Hello, My Movievaures! I hope you had a great week. I’m so excited to be back with a new review on one of the most expected shows of 2022: The Rings of Power. There was so much controversy, even before it was released in September. So many complained because of the actors’ skin color, the aesthetic of the first images released, and even the music. To me, all of that was just noise. I was absolutely thrilled that a show was going to be based on this amazing world Tolkien has created. Did The Rings of Power honor his work? Well, before getting into the details, let’s get to the non-spoilers part:

Set during the Second Age of Middle-earth’s history, thousands of years before the epic stories of Bilbo, Legolas, Frodon, and Aragorn, we follow a group of characters, some of them new, some of them that are already part of the legend. In a time where good already defeated evil at great costs, in a feeling of relative peace, some haven’t forgotten the past and believe that corruption will come back again from the ashes and plunge the world into darkness.

It is so hard to get everyone to agree to any type of adaptation. There are a few exceptions like The Lord of The Rings movies, but even then some people had something to criticize about the choice of actors or the timelines. When a movie or a show is based on a book, where you have the time to develop so much more the characters and the storyline, there is always a risk it will not fit the readers’ view. I think that it is important for fans to understand that there are much more limits when you adapt a story to the big/small screen.

All of this is to say that I’m absolutely not surprised that there are people saying it is not as good as what they were expecting. What annoys me more is all the drama around unimportant things like the actors’ skin. All this “woke” conversation we keep having over and over, every time there is a non-white actor on screen is getting annoying as hell. I will just address this to say that there are zero consequences to the storyline that there are some black & Latino characters. The issue here is that some people got so focused on these details that they started to negatively criticize the show with little arguments.

Don’t get me wrong. I get that the slow pace of certain scenes, even episodes is not something everyone enjoys. That some shots were awkward, especially for one of the most expensive shows of all time, and finally that there are absolutely some shortcuts that seemed unnecessary. However, even though it is not perfect I actually believe it is a great tribute to Tolkien’s story. First of all, the show is absolutely stunning. There is CGI of course, but you can also see great work done in costumes, masks, and real landscapes.

Some of the dialogues could seem a bit overcomplicated but at the same time, I actually enjoyed having a bit more deepness than what we are used to and more poetry to it. Indeed, there was some unbalance in how some characters’ storylines were treated, but I will say that I was positively surprised by how this story was built to fit the TV show format. I know that the second age is actually really long and so to actually follow for a long time the same set of characters while maintaining some sort of consistency and closeness to the original story for.

In short, The Rings of Power is not perfect indeed, but it doesn’t deserve the negativity it was surrounded by, especially for the reasons I highlighted above. For sure, it needs to speed up in rhythm if they want to keep the spectators’ attention for the next 5 seasons they already confirmed. None of the less, I hope they will not fall into the cliffhanger effect, where each episode is just a rush of actions. The Lord of the Rings is an epic story, indeed but it also takes its time to make us discover this amazing world. Well, this is all for today My Movievaures. Let me know in the comments down below your thoughts on this adaptation and don’t forget to follow me on Instagram (the_movievaures) while you wait for next week’s article!