Two years on and hundreds of millions of pounds later, we’re still witnessing the careless butchery of J R R Tolkien’s most precious work. Yes, we all love The Lord of the Rings but Tolkien loved The Silmarillion, his mythic origin story featuring the ancient gods and heroes of Middle-earth. The Silmarillion and the LOTR appendices are the basis for Jeff Bezos’s pet project, the £1 billion series Rings of Power on Amazon Prime. Anyone sane would have told him that these collections of myth and legend are not really filmable, but in the world of Amazon, money is the answer to everything. And Bezos has a lot of money. He budgeted £100 million for each episode. There are twelve episodes over two seasons so far, so that’s over £1 billion already, and I’ve heard a dreadful rumour that there are three more seasons to go; five in total. At this rate Bezos will run out of money and I’ll still be reviewing this rubbish six years from now.
Parts of season 2 are worse than season 1. There’s one bit where a worried father begs his commander not to go to war; he’s got children to feed and he can’t afford to die. The baby is seen in the background, crying in its mother’s arms. This touching scene has one glaring problem; they’re orcs. The bouncing baby in his mother’s arms is a baby orc. Whose idea was this? The pathetic orc family which we’re meant to care about reveals Rings of Power’s fundamental lack of understanding of its source material. Orcs can’t be doting fathers. We can’t see or even think about baby orcs. There is no pathos, no empathy with orcs; they are not emotional beings. They are the embodiment of meaningless cruelty. I have tried and failed to understand why the writers thought it would be a good idea to show a human side to orcs.
Season 2 has one thing going for it: there is a vaguely discernible plot this time, which season 1 was entirely lacking. We finally see why Rings of Power is called Rings of Power. Halbrand, the mysterious wanderer who was revealed to be Sauron at the end of the first season, has returned to forge his rings which he willl use to control everyone in Middle-earth. Now disguised as an elf with a Legolas wig, he has wheedled his way into the forge and heart of Lord Celebrimbor, the master jewellery-maker of the elves. Charles Edwards plays Celebrimbor as a kind of nervous civil servant who’s afraid of getting in trouble with his boss. He’s meant to be wise and powerful, the greatest smith the elves have ever known. That doesn’t come across here. Sauron has easily tricked him into making the rings of power which he has secretly injected with his own serum of evil. There are definitely homoerotic undertones here. Celebrimbor and Sauron have lovers’ tiffs in front of their employees. Lord Celebrimbor demands an answer from Sauron; ‘Did you tamper with the rings, yes or no?’ Sauron feigns shock and disappointment. When they complete the seven dwarvish rings they have an office drinks party, and Sauron is not happy with Celebrimbor’s speech. ‘I encouraged you to keep it brief,’ Sauron hisses under his breath. The lovers have fallen out again.
The forging of the rings plot point at least makes sense. Now we can see a kind of structure and momentum to the whole thing, but how are they going to sustain this for five seasons? My husband and I have begun a running list of all the references from the Peter Jackson films that they’ll try to shoehorn in for the fans along on the way. We’ve already ticked off Tom Bombadil, played perhaps as well as one might possibly play him by the excellent stage actor Rory Kinnear. We’ve had the eagles, we’ve had giant spiders, although my husband also predicts an appearance of Shelob the queen of spiders, perhaps disguised as a sexy woman. This might be a little left-field, but you never know. We’ll definitely get the Balrog because he was very popular in the Fellowship, and whatever worked before has to be milked and squeezed and harvested until not a single drop of box office appeal remains. We’ve also had barrow wights, though these were neither wights nor were they in barrows. They were the exact design of a zombie video game boss I’ve seen on my husband’s Xbox. Elrond shoots them in the head with arrows three times and he’s done it. No sense of threat, no consequence. Just carry on to the next bad guy.
The writers are really trying to make Galadriel a great warrior but she is knocked over and captured quite a lot. She and Elrond are having a teenage fight; he’s jealous that she has a ring of power and he doesn’t. They keep glowering at each other and he leaves her to the orcs, which seems like an overreaction. There are too many ridiculous and insulting interpretations of Tolkien’s characters to mention. Isildur, the great prince and warrior of Númenor, opens up to a girl he fancies: ‘I just wanted to do something important,’ he sniffles. Gil-galad, high king of the elves of Noldor, looks like Channing Tatum in a gold Elvis suit. His face is so puffy and stretched he looks less like a beautiful immortal and more like the actor’s had a bad reaction to plastic surgery.
The Harfoots are back, acorns and all, still trying to help the wandering hobo dressed in a hemp bathrobe as he looks for something; they’re not quite sure what. But I can guess. This is the backstory of how Gandalf got his staff, the backstory no one wanted and which will amount to roughly £500 million in production costs. I’m just waiting for him to say, ‘You shall not pass!’, or perhaps ‘You shall pass!’ as a kind of clever subversion of something we’ve already heard. Another prediction: this season is going to end with a spooky voiceover saying, ‘One ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.’ Remember when they said that in the Peter Jackson films? And remember how well those did in the box office? So let’s do it again! There’s not much more thought that’s gone into Rings of Power than that.
