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LOTR series: a view of the Two Trees


Ser Scot A Ellison

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1 hour ago, fionwe1987 said:

You can deduce that Jeff Bezos the Golden has a lot of money.

He certainly does, although it didn't feel like much of it went into The Wheel of Time (I know it had a big budget, just saying it didn't feel like it did).

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1 minute ago, Darryk said:

He certainly does, although it didn't feel like much of it went into The Wheel of Time (I know it had a big budget, just saying it didn't feel like it did).

This is either because of choices the showrunner made, or it could be because a large chunk of the budget was ear-marked for buying and building a studio that Amazon intends to use across other productions. 

If the former, I would not expect things to be improved very much even with a higher budget. If the latter, 2nd season should look better.

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1 hour ago, Darryk said:

He certainly does, although it didn't feel like much of it went into The Wheel of Time (I know it had a big budget, just saying it didn't feel like it did).

The man is paying for a bridge in Rotterdam to be dismantled so that his Bond villain sail yacht can pass through when completed. Some cuts had to be made.

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6 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

You can deduce that Jeff Bezos the Golden has a lot of money.

And he's raising the rates for Amazon Prime, despite having an earnings report off the hook, and having crushed fb.

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https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look

Excuse me while I vommit

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“The forging of the rings,” says McKay. “Rings for the elves, rings for dwarves, rings for men, and then the one ring Sauron used to deceive them all. It’s the story of the creation of all those powers, where they came from, and what they did to each of those races.”

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Another concern: Is the series going to put hobbits in the Second Age? In short (so to speak), yes and no. “One of the very specific things the texts say is that hobbits never did anything historic or noteworthy before the Third Age,” says McKay. “But really, does it feel like Middle-earth if you don’t have hobbits or something like hobbits in it?” The hobbit ancestors in this era are called harfoots. They may not live in The Shire, but they are satisfyingly hobbit-adjacent. McKay and Payne have constructed a pastoral harfoot society that thrives on secrecy and evading detection so that they can play out a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead story in the margins of the bigger quests. Two lovable, curious harfoots, played by Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh, encounter a mysterious lost man whose origin promises to be one of the show’s most enticing enigmas.

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Bronwyn (played by Nazanin Boniadi) with her forbidden love, Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova), in the village of Tirharad.

Nazanin Boniadi’s Bronwyn is a single mother and healer, seen here in her apothecary in Middle-earth’s Southlands.

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Speaking of Sauron, the villain’s presence is a major factor throughout the Second Age, culminating in his resurrection as a tyrant. As the show begins, there are only hints of the danger to come. Some see them clearly; others don’t necessarily want to.

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Elrond (Robert Aramayo) is a politically ambitious young elven leader

Blergh

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38 minutes ago, Falcon2909 said:

Just saw the newly released photos. HAHAHAHAHAHA why are Americans like this 

Hey, don't blame us all for this.

ETA: Why do the elves look like they were ported from The Witcher? A new Convergence??

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Sigh. 

I will never like short-haired elves. They just look too pedestrian. Whatever characters and plots they invent, my fear is that the spirit of Tolkien's world will be absent.

The final paragraph basically gives the story and is the most telling. And frankly I disagree with their decision. They're fine with inventing characters but don't wish to try to develop established characters that live and die in a certain period?

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In the novels, the aforementioned things take place over thousands of years, but Payne and McKay have compressed events into a single point in time. It is their biggest deviation from the text, and they know it’s a big swing. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” says Payne. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”

The Galadriel commander of the Northern Armies caption is really taking the piss.

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So will there be Westerosi levels of violence and sex in Amazon’s Middle-earth? In short, no. McKay says the goal was “to make a show for everyone, for kids who are 11, 12, and 13, even though sometimes they might have to pull the blanket up over their eyes if it’s a little too scary. We talked about the tone in Tolkien’s books. This is material that is sometimes scary—and sometimes very intense, sometimes quite political, sometimes quite sophisticated—but it’s also heartwarming and life-affirming and optimistic. It’s about friendship and it’s about brotherhood and underdogs overcoming great darkness.”

That really doesn't sound like the 'long defeat' of the Second Age to me. 

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I am aware that I should not take this marketing article seriously, but I can not help but notice how little attention the more canon elements get. Yes we have a lot of Galadriel and a bit of Elrond, but Numenor, Isildur and Celebrimbor only get mentioned once. Elendil, Ar-Pharazon, Miriel, Tar-Palantir and Gil-galad do not even get one. Sauron himself seems more like an addition to the Hobbit storyline

 

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So much of this reads so wrong. This is less "passionate Tolkien fan spares no expense to bring his world to life" and more "let's use the Tolkien name and LotR make recognition to take over the fantasy TV show market".

You're basically writing an original story in the world of LotR and using the names of popular characters to draw in fans. 

I wish these studios would just get the guts to write a big fantasy epic for TV from scratch and avoid all this nonsense.

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