get a bunch of characters all having super dramatic plots and revelations all over the place, and yet the story has almost no cohesion, seems to go nowhere, and if you actually look at the whole thing it makes no sense and comes up less than the sum of its parts.

After all, the point isn't the actual show, that's just an advert for keeping you subscribed to the service. And all that requires is that the value of all the Processed Entertainment Paste Product on offer is like $15 a month.

So maybe this is good. I'm not going to pre-hate it. But I'm going in very, very skeptical.


*To be fair, it also mulches bad ideas into virtually indistinguishable Processed Entertainment Paste Product.

[Zevox]

What is this based on? The Silmarillion?

There's clear references to The Silmarillion near the start of the trailer - the two trees and the lines "The world was so young there had not yet been a sunrise. But even then, there was light," which are a direct reference to the Two Trees of Valinor, a central part of The Silmarillion's backstory. So, whatever the rights status may be, yes, there's clearly some Silmarillion in there. Though it's theoretically set during the Second Age, and given the title one would presume is about the forging of the Rings of Power and Sauron's rise, and potentially the Fall of Numenore thereafter.

Personally... eh. Trailer's not bad, but it doesn't sell me on the series either. Just feels like any other generic trailer, if I'm being honest. Galadriel looking and sounding so younger than in the films does kind of bother me though. A little irrationally I guess, but though she is younger here than in LotR, she is still thousands of years old, so it seems to me she should already have hit the point where she stops appearing to age (by human standards) by this point.

Of course, I also don't have Amazon Prime, so I won't be watching it either way. But as it stands, they're not really making me wish I did.

[Fyraltari]

I have the same problem I do with all of these expansionary prequels: we know not-Blanchett is right, that war is coming, and how it ultimately ends. Much like Star Wars, I'm ready to explore what things are like after the big conflict - and while that can be risky (see the ST) sometimes it can be extremely rewarding (Mandalorian).

I appreciate the conscious effort to include POC - including elves! - though.

Trust me, I get it.

However, Tolkien's works are not public domain yet, which means the only new "Tolkien content"*, outside of non-profit fanworks (and even then) that can be made needs the Tolkien Estates official stamp of approval unless it is based specifically on Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit whose adaptation rights have already been sold (and even then there probably are various clauses regarding mediums and such).

The Tolkien Estates just isn't going to give anyone the right to use the names "Gondor", "Baggins", etc. to write the sequel to lotr that the Professor never wrote. I guess they could go for an adaptation of The New Shadow, but there's only like seven pages of manuscript for that one and much of it is a philosophical debate.

*I felt dirty typing that.

[Saph]

Which gets to the second area of concern; this isn't a novel, or even a movie. It's streaming TV. In recent times streaming TV tends to ingest good ideas and mulch them into Processed Entertainment Paste Product*. You all know what I mean, you get a bunch of characters all having super dramatic plots and revelations all over the place, and yet the story has almost no cohesion, seems to go nowhere, and if you actually look at the whole thing it makes no sense and comes up less than the sum of its parts.

After all, the point isn't the actual show, that's just an advert for keeping you subscribed to the service. And all that requires is that the value of all the Processed Entertainment Paste Product on offer is like $15 a month.

This is my guess as well. Given how mediocre a job Amazon did with Wheel of Time, I can't see much reason to expect their version of LotR (which is much harder to adapt than WoT) to be any better.

[Trafalgar]

This is my guess as well. Given how mediocre a job Amazon did with Wheel of Time, I can't see much reason to expect their version of LotR (which is much harder to adapt than WoT) to be any better.

I was very excited when Amazon took over the Expanse. But the new seasons have been so-so. I expect the new LOTR to be mediocre.

[Saintheart]

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

Indeed, I'm not personally satisfied until a minimum of three people have thrown themselves from the balcony in despair at any social gathering I attend. When I'm online I don't hold myself to that standard.

But I really don't think there's much other than despair warranted when all we're really being served up here is a long fanfilm of a long fanfilm. They're not ripping off Tolkien, they're ripping off Peter Jackson. (Not forgetting that Peter Jackson himself only made three good fanfilms, pouring much of his malice, his cruelty, and his desire to dominate all life into them ... as evidenced by the soulless celluloid of the Hobbit films that followed them.)

[Emmerlaus]

Indeed, I'm not personally satisfied until a minimum of three people have thrown themselves from the balcony in despair at any social gathering I attend. When I'm online I don't hold myself to that standard.

But I really don't think there's much other than despair warranted when all we're really being served up here is a long fanfilm of a long fanfilm. They're not ripping off Tolkien, they're ripping off Peter Jackson. (Not forgetting that Peter Jackson himself only made three good fanfilms, pouring much of his malice, his cruelty, and his desire to dominate all life into them ... as evidenced by the soulless celluloid of the Hobbit films that followed them.)

Kinda agree with you there. The Hobbits movies didnt give me hope for this serie. And somehow, Amazon Prime wont let me watch the Hobbit momies either on Amazon (using Brave and Chrome, it doesnt work on either of them) so I dont think I'll be watching this one either, for several reasons. Even for the Hobbits movies, it was like... a bad fad food restaurant. You go back years later to see if it was as bad as you remember it to be, thinking it cannot have being... and yet you fooled yourself. DOnt get me wrong, there is stuff I like in them but considering the movies lenght, most scene I like are not worth my time... and the Goblin King song... OMG I cant listen to it. It irritates me too much and I dont know why.

[Catullus64]

The Dwarf women don't have beards, 0/10, a monstrous betrayal of Tolkien's vision.

More seriously, I yawn at this. I find it rather hard to get as bent out of shape about it as some, but the only thing I find remotely interesting is some of the glimpses we seem to get of the First Age, like the Two Trees, and what I presume to be Galadriel's memory of the War of Wrath... but from what we know about the story and the licensing situation, these are unlikely to be anything but minor flashback moments in the show. So we've got a couple of images I've always wanted to see filmed, combined with a story that doesn't interest me. For me, this is essentially the world's most expensive set of desktop wallpapers.

[Ramza00]

Indeed, I'm not personally satisfied until a minimum of three people have thrown themselves from the balcony in despair at any social gathering I attend. When I'm online I don't hold myself to that standard.

But I really don't think there's much other than despair warranted when all we're really being served up here is a long fanfilm of a long fanfilm. They're not ripping off Tolkien, they're ripping off Peter Jackson. (Not forgetting that Peter Jackson himself only made three good fanfilms, pouring much of his malice, his cruelty, and his desire to dominate all life into them ... as evidenced by the soulless celluloid of the Hobbit films that followed them.)

Everyone is ripping off someone ever since Paradise Lost and John Milton introduced time travel into fiction. Why does the ringwraiths look like that? Because John Milton conceived Death that way.

Thus the thing we are complaining about is not ripping off of those who ripped off someone else, again and again. It is because we can trace the apparent lineages on the surface of things, with only a cursory knowledge of details. Everyone knows Rings Of Power is connected to 20 year old LOTR movies, and 60 year old books. That is what we are complaining about.

Yet perhaps this was inevitable with mass image society where it is so easy to reproduce, recreate, and only surfacely modify art. Thus our systems of ritual and authority are messed up, we feel the past haunting the present without a recreation that feels earned? But hey this is not new, we had people pointing out the tech of the 1880s made this inevitable when they were writing in the 1930s.

[Metastachydium]

Everyone is ripping off someone ever since Paradise Lost and John Milton introduced time travel into fiction. Why does the ringwraiths look like that? Because John Milton conceived Death that way.

Thus the thing we are complaining about is not ripping off of those who ripped off someone else, again and again. It is because we can trace the apparent lineages on the surface of things, with only a cursory knowledge of details. Everyone knows Rings Of Power is connected to 20 year old LOTR movies, and 60 year old books. That is what we are complaining about.

Yet perhaps this was inevitable with mass image society where it is so easy to reproduce, recreate, and only surfacely modify art. Thus our systems of ritual and authority are messed up, we feel the past haunting the present without a recreation that feels earned? But hey this is not new, we had people pointing out the tech of the 1880s made this inevitable when they were writing in the 1930s.

I wouldn't be so rash to conflate respectable forms (and even traditions) of transtextuality (regardless of its degree of subtlety) with the consumeristic production of painfully bloated franchise-style properties unpleasantly reminiscent of what can be best termed as carcinogenesis.

[Ramza00]

I wouldn't be so rash to conflate respectable forms (and even traditions) of transtextuality (regardless of its degree of subtlety) with the consumeristic production of painfully bloated franchise-style properties unpleasantly reminiscent of what can be best termed as carcinogenesis.

But they are linked! When one crafts things out like a machine the difference between cancer and planned growth is barely a distinction. And the want to say a distinction between A and B is the ego wish, the desire as a want to say there is a high / superior culture and a low / inferior culture in regards to art and entertainment. This is understandable but I do not think this is really what is going on.

Whenever things are so common, so everyday with its ubiquitousness and many things like it in a culture, well this changes how humans approach art and we say one is superior vs inferior. What makes something unique? What makes A have a special Aura?

Well ritual does that, the ritual which starts as a personal investment which transforms into small group cult investment that becomes cultural investment over time due to spillovers. But a reproduction, a spin-off is also unmoored from time and space of the original so it feels out of place, it feels like it is haunting the present. Likewise the opposite thing is occurring, since it feels out of place we compare it to everything else (the common) and this produces an uncanny and unflattering experience. The thing is both not unique, and also it is very common, it is an ugly chimera and not it’s own thing with a cult investment.

Things no longer feel earned for we are displacing our old feelings into the new, likewise those feelings have not been earned by the new, and we can feel this mismatch. While other forms of inspiration and transtextuality as you say are not put into those frameworks of mind, they get to earn their own successes, and thus everything is more subtle. Works which you are not aware of their origins on the surface of things feel fresh even if they are old as stories themselves.

[Psyren]

I'd say Wheel of Time has more of a reason to exist, i.e. being the anti- Game of Thrones - a gynocratic high-magic setting to counter GoT's grittier sexism, coupled with bringing our collective imaginations to life on screen through the bigger channeling moments. Falme, Dumai's Wells, Rhuidean, The Fall of the Stone - there are a lot of splashy set-pieces I'm looking forward to seeing them bring to life with Amazon's deep pockets.

This LotR show by contrast feels like "Say, did you like a bunch of people riding horses across sprawling New Zealand landscapes? Here's more of that. Now with 800% more women!"

[Divayth Fyr]

I was very excited when Amazon took over the Expanse. But the new seasons have been so-so. I expect the new LOTR to be mediocre.

I feel that expectation is quite optimistic :P

However, nothing presented so far - some nice looking set pieces aside - makes me hopeful this will achieve even mediocrity. And if some of the rumours floating around turn out true, well, this may end up a mess that will make people appreciate the Hobbit as an adaptation...

[Ramza00]

Can we stop saying 800% more women? It is kind of a real valid criticism to say that LOTR and The Hobbit have almost no women. Likewise we actually have more Women Tolkien characters in The Silmarillion (aka Zero and First Age).

Now the 2nd age notes and appendixes barely have any women characters just like LOTR, but they are talking about Male Primogeniture cultures and just who was ruling at the time. No day to day life, no pathos doing the driving motivation, such a bird eyes view it is useless. Thus it will be natural for a Second Age show with vibrant cultures to have both men and women in it.

[HeyHoWhatUpYo]

Can we stop saying 800% more women? It is kind of a real valid criticism to say that LOTR and The Hobbit have almost no women. Likewise we actually have more Women Tolkien characters in The Silmarillion (aka Zero and First Age).

Now the 2nd age notes and appendixes barely have any women characters just like LOTR, but they are talking about Male Primogeniture cultures and just who was ruling at the time. No day to day life, no pathos doing the driving motivation, such a bird eyes view it is useless. Thus it will be natural for a Second Age show with vibrant cultures to have both men and women in it.

Do we need more women in LOTR? Do we need more male protagonists in Sex and The City? Can there be such a thing as media that appeals to not every single identity out there?

I'm still upset that there weren't more Carebears in the Smurfs. Muh inclusiveness.

[warty goblin]

I'd say Wheel of Time has more of a reason to exist, i.e. being the anti- Game of Thrones - a gynocratic high-magic setting to counter GoT's grittier sexism, coupled with bringing our collective imaginations to life on screen through the bigger channeling moments. Falme, Dumai's Wells, Rhuidean, The Fall of the Stone - there are a lot of splashy set-pieces I'm looking forward to seeing them bring to life with Amazon's deep pockets.

This LotR show by contrast feels like "Say, did you like a bunch of people riding horses across sprawling New Zealand landscapes? Here's more of that. Now with 800% more women!"

Yeah sure in theory I'll buy WoT as inverse GoT. In practice the WoT show was boring as hell. I love me some fantasy nonsense, and it was just mind-crushingly dull, in exactly the sort of overplotted but structureless way I was talking about upthread.

(GoT drove right the hell off a cliff don't get me wrong, but the first seasons were really good TV. I managed I think four episodes of WoT before giving it up for more engaging activities. Like flossing. )

And I don't think it's really fair to say what the LoTR show feels like, because we've seen about 300 seconds of it. It's a teaser trailer, and teasers are unrepresentative as all getout. Remember the first Fellowship of the Ring teasers being all "you will find adventure or adventure will find you?"