The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
The first season is finally done and with a LOT of complaining from the internet, I have to sit back and ask: was it worth the nearly half a billion dollars that Amazon spent on it? If you were to ask the internet trolls, they’d tell you it’s a woke tangent from the source materials, to which I say: GOOD. I’ve never read the OG books, lord knows I’ve tried, but Tolkien was just too much of a word nerd to make the books themselves compelling enough to actually get them finished. What Peter Jackson et al did in 2001 was nothing less than a miracle, they were able to distill an impenetrable trilogy of books into simply the best fantasy movies of my lifetime.
I’m a huge fan of the extended versions, which are about twelve hours long, a similar runtime to “The Rings of Power”. The television has the benefit of knowing there’s another season coming, and we benefit from the fantastical results of the question of “what if we didn’t have books to base this on, but had the money and skills to do it justice?”.
My one huge complaint is about the way they treat the female dwarfs in the series, but I can imagine exactly how they arrived at the decision point and how they make the decision, but it still sucks we didn’t get to see them the way I’ve always imagined them: indistinguishable from their men in nearly every way.
