[SPOILERS] Rings of Power: "I am Sauron" "I'm Sauron" "I'm Sauron!"

[Ser Drewy]

I feel like S1 should have been more focused on forging Rings of Power (with some early failures and lesser rings) and Sauron ought to have been more a figure in Elrond & Celebrimbor's story. Halbrand shoulda been the future Witch-King or something.

What a weird show. 

Does this mean S2 will focus on Sauron fighting Adar & Waldreg for rulership of Mordor?

[Cas Stark]

5 minutes ago, Consigliere said:

That is all.

Amazon pissing away a billion dollars only to make a CW level show is pretty funny.

Yes and no.  It seems like it has done what Amazon wanted.  It has gotten a large audience, a lot of buzz and is generally critically well reviewed.  The fact that the writing is total crap seems unimportant.

 

[Ser Drewy]

9 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Yes and no.  It seems like it has done what Amazon wanted.  It has gotten a large audience, a lot of buzz and is generally critically well reviewed.  The fact that the writing is total crap seems unimportant.

 

I mean, there were things in the show I thought were decently done, though it is very flawed. And weird. And dumb at times. 

Honestly, critics giving it great reviews isn't surprising to me. I sat through the wild ride of GOT S5-8 mostly being praised to high heaven even though the show was an increasing dumpster fire that barely cohered on an episode-to-episode basis. 

[karaddin]

After letting it sit for a while I did at least get the perspective that this was better than I expected before it started, I thought I was going to absolutely hate it/not watch it. Damning with faint praise. I have felt the actors have for the most part done the best they could with what they were given.

It also feels weird that it didn't even touch base with Arondir/Bronwyn after all the narrative focus they'd gotten earlier, and letting it look like Isildur is dead through the end of the season.

2 hours ago, farerb said:

I noticed his accent since one of the promos before the show premiered. He's Australian by the way.

Just to be clear - the accent he was putting on was not an Australian one. I did think he was putting on much more of an accent around the rest of the elves but I wasn't sure if he actually was or if it was just the contrast when surrounded by the elvish accents.

I did really like him though, any of the issues with Sauron aren't his fault.

[Cas Stark]

2 minutes ago, Ser Drewy said:

I mean, there were things in the show I thought were decently done, though it is very flawed. And weird. And dumb at times. 

Honestly, critics giving it great reviews isn't surprising to me. I sat through the wild ride of GOT S5-8 mostly being praised to high heaven even though the show was an increasing dumpster fire that barely cohered on an episode-to-episode basis. 

Other than looking good and having good CGI, I don't know what else they did that was so great or even good.  The casting was to me a very, very mixed bag.  The pacing, character development and plot are mediocre to bad.  Galadriel being an asshole is an insane choice, but again, no one seems to care because asshole=badass=girlboss so it must be good. Ugh. The dialog is cringe worthy. 

[Heartofice]

Yeah that finale just feels weird. 
 

The forging of the rings, maybe the most momentous event of the series, the thing the show is named after, happened in the blink of an eye. Having Celebrimbor being schooled in forging by Halbrand is just nuts. His ‘oh yeah why didn’t I think of that!’ Face was painful. The whole thing was very rushed, which is annoying given how dragged out this season seems to be.

And yesterday I was about to say that it’s unfair to criticise the show for being mystery box, because that seemed purely an invention of the marketing team. But no, they did a red herring with ‘Gandalf’ and actually yeah the show has been trying to fool you into thinking he was Sauron, that’s exactly what they’ve been doing so they can pull the rug and go ‘no!! It’s Halbrand!! Hahah!’

Halbrand being Sauron is basically the same issue as Hayden Christiansen being Darth Vader. It totally takes away from the mystique of the character by casting a not very good at acting , slightly good looking average Joe in the role. My reaction was ugh.. I can’t look at Sauron the same way again now. Rubbish.

[Farerb]

Regarding mystery boxes - we shouldn't forget about what's her name and the Palantir.

I think they wanted someone who looked like Aragorn for Halbrand.

[ASOIAFrelatedusername]

Ok. Two things that do not make sense:

- Why is Earien summoned to make some sort of statue for Tar-Palantir's grave? Isn't she supposed to be an architect and not a sculptor? These  are different occupations.

- The dagger being just melted, blade and hilt, with no attempt to separate the gold, silver, and, presumably, iron.

Edited October 14, 2022 by ASOIAFrelatedusername

[Farerb]

Just now, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

- The dagger being just melted, blade and hilt, with no attempt to separate the gold, silver, and, presumably, iron.

In addition, was the Dagger the ONLY thing from Valinor?!

[sifth]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

It is amusing, although by now very old and tiresomely predictable, whenever anyone demonstrates they are paying attention to a story, and you are not, you throw a hissy fit and yell "FANFICTION!" and "LIARS" when they are simply repeating canonical information that was spelled out in the original show.

Just tell me the episode, where Jacob says "the monster is here to protect the island, my brothers soul merged with it". I'll wait, heck it doesn't have to be Jacob, it could be any character. The fact of the matter is, what you told me, is something you were able to cobble together from 6 years of the nonsensical writing of Lost.

Here are the facts as they are presented. MIB and Jacob's mother tells them "magic light is very bad and is a faith worse than death". Jacob throws MIB into magic light. Smoke monster appears. Did it exist before this? Did doing this action wake up the monster? Did doing this action transform MIB into the monster? These are all thing never told to us and left for us the viewers to guess, because this is how the show answers questions, lol

Edited October 14, 2022 by sifth

[slant]

 

11 minutes ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

- The dagger being just melted, blade and hilt, with no attempt to separate the gold, silver, and, presumably, iron.

In the shot with the rings, you can see that they all have bands made of different metals. I think when the molten metal is being poured through all those different vessels, there is a shot of the fluids separating, one spiraling inwards, while another stream going along a different channel. I'm guessing that was the purpose of showing all that. 

23 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

The forging of the rings, maybe the most momentous event of the series, the thing the show is named after, happened in the blink of an eye. Having Celebrimbor being schooled in forging by Halbrand is just nuts. His ‘oh yeah why didn’t I think of that!’ Face was painful. The whole thing was very rushed, which is annoying given how dragged out this season seems to be.

Sauron was a student of Aule, so it makes kind of sense, but I agree, they did not let it all simmer sufficiently. Galadriel is suddenly suspicious of Halbrand once they are in Eregion. Gil Galad is not directly that suspicious of Halbrand. They did not make him appear fair or 'Lord of the Gifts', he just gave a suggestion and called it a gift lol. 

[Cas Stark]

A more talented group may have been able to better pull of Halbrand as Sauron.  He would have been more enigmatic, more charismatic and more in control, and would have generated less of a 'twist' and more of an is he/isn't he type of fan conjecture.  

[Heartofice]

9 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

A more talented group may have been able to better pull of Halbrand as Sauron.  He would have been more enigmatic, more charismatic and more in control, and would have generated less of a 'twist' and more of an is he/isn't he type of fan conjecture.  

I got a real ‘coronation street’ vibe off of him, for viewers in the UK. That is soap actor level btw.

[ASOIAFrelatedusername]

I've actually been playing Shadow of War since it was on sale recently. That game likewise is a giant abomination when it comes to how it treats the source material. And also like the show the writing is below average even for a video game. However at least there is some creative ambition there to do something new and interesting with Tolkien's world. That ambition is of course completely at odds with Tolkien, see Sexy Shelob as the "unsung hero of Middle-earth", but it is still present. If they had not been shackled with the license and if someone had occasionally slapped the writers with a decent book, something good could have come out of that.

Rings of Power utterly lacks that. It just throws vaguely Tolkien-ish stuff at a wall and thinks that result can be called an adaptation.

[The Bard of Banefort]

4 hours ago, farerb said:

Regarding mystery boxes - we shouldn't forget about what's her name and the Palantir.

I think they wanted someone who looked like Aragorn for Halbrand.

 

4 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

A more talented group may have been able to better pull of Halbrand as Sauron.  He would have been more enigmatic, more charismatic and more in control, and would have generated less of a 'twist' and more of an is he/isn't he type of fan conjecture.  

I think the goal was to shock the viewers as much as possible. They couldn’t hint at Halbrand being Sauron until now because that would have made it less surprising. I think a lot of screenwriters took the wrong lesson away from the Red Wedding.

Halbrand looking like Aragorn and being a long-lost king was definitely set up as part of the subversion. But at the same time, I think that Hollywood overestimates just how much people want to be shocked. I’d reckon more people would have preferred a second Aragorn to a secret dark lord, just like how they like having another ginger dwarf and kind-hearted hobbit.

That said, I still generally like the show, much more so than book fans seem to. I think that when you love the source material, it’s always going to be a challenge to love the adaptation, which is my current predicament with HOTD.

Edited October 14, 2022 by The Bard of Banefort

[fionwe1987]

However clever the twist, it also twists Galadriel's character in absurd ways. It's not about her making mistakes, or being monomaniacal. Great characters have been written who make mistakes and are single-minded in purpose. 

The problem is, they made Galadriel be completely played. And then ended the season with her having learned nothing. And both these things completely change the character. These are not small tweaks to her, these just change all her actions in LotR, and not in a remotely good way. 

Sure, they may evolve the character over the seasons. But plot and character wise, that's only gonna work if you ignore a lot of season 1. 

Sauron is the great deceiver, not a clueless deceiver who happens to fall in with the wisest Elf, and then manages to trick her based on somehow knowing that the Elves wouldn't know who the last ruler of the Southlands was, even though he clearly knew they maintained a substantial presence there. Why didn't Arondir ask Halbrand who the fuck he was? That he remembers no king from the past century, do by what rights does he claim this place?

None of it hangs together. It's a disjointed narrative that counts on you not remembering or thinking about events. 

Even if I knew nothing about the books, I'd have left the season dissatisfied with the terrible plot and characterization, and there's really no way to view the show to hide these issues. They're inherent to the shows logic, and since they didn't bother to adapt much from the books, this is entirely due to the show. 

In sum: the show sucks. Amazon doesn't know how to do fantasy, 

[Farerb]

4 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

 

I think the goal was to shock the viewers as much as possible. They couldn’t hint at Halbrand being Sauron until now because that would have made it less surprising. I think a lot of screenwriters took the wrong lesson away from the Red Wedding. 

Halbrand looking like Aragorn and being a long-lost king was definitely set up as part of the subversion. But at the same time, I think that Hollywood overestimates just how much people want to be shocked. I’d reckon more people would have preferred a second Aragorn to a secret dark lord, just like how they like having another ginger dwarf and    kind-hearted hobbit.

That said, I still generally like the show, much more so than book fans seem to. I think that when you love the source material, it’s always going to be a challenge to love the adaptation, which is my current predicament with HOTD.

Ironically, I thought the Red Wedding on GoT was adapted horribly. 

I love both ASOIAF and LotR and despite some flaws with House of the Dragon, especially with the 5th episode, I thought it was handled much more competently than Rings of Power. It might sound weird, but I even think the upcoming Willow show looks better than Rings of Power.

[IFR]

22 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

That said, I still generally like the show, much more so than book fans seem to. I think that when you love the source material, it’s always going to be a challenge to love the adaptation, which is my current predicament with HOTD.

I've read The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. I hardly recall the details of The Silmarillion though, and I consider myself far from a purist with this adaptation. I just want a good story.

This isn't even remotely a good story. Hot D has had blunders. Daemon the one man army and the fight at the end of the wedding were the most egregious missteps. They were perplexing and nonsensical.

But Hot D has characters with depth and dimensions, characters whose mistakes are very human, and from which there usually are consequences. Characters in Hot D don't behave like morons because that's what the plot demands. Characters evolve naturally and their inter-relations make sense. The plot makes sense. When it doesn't, it stands out.

The standard of RoP is near constant nonsense. Characters are highly inconsistent, and behave not because that's what their character would do, but because the plot requires them to do such. The characters are limited by the creativity and intelligence of the writers, which cannot be terribly impressive because everyone is written as staggeringly stupid. There's no depth, no nuance to these characters. They are rote.

And the plot is asinine. This is probably the worst way you can tell the story of the forging of the rings, and Sauron's deception, and the fall of Numenor. It's like the writers were translating an eight year old's rambling summary of how events took place.

RoP is in such a state of near constant blunders that it actually makes moments that aren't straight up insulting seem pretty good.

The contrast between these two shows seems very stark to me, and it has nothing to do with fidelity to their respective source materials.

 

Edited October 14, 2022 by IFR

[Luzifer's right hand]

I don't like this Sauron guy. I hope nothing bad happens to Adar!

[Cas Stark]

I never finished the Silmarillion and the only Tokien letters I've ever read have been posted in these threads.  You don't have to be a book nerd to realize that the plotting and characterizations in the show are terrible.