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Amazon buys up Middle-earth, it searches the One Ring! (Rings of Power news thread)


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I’m not surprised they’ve moved from New Zealand to the U.K. for future seasons, there’s no need to be in NZ when you’re creating the whole thing in a computer anyway. 

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13 hours ago, Chen G. said:

Okay, I think this looks really beautiful:

 

RPAZ_S1_FG_104_00025314_Still001_R1.jpg

 

I know this is supposed to evoke Minas Tirith, but I see the front end of a medieval Imperial Star Destroyer, and now I can't unsee it.

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3 hours ago, Bilbo said:

I’m not surprised they’ve moved from New Zealand to the U.K. for future seasons, there’s no need to be in NZ when you’re creating the whole thing in a computer anyway. 

 

I mean, did we expect them to find a place that looked like this and build Numenore there? Anymore than we did with Rivendell, or with Laketown, or with Minas Tirith?

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Is it possible this show takes place in two different time periods? Cutting back and forth in some fashion between the “present” of Ar-Pharazôn and the “past” of Celebrimbor? Perhaps in the form of memories of the Elvish characters who straddle the 1,800 year+ gap?

 

Trailers show the Two Trees and I think the Helcaraxë — and those would obviously be flashbacks.

 

The Balrog, that’s a stumper, he doesn’t come into the tale till the year 1980 of the Third Age! Is he just in dreams?

 

I have no Meteor Man theories, but it does occur to me, there are writings in PoMe about how maybe Glorfindel and the Blue Wizards returned to Middle-earth in the 2nd Age, not the 3rd Age.

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11 hours ago, Holko said:

That's Minas Tirith with the church Cersei blows up with the green stuff on top of it!

Looks a bit similar to the Sept of Baelor lol. This looks way cleaner though and less “lived in”.

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13 hours ago, Pellaeon said:

Is it possible this show takes place in two different time periods? Cutting back and forth in some fashion between the “present” of Ar-Pharazôn and the “past” of Celebrimbor? Perhaps in the form of memories of the Elvish characters who straddle the 1,800 year+ gap?

 

Trailers show the Two Trees and I think the Helcaraxë — and those would obviously be flashbacks.

 

The Balrog, that’s a stumper, he doesn’t come into the tale till the year 1980 of the Third Age! Is he just in dreams?

 

No, everyone working on the show is crystal clear they've compressed the timeline into, presumably, a few years. That allows the Tirharadrim and Harfoot characters to not only survive to the end of the series, but also to maintain their appearance: from a dramatic standpoint, you don't want Tyroe Muhaffidin's Theo to be 14 in Season One, 20 in Season Two and 35 in Season Four: you want him to mature along the lines of an Arya Stark.

 

That isn't to say there aren't flashbacks: Certainly, the time of the Trees period is a flashback. What you deem the Helcaraxë is actually a mission Galadriel leads into the Forodwaith in "real time" rather than in flashback.

 

The Balrog is a trickier business: I think the shot we see of the Balrog proper is either some First Age Balrog in flashback or perhaps setting-up Durin's Bane appearance so that when Peter Mullan's Durin III talks about a "tempting shadow [that] would bury us all beneath the Mountain" we know what he's talking about. I do think he'll appear, but only as the Season Five endgame to the Khazad Dum storyline, which - yes - would seem to pull on material from the first two milennia of the Third Age.

 

Meteor Man I'm becoming more and more convinced is Gandalf. Having jumped through all these lore hoops to have Hobbits, to collapse the time frame, to seemingly have Durin's Bane and so forth, you wouldn't think they'd pass up on Gandalf.

 

2022-08-13_2.png

 

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So let's do a small recap. They're doing timeline compression which could mean that they'll merge the war of the Elves and Sauron with Pharazon expedition when he captured Sauron( this is bad because the context is entirely different in the first conflict the Numenoreans went to war for the love and the sake of the elves in the second just for pride and glory), also timeline compression could mean cutting a lot of the battles and even the siege of The Last Alliance. Also I don't give a damn they are doing timeline compression to keep alive and still young their original characters. They're inserting Gandalf for the sake of nostalgia bait, they will probably close the dwarven storyline with Durin's Bane an event that happens only 2000 years after in 1980 TE(huge red flag for me it means Tolkien Estate doesn't give a sh.i.t about them twisting Tolkien's canon)

It's safe to say that at the end of the damn five seasons we'll count  the few things that they haven't changed on one hand.

 

Let me know if I forget something. As this wasn't already enough @Chen G.

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1 hour ago, Servant of Morgoth said:

Let me know if I forget something. As this wasn't already enough @Chen G.

 

In an interview with EW from ComicCon, the actresses of the two Hobbit youngesters made the parallel to Frodo and Sam...

 

Also, and this is me piecing stuff together so take it with a grain of salt, but this fort will get besieged by Orcs until Galadriel brings the Numenorean cavarly to save the day (ahem...Helm's Deep...ahem):

 

0i5gp328ajf91.png

 

Spoiler

And then in what looks like the subsequent victory celebrations, an explosion happens:

 

ftc6ornkpld91.png?auto=webp&s=167fde5419

 

which I believe turns the verdant stretch of land above into...

 

4k-returnofking-movie-screencaps.com-267

 

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This peaceful land being conquered & turned into Mordor is an idea I'm sure they got from The Scouring of the Shire (and Frodo's vision of it in the film). Which is the rationale they'll use to justify it. 

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Yeah, but this isn't a case like the Scouring or like Isengard where the continuous indsturialisation and/or war preparations ravish the land: its a case of something going "boom!" (why, how and what the nature of this explosion is, I haven't the foggiest) and there's Mordor.

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They are. Its the same as the rhetoric of "they're not Hobbits, they're Harfoots, you see, and that's why its totally different and not pandering!"

 

This is the real killer for me, though: 

 

Quote

we weren't interested in a show that was a nostalgia play or a retread, or a reboot or a sequel in a lot of the traditional ways we felt we were getting as viewers.

 

We've heard the showrunners parrot this line a few times now, on a couple of occasions. And from what I can see, it just doesn't jive with what their show has to offer, between the Harfoots, potentially Meteor Man and certainly this siege battle.

 

Whether this is intentionally misleading or not is for a later day, I think.

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Mount Doom was made by Morgoth. The land of Mordor was already barren and harsh because of the volcanic eruptions even before Sauron decided to built his stronghold there

 

In truth I am already tired of all these proto things they're doing. Proto hobbits, proto Mordor, proto Gandalf, proto Durin's Bane,etc.

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On 12/8/2022 at 2:46 PM, Chen G. said:

 

I mean, did we expect them to find a place that looked like this and build Numenore there? Anymore than we did with Rivendell, or with Laketown, or with Minas Tirith?


No, but the whole thing looks like it was filmed in a big green room with everything added in afterwards not just wide establishing shots like that of Byzantine Tirith posted above.

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9 minutes ago, Nick1Ø66 said:

Finally, Tolkien's vision fulfilled.

 

 

Ah, but you're wrong Nick. That's not Tolkien's vision fulfilled, clearly THIS is:

 

 

The way this shaping up, at its worst this show would make a hell of lark if you've a drink handy.

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51 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

 

Ah, but you're wrong Nick. That's not Tolkien's vision fulfilled, clearly THIS is:

 

tumblr_lq6p85r6Kq1ql141xo1_250.gifv

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1 hour ago, Nick1Ø66 said:

Finally, Tolkien's vision fulfilled.

 

Screenshot 2022-08-15 at 17.35.43.png

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with everything that gets released from this series I struggle to tell if it’s real or parody. 

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Quote

The new season will be directed by an all-female director line up

 

Whatever makes you sleep better at night Amazon hierarchy. Your backs must hurt from all those pats.

 

56 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

 

Seems to be AWOL this season.

 

 

He obviously saw the scripts.

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This show just has a hypocrisy underscoring the whole enterprise. The show runners have said consistently that they want to distinguish their series completely from the New Line films for artistic and legal reasons. So what do they do? They hire Howard Shore to write the theme, John Howe to create the design art, film in New Zealand, hire a cast of look-alikes, and create a production & creature design that more or less depicts Middle-Earth the same as the movies. Sort of sounds to me like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. They obviously know that the films are the way the public imagines Middle-Earth, and they're not going to risk showing it any other way. It's a commercially sound decision and an artistically cowardly one.

 

Which I suppose gives me mixed feelings. I loved the way the films looked,  but on the other hand, there are countless other talented artists who have depicted Middle-Earth in other ways, who have visions distinct from Howe's & Lee's (to say nothing of Jackson, Richard Taylor & WETA). If they really wanted to set their own path and contribute something unique to the Middle-Earth tapestry, they could easily have done so. But they want faux-continuity with the films (which honestly, I can't blame them for) without saying they want continuity. It's all a wink & nod of Orville level proportions.

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3 minutes ago, Stu said:

I'll leave judgments on the quality of the show itself, divorced from the poisonous marketing, to everyone who will actually watch it :) 


At least you’ll get a new Bear score from this. I’ll get nothing 😭

 

 

I have House of the Dragon though so it’s not so bad

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51 minutes ago, Bilbo said:

I have House of the Dragon though so it’s not so bad

 

Yes, this seems like it will easily be the better of the two shows. Neither seems promising on the music front though. :(

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2 hours ago, Stu said:

The cynicism and hypocrisy just makes my skin crawl.  And the playbook is so rote at this point.  The way they want to affix this perception that if you're a Tolkien fan and you don't watch the show, you're actually maybe abetting fascists or whatever.  I can't roll my eyes higher.

 

But I fixed the headline.

 

The ‘Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Team Already Fears Counts On Racist Backlash Against Cast

https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-team-fears-racist-backlash-against-cast

 

-Shame on the media for creating this culture in the first place

-Shame on the marketing team for cynically taking advantage of it all to gin up a 'good guys vs. bad guys' narrative, playing fans against each other for controversy ("earned" media)

-Shame on the creative team for going along with it

-Shame on the sanctimonious viewers that buy into it

-Shame on me

-Shame on you

-Shame!

 

image.png

 

Shame shame shame on the sinner! (That’s the book quote for that scene)

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Anyone mention that the series will premiere with 2 episodes. Or did I miss that being mentioned.

 

https://www.polygon.com/23308109/lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-amazon-prime

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will premiere with two episodes

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4 hours ago, JohnTheBaptist said:

Amazing how everyone's already decided the show is terrible without having seen a single minute of it. 


If what they’ve shown us so far is what they think is the best material to try and sell it to us I’m afraid to see how terrible the rest of it will be.

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5 hours ago, JohnTheBaptist said:

Amazing how everyone's already decided the show is terrible without having seen a single minute of it. 

On one hand, I'm generally in the camp of nihilists, who thinks that Tolkien's work must be protected from the hands of greedy corporations and soulless commities as much as possible. Seeing Tolkien's work being turned into lucrative , yet occasionally good "content", feels a bit like if Saruman industrialized all of Middle-earth and the hobbits saying "Well at least we got cars now". (Sure, the LotR trilogy was a commercial project too, but I must admit I'm biased due to the raw passion and creativity it excudes. At least let there not be another adaptation of LotR in my lifetime.)

On the other hand, you're completely right. It gets so tiring of how quickly people form camps and decide what to think before they've even seen the thing. If it's good, it's good; no matter who made it or what they've said or how it was marketed. Same if it's bad.

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I keep my skepticism towards responses coming from glossy premieres and press screenings. Not to accuse anyone going to those of being disingenious, but something about being a little bit dazzled by all the pomp and circumstance seems to put people into a more agreeable mood.

 

Looking for example at responses from the premiere of The Rise of Skywalker, for instance, one must wonder if those people saw the same film we saw in theaters.

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I'd say I take these insta-reactions from premieres with a grain of salt, except that a grain of salt can actually be useful.

 

One House of the Dragon insta-reaction tweet described the show as "Better than Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad."  So...yeah.

 

 

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Apparently the first 2 episodes will drop at 6pm Pacific time on Thursday September 1st, which is 9pm in my local Eastern time zone

 

The remaining episodes, however, will drop at 9pm Pacific time on every subsequent Thursday until the finale on October 13, which is midnight in my local timezone, so it'll basically be a Friday / weekend show for me, I doubt even the premiere will be seen by me that Thursday night

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