nineveh_uk

When I read the headline to this Guardian article, my reflexive thought was that that was overly harsh: Now it’s over, let’s come out and say it: The Rings of Power was a stinker. And then I paused. Amazon's Rings of Power's first series is the most expensive television ever made. Its 8-episode series cost an unspecified but enormous amount of money, and looked at in those terms, of how much value did they get out of that money, the Guardian is right. That sum of money could have made, should have made, an awful lot of very good television*, and it simply didn't on any front.

A stinker financially, but my fundamental problem with RoP was that it was simply tepid. If it had been laughably bad I'd have been ranting on Dreamwidth after the first two episodes. I'm a Tolkien fan of nearly 35 years, I have opinions, even if one of those opinions is "it is necessary for a good adaptation to adapt." The root problem is the script.* The script is indeed a stinker. At best, it steals from the LotR films in a heavy-handed way. Occasionally there are good original sections. Most of it is dull. At worst, it vividly illustrates the truth of Ursula K Le Guin's 1973 essay From Elfland to Poughkeepsie. Le Guin and I don't entirely agree on what makes good fantasy style, but we certainly agree on what it isn't: dialogue that with a couple of proper nouns changed sounds like 'a sample of conversation between a senator and a lobbyist for pollution control.' Le Guin's brilliant example actually includes the name Nigel. RoP doesn't go that far, but as a text one would scarcely be surprised at any moment were Nigel the analyst to start delivering his report on biscuit sales.

I'm not as harsh on the acting as Stuart Heritage; though I agree that it is not all of equal quality, I think that the actors could largely have done better with better material. Morfydd Clark is indeed good, albeit occasionally made up rather too heavy on the blusher, but my goodness does she have heavy lifting to do. She's also hampered in that for a fantasy series with a female lead, it manages to be remarkably sexist in a 'complete failure by the creative team to examine underlying prejudices' way. Yes, there are some female characters. But again and again they get presented in ways that fall back on modern media sexism. Amazon's elves are a sexually dimorphic species, women all beautiful, willowy, and Galadriel excepted, at least one of unseen or silent, while the men (Arondir and his fellow Sindarins excepted) are either determinedly middle-aged middle-manager in appearance, or in the case of Elrond, looking like ones mental image of an economics post-grad at Brigham Young University.** I think there was one female elf other than Galadriel who had a speaking part, in episode 1. In one particularly egregrious scene, three male elves plus a dwarven prince sit round a dinner table. There are two women there, veiled and silent, and faces pretty much unseen. Afterwards while the manly business meeting continues, we see equally veiled and silent female elves clear the table. No doubt they then went on to do the washing up. Meanwhile in 'the Southlands', prominent village woman Bronwyn wears the kind of sleeveless hippy sundress that Kate Aldridge would have thought too much in the 1980s while all around her the generic peasants are warmly clad. Once again, Bronwyn is the only woman with lines in the village.

I will admit that it looks absolutely gorgeous, the budget on scenery and special effects being well-spent. The dwarf kingdom in Eregion is magnificent, Numenor a splendid blending of Venice and Byzantium with a dash of Alma-Tadema, the Hobbits earthily bucolic (a bit OTT so, others than I have done the Irish accents rant), the elves' clothes and forest-cities unearthly even if their wigs are not. But setting isn't enough. It isn't anything like enough.

When it comes down to it, the producers, the showrunners, just haven't thought enough. They've got the first 8 episodes of a 5 series and it is boring, and simply because I already know the outline of the story, an issue that applies in the adaptation of any book. There is some good original stuff in there - I ended up really liking Adar (the acting helped), but as a whole they have a bad script both in the detail*** and as a whole. The hook may be 'has Sauron returned?', but if you're not answering in the text that until the end of the series, you need some plot in the intervening episodes that is more than a few business meetings about magical biscuits. The writer of any UK soap, of any bargain-basement 50 episode Cdrama**** knows that you cannot spend your filler episodes just hanging around. And unfortunately, for all its better moments that promised something more, RoP was about 90% filler. I think this is fixable to quite a significant degree for subsequent series, but will need recognition of the problem and some money and talent putting into the script.

And finally PYROCLASTIC FLOWS DON'T WORK LIKE THAT!!!!!!!!!!!

OK, I admit it. This turned into a rant.

*Actually the root problem is giving a project like that to a couple of totally inexperienced showrunners because they were white men with connections.

** Think the lead in The Book of Mormon and dial it up. A lot. Although Elrond's actor actually comes from Hull. Or as they call it in Hull, Kingston upon Hull.

*** Seriously, that was the best you could come up with for Sauron's influence on the creation of the rings? Something that the elves would only not have thought of if they had not reached Bronze Age technology levels? FFS! What ought to have been a climatic moment is simply cringingly bad writing. Then there's the insular village, with inhabitants nonetheless called Bronwyn, Theo, Rowan, and Waldreg.

**** God knows, The Untamed had its flaws, but it does set up its big mystery right at the start and then maintain the viewer's interest in that central question through a fairly complicated narrative.