Barnald

1) The wait goes on...
 
2) I suddenly feel very old. Feels like yesterday we heard the first samples of the score...
 

I don't buy the studio collusion angle on this. Take a look at the Harfoots: on the face of it, that entire storyline would seem like one huge studio mandate. In a way, it was: myself and Fellowship of Fans interviewed one of the prospective showrunners that Amazon auditioned, and he was adamant that they wanted Hobbits in the story.
 
However, looking at the Harfoot storyline in the show, the one thing it doesn't do is play out like some studio dictate. It seems to me that its more accurate to say that rather than Amazon choosing people they can control, they chose people who were innately sympatico with the company's vision for the show from the outset.

That’s not fair. 
 
ChatGPT would be a step up.

I knew. 

1) The wait goes on...
 
2) I suddenly feel very old. Feels like yesterday we heard the first samples of the score...
 

So I did a thing.
 
I always thought it was interesting how the first appearance of Gondor/Minas Tirith in FOTR is scored not with any material related to Gondor but with Mordor/non-thematic material ("Shadow of the Past" 1:45-2:02 or "Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe" 6:33-6:49)
 
Which always made me wonder how it might have sounded if one of the Gondor themes had been used. (Even if not using it, was the right choice, allowing it to build over the three films.)
 
Well, now with a small amount of composing knowledge, and samples, I decided to answer that question for my self.
 
Here is, as a fun experiment, a very short mockup of a variation that recently popped into my head, inspiring this little project:
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q-esIYcifunLVo75pbrNbPJL5etfEUhT/view
 
@Jay@Incanus @Monoverantus
@Kühni

If nothing else, I feel like Hobbit Complete Recordings are more likely if Warner Bros see Middle-earth as an active property.

If nothing else, I feel like Hobbit Complete Recordings are more likely if Warner Bros see Middle-earth as an active property.

If nothing else, I feel like Hobbit Complete Recordings are more likely if Warner Bros see Middle-earth as an active property.

If nothing else, I feel like Hobbit Complete Recordings are more likely if Warner Bros see Middle-earth as an active property.

I would consider myself an apologist if we were talking about something truly terrible, with a terrible critical consensus. The Hobbit is not that: its just one of those films the memory of whose flaws became exaggerated in retrospect.
 
I think Nick's position that they are some of the best the fantasy genre has to offer outside The Lord of the Rings is probably correct, although personally, again not considering myself an "apologist", I'd say that's a low bar and that praise could be found for those films without comparing them to supbar movies.
 
I don't even think they're Jackson's worst films: this is a man who directed The Lovely Bones and for as lethargic as the pace of An Unexpected Journey sometimes becomes (my own personal biggest issue with the trilogy: I think the other two entries are paced just fine) it still moves faster than does Jackson's King Kong. Both, as it happens, have better pacing than Amazon's show, but I digress.
 
To me personally, my liking of the films has to do with a lot of things - I like the tableaux, I love Shore's score, I like the way it sits with The Lord of the Rings on the shelf as a six-part series, I like how some (not all) of it looks - but really, at its core, for me the story of the Dwarves registers very deeply: the whole story of a great folk reduced to beggars in the diaspora, yearning to return to their ancestal home, reminds one very much of Jewish history. So, too, does their more complex side: blaming others for their misfortunes and holding grudges, being secretive and suspicious of the outside world, etecetra.
 
That, to me, is much more meaningful than a dodgy beat in an action scene, a supbar love story, a terrible comic-relief character in Alfrid (whose in 5 minutes of the 151-minute long The Battle of the Five Armies, talk about missing the forest for the trees), etc...
 
But there's a much more meaningful point here which is that, regardless of what you think of those films, to treat it like a civil court trial against Jackson and to wave it around to say he should be kept at arm's length from cinematic realizations of Middle Earth when he was the one to instigate it all (Bakshi notwithstanding) is I think overly-harsh. Its like artistic cancel culture.
 
I mean, I don't think he'll step into the directing chair for any of these, nor do I think he should. But that's for other reasons, not because "Peter Jackson ruined my childhood!"

The Hobbit isn't terrible. If it were made first, it would probably be considered the greatest fantasy film made to date. It's not in the same league as LOTR, of course, and it suffers in many ways by comparison. But I don't think it's "terrible" a film, and I've been one of its harshest critics on here.

But speaking of comparison, if The Hobbit is made to look worse in comparison to LOTR, it's certainly improved, in my eyes at least, in comparison to Rings of Power. 

If nothing else, I feel like Hobbit Complete Recordings are more likely if Warner Bros see Middle-earth as an active property.

That your defence of the show often entails criticism of Tolkien (and disregard for his lore) kind of speaks volumes, no?

ROP deserves to be judged more harshly than other genre shows because of its pedigree. Not only its (albeit loose) origins in Tolkien, but the unprecedented amount of money spent on it.  
 
Take someone whose life was a disappointment, and who squandered the opportunities they were given. If that person came from a great family, had been raised in privilege and wealth, and given the best possible education and every advantage in life, you'd judged him more harshly than one who came from a disadvantaged background. And rightly so.
 
There's simply no excuse, given the type of writers and showrunners they had access to and could have brought in, for the show to have ended up like this. Bear's score and stunning visuals (and the latter are expected in a production like this) can't make up for the amateurish writing, poorly written characters, awful pacing and nonsensical plot. It's an incredible waste of time, talent and resources, and frankly, yes, an insult to Tolkien. 
 
With great power comes great responsibility!

I think it’s clear at this point that the Tolkien Estate just wanted the money and didn’t give a damn about what the show did. It’s about as closely related to the Tolkien’s work as your average game of D&D.

I think that was fairly evident the moment some started praising Rings of Power...
 
Obviously BCS by its very nature leaned heavily into backstory - to what extent any of that was unnecessary, I'll leave up to you (and since we're dealing with something that had no prior existence in any form, and takes place within a mere 10 years or less of the world of its successor show, comparing it to Rings of Power in this regard is absurd). But to leave perhaps the biggest enigma of the entire series largely untouched has to be commended.

That was part of the problem with the Star Wars prequel trilogy...the Jedi order, the Clone Wars, etc. we're all spoken of as myth and legend in the OT. There was no way the on-screen portrayal was going to be able to live up to whatever people conjured in their imagination while watching Star Wars....and it didn't. At least for me.
 
Shows with contemporary settings, and that are more character driven, especially psychologically complex characters like those in Breaking Bad, are more suited to a "backstory", IMO. How Saul got to be the person he becomes is interesting and even relevant, whereas portraying how Mordor became Mordor just takes away from the magic.

I stuck to my guns and haven't watched a single second!

Good grief, that was awful.
 
The show is just full of poorly written, cliché-ridden TV tropes has little to do with Tolkien. It's getting worse, not better, by the week.  It has the same beats, and flaws, of any other average streaming show, except that it has that huge budget. And what of that budget?  Yes, the settings are spectacular and very well done. But the big, epic battle they were leading up to felt decidedly small scale, and even...amateurish. And the writing...my God...when you start having your supposedly brilliant and heroic main characters act stupidly in order to move the plot forward (e.g. the misdirection with the evil sword that was obvious from the get go) you know you've hit rock bottom.
 
I’ve seen people praising episode 6 as “one of the greatest hours of TV ever”, and to each their own, I don’t begrudge anyone enjoying the show. But to me, at this point all ROP is doing is taking away the mystery and magic of Middle-Earth by strip mining its history to facilitate made up "origin stories". 
 
If there's anything that's surprising, it's that it's even more fan fiction than I suspected it would be. The whole story is basically TV writers making up, well, everything. The show is not going to get better, the DNA on this one is coded. I might finish the season, because I hate leaving things unfinished, but after that I'm out. 

Apparently everything and everyone needs a (crap and unnecessary) backstory now. How refreshing it was for Better Call Saul to resist the temptation to delve into Gus' (obviously eventful) past in Chile, and just leave it one big tantalizing mystery. But there was a writing team who knew what they were doing...

Apparently everything and everyone needs a (crap and unnecessary) backstory now. How refreshing it was for Better Call Saul to resist the temptation to delve into Gus' (obviously eventful) past in Chile, and just leave it one big tantalizing mystery. But there was a writing team who knew what they were doing...

Apparently everything and everyone needs a (crap and unnecessary) backstory now. How refreshing it was for Better Call Saul to resist the temptation to delve into Gus' (obviously eventful) past in Chile, and just leave it one big tantalizing mystery. But there was a writing team who knew what they were doing...