The Awfulness of 'The Rings Of Power' Truly Knows No Bounds

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | December 18, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | December 18, 2023 |

It’s been many months since I watched Amazon’s The Rings Of Power, and I’m honestly still in disbelief at just how terrible it was. Not just for its take on Tolkien’s work, but for its atrocious grasp of basic storytelling and film making. I have a very lax attitude to adaptations: You can change things up as much as you want, as long as you tell a good story, who cares? The billion dollar Bezos baby managed the worst of both worlds.

I’ve moaned about the show before, but having stumbled on a YouTube video that moans about it from another angle, I feel compelled to share, just to vent my frustrations a little bit. I don’t know who this YouTuber is—and there’s always a danger that they end up being one of those right wing reactionaries—but this analysis of the show, focusing on a comparison between two fight scenes: Aragorn Vs. Lurtz in Peter Jackson’s flawless The Fellowship Of the Ring, and [???] Vs. [???] in The Rings Of Power is pretty spot on.

It really is unfair in many ways to compare scenes from…well, most things, to the original Lord Of the Rings trilogy, which—apart from The Return Of the King, which I maintain lowers the standard a bit—really remains shining beacon of blockbuster cinema, but, hey, if you’re gonna purposefully revisit that world, brace yourself, that’s obviously what’s gonna happen. The battle comparison in the video below really gets into things, highlighting all the things that Fellowship does right—the narrative weight, the sense of danger, the choreography and its origin in the character dynamic, and the physical grounding in a real place—and compares that against the Rings of Power scene, which fails in every one of those metrics

I guess I have to go rewatch the trilogy now again.