jpmatlack

Nearly every criticism about this show has turned into an ironical farce of contradiction. Not all- there are serious concerns, but by and large the naysayers appear to be the most hilarious victims of Confirmation Bias I’ve seen in quite awhile. 

I don’t disagree either. Fanboys and haters appear to me to be two sides of the same coin. 

6 episodes in, and I'm having mixed feelings so far.
 
The scale of the show and production values are truly impressive, but despite that, the narrative is a bit slow. I feel that the show has so many characters and locations that, despite the episodes being over an hour long, the plot has moved very little. Compare this with GoT S1, which also had many characters but the plot had an urgency that I think it's lacking here.
 
I like the Southlands part of the show mostly because it's the one where you can feel an urgency - these poor farmers are in danger with orcs threatening their lands. The rest I'm mostly indifferent towards, and the story is moving so slowly that I have the feeling the producers planned this season to be kind of a prologue for the story they actually wanted to tell. This is a really risky move, in my experience most of the movies or shows who set their first installment to be just a prologue ended up flopping later.
 
That said, I surely don't hate the show, and will watch the next episodes and the upcoming season. Bear McCreary's music is rather impressive, the kind of epic score that is an endangered species these days. It'll be extra sad if he loses the Emmy next year to another synth sound design-y score.

I highly recommend you watch one of the superb fan edits of the Hobbit. Never go back to the disaster of the trilogy…
 
There’s a video on YouTube with deepfake versions of Cate Blanchet and Hugo Weaving de-aged. They actually highlight how good the new actors portray these two characters in line with the films. 

Well, seeing as how only like 3 things have happened, that seems fair… 

I think all the actors do a good job, it's just the material they're given is occasionally extremely dull.

I think he does marvellous work as Elrond, for what its worth.

I don’t disagree either. Fanboys and haters appear to me to be two sides of the same coin. 

Shouldn't Valinor technically be reachable without having to go all green flash, since the only reason Valinor was hidden was because of the Numenor situation?

Good for you for not continuing the bizarre sadistic practice so many people feel compelled to engage in…
I don’t understand this at all. It’s like forcing yourself to eat every donut of a flavor that makes you want to vomit just because you like donuts in general… if it’s truly this awful, just walk away and don’t look back. 

Aren't you the guy who was disappointed that RoP didn't sound like Boulez? Hilarious, by the way, ironic or not. 

To be fair, there are so many great artworks done of Valinor, that I really wanted it on screen.
 
The writings of Tolkien are so strong and evocative that the myth reading it can't be teinted.
 
What is demystifying Valinor way more than that short image of it with the trees is Galadriel's awful journey there. The mystique of Valinor comes greatly from the fact that there are accounts of people going there and leaving it, but as a sort of metaphor, and you're left imagining how you actually get there. Since they are clearly marked as lands, but it's also a place of myth. 
Showing an actual divorcing wall is just a very dumb idea.
When Theoden says he's going to the Halls of his fathers, of course you don't show him knocking on a huge wooden door. It's metaphorical.
Just like in every movie telling Jesus Christ's life and death, you show him crucified, and not flying up the sky in big fluffy clouds until he hears harps playing.
I'm very grateful the writers don't have the rights to the Silmarillion, otherwise I swear they would take the phrase "Halls of Mandos" and show actual halls of Mandos.
 
I'm angry now.
 
How can you be so stupid as a writer?
I swear, sometimes you just look at people and know they're the reason there need to be instructions printed on shampoo bottles.

May your sacrifice in the face of such grief be long remembered. “Greater love has no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friend.”  Surely your self-giving will speed you to the shores of the Blessed Lands. 

I did watch the first 3 eps and hated most of it.

Before it starts losing its way in the 70 minute mark I'm rather fond of Bakshi's film. At least its not demystifying its audience with creation myths...
 
I mean, I don't want to be too flippant with The Rings of Power: it all looks very nice and I love the concept of Adar and his renegade Orcs. I love this rendering of Elrond, too.
 
But the narrative is slop.

I’d think it would be easier in that situation!  Consider a Tolkien fan like Holko who is not watching and just shit-talking from the sidelines (a noble profession) because he knows he’ll hate it.
 
I’m of mixed feelings on Tolkien, both in his writing and in adaptions of his work.  Still, Rings of Power, just like Jackson’s movies, the video games, the upcoming horse cartoon - by virtue of creative team and year of creation, is automatically divorced from the source material for me.  Even if I think it doesn’t fit with the source material, I can acknowledge the reasons why it doesn’t and understand that it doesn’t impact the source material at all.  It would be like getting mad at one of those bad 1990s Star Wars tie-in novels, or getting mad at, like, a remake of Robocop.  Why bother?

As a piece of visual media, for me, this clearly isn’t meeting the heights of Jackson’s LOTR, but it’s exceeding the lows of the Hobbit movies (which I still found worth watching). Certainly it’s better than the cartoons from the ‘70s and ‘80s.   It’s fine and better than most of the genre dreck right now, but certainly not a great work.
 

You act as if it's easy to just stop watching it as a Tolkien fan, when the visualization of Middle-Earth is pretty great. It's the dumb-as-ass screenplay that keeps people throwing up in their mouthes.
 
I watched the first episode and the last. And my god am I sick of Bear's music. The first episode made me passionately hate Galadriel's theme because it's quoted verbatim literally every two minutes, and the last one made me hate Bronwyn and Arondir because it plays verbatim every damn time.
It's not film scoring just throwing a character's theme in every time said character is on screen.
 
IF Bear did all the music by himself (which I still think is BS), then I suggest he gets more people on board for season 2.
 
And I absolutely hate how the journey to Valinor is depicted as sort of cult-ish induction where the weak go to be idle.

Definitely not the greatest episode of TV ever, but definitely a pretty good episode of this pretty good show.  You people who continue watching anything despite hating it puzzle me!  I’ve stopped plenty of shows, and it’s pretty easy to do.
 
Even though I don’t care much for Bear’s Galadriel theme, I did get a little pop when it was quoted during the initial charge.

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. 

Yes!  They like the show and therefore are morally defective! 

May your sacrifice in the face of such grief be long remembered. “Greater love has no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friend.”  Surely your self-giving will speed you to the shores of the Blessed Lands. 

So if Chen didn’t watch it, his co-hosts would just be like, “You have NOTT seen what we have seen.”

Yeah. Just, having Mordor created onscreen... big no-no for me.

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...