'Rings of Power' boasts top-notch production

I entered into the first two episodes of Amazon Prime Video's "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" with considerably mixed feelings, and in spite of finding myself impressed by a lot of what I saw, I'm approaching the rest of the season with mixed feelings still.

Thanks to the subsequent significant stumbles of the "Star Wars" film series, Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy seems even more flawless now than when it was first released, but Jackson's "Hobbit" trilogy was an over-inflated mess.

Although Amazon is technically producing another adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings," it's also accommodating conditions set forth by the Tolkien estate, by narrowing the scope of its adaptation, mostly to those novels' appendices, which all previous TV and movie producers had correctly judged were less than ideally suited to being adapted.

Amazon sidesteps the dryly encyclopedic nature of those appendices, and other Tolkien works such as "The Silmarillion," by forcing the word "adaptation" to do some heavy lifting, by filling in some narrative gaps that, as with the "Star Wars" prequels, even the most ardent of fans may question whether they warranted being fleshed out.

Before we get any further, I'll confirm what every reviewer has said: this is the most expensive television series ever made, and it goes out of its way to ensure you can see how every single cent was spent on screen. It makes Jackson's opulently produced Tolkien trilogies, which spared no expense, appear paltry by comparison.

I'd almost recommend watching "The Rings of Power" for its overpowering visual spectacles alone, as we're finally treated to worthy portrayals of the previously only hinted-at majesties of the ethereal Blessed Realms of Valinor, and the jaw-droppingly well-engineered Dwarven city of Khazad-dûm in its prime.

Unfortunately, I'm almost forced to recommend "The Rings of Power" primarily on the strengths of how well-rendered the CGI is for its kingdoms' architecture, and how well it takes advantage of the lush natural landscapes of New Zealand, because of its four main plot threads, barely half of their stories feel genuinely novel to me.

We're introduced to the royal elf Galadriel as the Lady of the woods of Lothlórien in "The Fellowship of the Ring," but "The Rings of Power" makes the bold move of turning her into the Dark Knight of Middle-earth's Second Age, setting her on a quest to avenge her dead brother Finrod by hunting for Sauron, long after everyone else has dismissed him as gone for good.

While "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" cast two generations of Bagginses as point-of-view protagonists who skittishly ventured beyond the Shire, "The Rings of Power" introduces us to the Hobbits' hunter-gatherer antecedents, the Harfoots, by dropping a world-shaking mystery from out of the sky onto the outskirts of one of their nomadic camp sites.

The curious Nori and her reluctant companion Poppy are our gender-flipped Frodo and Sam, tending in secret to a "giant" (a human, by all appearances) who wields cryptic, slightly sinister magics, and whose ability to communicate is hindered by trouble controlling the volume of his voice, to put it mildly.

Given that Frodo and Bilbo were independent men of leisure, it's neat to see how two young women, whose families still rely on them, struggle to balance such mundane obligations with the call to adventure.

Fortunately, the plot thread most prone to the potential for prequel-itis is also the story packed with the most earnest emotional warmth in the series so far, as we see Elrond, the half-elven future Lord of Rivendell - completely unrecognizable from when he shared the face of Agent Smith in "The Matrix" - as he mends an old friendship to embark on what we know will be a catastrophic undertaking.

At first, I boggled at seeing the sardonic Elrond, whom I remembered being portrayed as such a fey, untroubled, school-boyish figure, until it was revealed he would be playing such a prominent role in coordinating the creation of THAT forge, from whose fires would come ... well, "The Rings of Power," at which point I realized that this series is recasting Elrond as the Robert Oppenheimer of Middle-earth, which certainly accounts for the furrowed brow of his later years.

As much as "The Lord of the Rings" underscored the romantic tragedy of how Arwen would outlive Aragorn, I find myself much more moved by the outwardly gruff Dwarven Prince Durin grudgingly giving vent to his hurt feelings over how Elrond, his relatively ageless friend, simply skipped out on the past 20 years of Durin's life, including his marriage and his kids being born.

Elrond and Durin's friendship feels authentic and earned, to the point that it's easy to see why Durin's delightfully boisterous wife, Disa, should want her husband to make peace with a man who's a virtual stranger to her.

What I found the least compelling plot thread has fantastic sociopolitical storytelling potential, as it's set in the Southlands, where elves have stood watch over villages of humans descended from allies of Morgoth, the Big Bad who preceded Sauron.

What could have yielded complex commentary on the nature of colonization and permanent "peacekeeping" forces has instead been wasted on a zero-chemistry societally taboo yearning between the elven sentinel Arondir and the human healer and single mother Bronwyn, whose sullen adolescent son Theo at least brings some dark energy into his fixation with a clearly evil broken sword.

The Boxleitner family boasts no shortage of Tolkien fans, so I watched the first two episodes of "The Rings of Power" with my parents, after which my mom declared, "I'm hooked," and was ready for more, while my dad compared it to a number of sci-fi novels he's read, "where they start out with all these different threads, and about halfway through, I'm ready to put the book down, because nothing's coming together, and it's not building toward anything."

Two episodes in, I agree with Mom and Dad about "The Rings of Power;" it's earned my continued attention, but it needs to start tying together its plot threads, and it really needs a stronger sense of narrative direction.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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