The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime)

Man of Honour
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Sounds like it's as bad as I feared. I'm not bothering with it.

It is nothing like as bad as the trailers and other preview stuff indicated but kind of bland. The concept of a female black dwarf really doesn't work on screen but is a fairly short section, the rest of the diversity/woke elements so far are fairly innocuous and don't really intrude unlike a lot of stuff lately.
 
Caporegime
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I know I could lose my nerd license by admitting this. but I'm not a big fan of the films. Not knowing the films inside out, should I watch this or give it a miss?

It's produced by completely different people to the films, based on different sources material - they don't even have rights to use anything from the books the films were based on.

So, no, watching the films doesn't do much. Honestly, I don't think it does itself any favours by setting itself against them.
 
Soldato
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quoi

So what did Amazon buy? “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” Payne says. “And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.” That takes a huge chunk of lore off the table and has left Tolkien fans wondering how this duo plans to tell a Second Age story without access to those materials. “There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to,” McKay says. “As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with.”
 

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Soldato
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I was always hoping at some point to see more of Sauron's story. Even The Hobbit didn't deliver much there. It was a little more than Lord of the Rings but still not enough even though it shown a little more of the darker side.
 
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Soldato
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Great first two episodes; so glad they didn’t throw well known actors at it because I find that ruins the vibe.

Definitely leagues better than that terrible GoT dragon rubbish (hoping it does improve).
 
Soldato
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I read it elsewhere but I 100% agree that it’s the delivery of the lines that does it a bit of a disservice, like the language is too modern IMHO, Sir Ian McKellan and the others delivered the lines with such poetry you could believe they were of that age, this severely lacks that delivery sadly.

Overall I really enjoyed it though and I’m really looking forward to more of it.
To be fair every time I tried to read the Silmarillion, I got about 20 pages in and couldn't get past Tolkien's archaic prose.

My verdict on the show is "open" at present, has the makings of a good story though I do wonder how they got this past the Tolkien estate/principals.

The casting is what it is, though in the books the only identifiable persons of colour were those from the lands south of Gondor - Haradrim and Umbar etc. It was not a multicultural society. Trying to work out why all the dwarves sound like Gerard Butler, though.
 
Soldato
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Enjoyed the first episode, second one was a bit meh. Not a fan of when it shows the cities, looks far too CGI / you can tell it's a model, which ever method they used.
 
Soldato
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Is that what anyones asking for? You're letting your prejudices show again.

With your "logic" you could never have a person of colour in any Shakespeare play/movie because they'd stick out like a sore thumb. In fact in any play/movie written before POC started living in Europe and/or didn't explicitly mention that this character wasn't white. Can you not see how ridiculous that is. For most characters skin colour is irrelevant.
 
Caporegime
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With your "logic" you could never have a person of colour in any Shakespeare play/movie because they'd stick out like a sore thumb. In fact in any play/movie written before POC started living in Europe and/or didn't explicitly mention that this character wasn't white. Can you not see how ridiculous that is. For most characters skin colour is irrelevant.

How is that ridiculous?

Skin colour isn't irrelevant at all.

And here we have a film based on the survival of one of the last isolated tribes of the amazon...oh yes, there's their leader played by Trevor Armstrong from Chipping Norton. Look at his flowing golden locks and those glistening blue eyes, his classic pale complexion. That's ridiculous. The cast of black panther being white is ridiculous. Jamaican/Irish accents that can't stay consistent is ridiculous.

Geographical and sociological isolation is a fact of history and the modern world. In fact it's only very recently with the advent of mass transport that wider integration outside of major cities has become a thing. This is reflected in literature, particularly in the portrayal of historical periods. Individual skin colour of characters can be irrelevant but in a wider group it is not.

I'm sorry that reality offends your sensibilities.
 
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