Here it is: Prime Video’s precious Lord Of The Rings trailer
The massively budgeted fantasy series takes place ages before the Peter Jackson movies
Aux News Man
Six years after closing the book on the Hobbit trilogy, a new power rises in the most likely of places: Amazon. Fittingly so, the massive corporation (which has many similarities to the Dark Land of Mordor, but we’ll spare you) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power’s debut season in hopes of having a Game Of Thrones-style success.
After releasing a picture that we spent way too much time parsing, giving us an obvious title, endangering the lives of stunt performers, and posting photo after photo of hands, The Rings Of Power finally has an official trailer. It’s our first look at the Middle Earth hinted at in Peter Jackson’s trilogies.
Here’s the synopsis:
“This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared reemergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone
Thus far, the studio has been tightlipped on the series, announcing that it will take place in the Second Age of Middle Earth. Bookended by the downfall of Dark Lords, the Second Age is 3,400 years of set up for the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. During this era, the elves forge the rings of power, the Dúnedain thrive, and Elrond gets a great deal on property in Rivendell.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power premieres on Friday, September 2, on Amazon Prime Video, with new episodes rolling out weekly.
127 Comments
At the risk of starting a huge flame war, I’ll say this: Yeah, looks pretty cool.
It does look pretty cool. So did the teaser for The Phantom Menace.
Fool me once…
If the Phantom Menace was the last time you got fooled by a cool trailer, I admire your gifts of insight!
Thank you. It’s saved me a bunch of money on movie tickets.
I mean, the trailer for Revenge of the Sith looking fucking AWESOME. So… fool me thrice?
Seriously though, I am talking about teaser trailers. Not the “official trailer” that gives you cool character moments and a bit of an idea of the story.
Check out the first glimpse teaser trailer of The Force Awakens. You get no idea about the story or characters, but it looks like Star Wars, feels like Star Wars, and indicates you’re gonna be in for a heck of a ride.
And then you watch the actual movie and… you been nostalgia baited.
Sure. So did The Hobbit, before I watched it. And that was made by all the same people.
The Hobbit should’ve been two movies at most. The biggest problem with the Hobbit trilogy are the call-backs to LotR and all the crap they made up and stuffed in there to pad out the movies.
I agree, wasn’t there a fan cut going around a few years back of the Hobbit with the superfluous stuff cut out? I think the trouble is once you’ve done a very big hit nobody ever tells you to edit properly ever again.
The problem was making The Hobbit after The Lord of the Rings and deciding to turn it into a full prequel (giving the studio three movies), including all the off-screen action that ran parallel to Bilbo’s adventure as summarized in the LoTR appendices.
It’s been a long time since I read The Hobbit, but definitely didn’t remember Gandalf hanging in a birdcage. Throwing in all the side history wrecked what should have been a fun, crisp adventure flick.
Really? I found the biggest problem of The Hobbit to be the incredibly inconsistent tone, constantly switching between cartoonish slapstick and serious drama, as well as the lack of focus on the actual main characters. I don’t think anyone needed to see what Alfred Lickspittle got up to, much less to have a whole subplot devoted to him.
What’s weird is how for all the padding, there were still bizarre omissions from the book. The dwarves’ introduction to Beorn was left out, and reinstated in the extended version. The goblin army was dropped from Five Armies just to shoehorn a subplot about Angmar. The whole thing just felt dumbed down.
The problem with The Hobbit, aside from just being bad, was that the trailer used that amazing Misty Mountain song which set up a way more somber and grounded movie than the goofy CGI fest than it delivered.
It definitely looks like it strikes the same tone…but so has every low energy remake lately.
There’s something off though. I’m finding it hard to articulate exactly what that is, too glossy?
I FIND YOUR OPINIONS WELL-CONSIDERED VALUABLE AND WORTHWHILE RAAGGGHHHAAHHAHGGHH KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK
Hey! They stole this idea from me! Ah, well.
Which part? The adapting the material you don’t have the rights to part, or spending the 465 million you don’t have part?
So, based on that trailer, how much of that $465 mill went to on-scene talent and how much went to virtual effects, do we think?
They’re still overpaid, like all entertainers who have “made it”
Go back to cleaning out the fryer. Your break is over.
So, it’s better for the studios (Amazon in this case) to boost their profit margins and keep more of the money in their shareholders’ pockets?(You know they aren’t going to make the entertainment cheaper if they start paying people less.)
It was more a comment on the relative prominence/merits of each than a plea for people to be “paid fairly.” (Although I do think that’s a pretty laudable goal in general, despite not knowing much about the salaries paid to non-movie star actors/behind-the-camera talent.)It certainly seems relevant that there’s like…one or two lines spoken out loud? Compared to like 10 really impressive, obviously computer-generated/enhanced shots? (This is based on my memory of watching the clip like, 5 hours ago.)
They look pretty good but also, if you told me this was from a Final Fantasy game or something, I would believe you.
It looks like she was recreated in CGI, her face is odd, they couldn’t do this on a green screen with the real actor?
I worked very hard on this and it was very expensive:
pff, I can see the pixels
Usually you have to pay extra to see that!
I think the FF cutscene would be better animated – whoever that is in the video just seems to float onto that ice wall. There’s no weight.
*posts a cropped picture of an actual actor dressed in prop armor* “This CGI looks pretty good, but it could have been from a videogame.”
This was the most jarring part of the trailer for me… an actor clearly not struggling physically, looking bored and pretending to hang from a cliff while clearly hanging from a scaffold in front of a green screen is probably what the ethos of this entire series is going to be, which as pretty much everyone knows, is the exact opposite of what was charming about LOTR.
Also, totally unrelated to anything else I’ve said in these comments: SAINT MAUD IS GALADRIEL?!?!
I don’t necessarily need an expensive, well-known cast (lots of great TV has been made with people new to most of the audience), but I sure do hope they get good material to work with.
I consider myself a pretty fair Tolkien fan – grew up with the books, and I’m even named for one of the characters. They’re my favorite book and film series ever, and while I’m no Stephen Colbert, I can recite off a fair bit of history.I’ve had a hard time drumming up much enthusiasm for this project. Maybe it’s because Tolkien only ever had the chance to write two stories and everything else is basically just a textbook of extensive history, and I worry that those textbooks won’t lend themselves easily to narrative interpretation. Maybe because I know the outrageous sum of money Amazon has put into this and I worry about the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Maybe because after The Hobbit movies, I’m burned out on anything remotely approaching the world because it’s been so thoroughly exploited by movie studios prioritizing money over quality.
Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised? But for the time being, even with this first teaser, I remain pretty skeptical.
In the one ring dot net chat tonight, anti woke showed up in chat and made racist comments. The chat had to be shutdown. So much hate. What a sad world we live in.
Same type of freakout happened in the subreddit for Resident Alien after last week’s episode featured “girl power” set of story lines. The writers had the temerity to include a joke about vaginas and give a girl in a hijab a couple of lines about female empowerment. The anti-woke brigade couldn’t handle that much estrogen…
The mods had to step in and put a stop to the nonsense.
I had to leave multiple LotR Reddit communities since they dropped the character posters dropped. It was all kinds of low-end racism and no one could seem to fathom that being racist isn’t exclusively about intent.
What kind of comments? Because a friend of mine was just dogpiled for saying “An elf with a fade is ridiculous” and I was like, um, he’s right.
They kept spamming the chat with “n***ger elf” The bitterness coupled with white grievance was strong with them.
Twitter’s pretty much the same. I’ve spent too much of my Monday attempting to explain that Elves, Hobbits, and Orcs aren’t real, actually.
I love the actual novels, but couldn’t really muster a whole lot of enthusiasm even for the appendices, let alone any extended texts. Tolkien seemed to treat most of that stuff as mythology, and for me it lacks a compelling narrative. But I don’t see any reason why someone couldn’t effectively take that barebones story structure and fill in the gaps to great effect. Comic books have swiped basically every bit of western mythological tradition and rewrote it into tons of different stories, which is virtually the same thing give or take a billion dollars.In principle, I’ve been put off by Amazon’s whole design process of making their own new Game of Thrones with an Old Tolkien. But I think this is really exciting looking trailer. I can’t wait to illegally download it for free.
But I don’t see any reason why someone couldn’t effectively take that
barebones story structure and fill in the gaps to great effect.
In most cases I would agree with you. I think I’m still too worried that this is driven more by money than a sincere desire to flesh out Tolkien’s world from an artistic standpoint.But hey, if you’re excited, more power to you! 🙂
But money is also a massive incentive to get it right. If they put out a dud, all they’d have to show for it is one of the biggest write-offs in history.
But money is also a massive incentive to get it right.
How many times have we seen a movie or television show where they threw all the money in the world at it, and it turned out to be utter crap, Tacitus? When you have that much money at stake, you have a lot of people who think putting up the money means they can make creative decisions, which are often…horrible….You would think if you’re the money producer you’d have an incentive to get it right, but what usually happens is one negative reaction and suddenly the money producers’ dive in to “protect the investment” and make matters a lot worse! Just look at what happened to Justice League – while I have no love for Zack Snyder he clearly had a direction for his version of the movie to go in that would course-correct the issues audiences had with BvS:DoJ. But rather than trusting Snyder, WB used a family tragedy to shoehorn Joss Whedon into cutting the film to almost half its length and…adding jokes like were in his AVENGERS movies.
I guess that’s what excited me about this. The outline of the stories Tolkien left seem wildly intriguing. Perfect set up for new writers to fill in. Like, you’re getting tell Elrond’s story? What was it like being raised by the sociopaths who murdered his people and kidnapped him and how does it affect him? How does Sauron go from captive to most valued counselor? It could be cool if the writers are good.
What was it like being raised by the sociopaths who murdered his people and kidnapped him and how does it affect him? I don’t care because I can’t see how knowing this will inform our reading of him in LOTR in any way. It’s cool to learn backstories when it helps explain or uncover something about a character we didn’t understand, or maybe even realise. But I can’t imagine any revelation or information about Elrond that would make me think anything more than “oh… neat.”
Like, you’re getting tell Elrond’s story? What was it like being raised by the sociopaths who murdered his people and kidnapped him and how does it affect him?I wouldn’t exactly call Maedhros and Maglor sociopaths. They were tragic villains, and the whole reason why they raised Elrond and his brother was the guilt over all the crimes that they had committed.
I have less than zero sympathy for the Feanorians to be honest. Not killing one specific set of children after you slaughtered a refugee camp, doesn’t seem like much in the way of atonement. And their guilt didn’t really stop them from persisting in their goals either.
Would this then sort of be the Star Wars prequel of Middle Earth! Not in that or sucks but that it’s about everyone turning bad and the ending is a huge bummer?
I guess it depends on which story you choose to tell? Because elves live so long, you’re talking about lots of time and lots of individual stories. Any of which could be the subject of a show. Like, you could probably do a whole show about the lead up and Fall of Numenor. Which is sad, but it leads directly to the founding of the kingdoms Gondor and Arnor (Aragorn’s kingdoms). If they are covering the forging of the rings, it’s probably going to be intense and sad, but they do kind of “win” so “complicated” is probably the best answer.
Would this then sort of be the Star Wars prequel of Middle Earth! Not in that or sucks but that it’s about everyone turning bad and the ending is a huge bummer?Not really if you end with the War of the Last Alliance. Bittersweet victory, Sauron loses, but is destined to rise again one day, but the heroes get to celebrate generations of peace and prosperity before that happens.
Not really. If this show occupies the time frame I think it does, it ends with Sauron’s first defeat- basically, the flashback that opened the Fellowship of the Ring.
I love the actual novels, but couldn’t really muster a whole lot of enthusiasm even for the appendices, let alone any extended texts. Tolkien seemed to treat most of that stuff as mythology, and for me it lacks a compelling narrative.There are many individual stories there that are plenty compelling. The problem is that they are also unfinished, since Tolkien could never stop himself from constantly tweaking and changing things. So what the readers got were more summaries of stories than the stories themselves. For an idea of how the tale of Beren and Lúthien should have worked, for instance, check out what Tolkien managed to complete of the Lay of Leithian. It’s a very beautiful narrative if the poetic verse doesn’t turn you off: https://tolkienleithian.blogspot.com/2013/03/canto-i.html
But I don’t see any reason why someone couldn’t effectively take that barebones story structure and fill in the gaps to great effect.Because before this project was in development a game developer did this exact thing and retconned the source material to make Celembrimor 100% complicit with Sauron’s plans, and actively tried to forge a second own ring of power of his own. Oh, and they gave us Sexy Shelob. I have zero faith for any original story ideas for this franchise.
Wow, and those things are like, bad? Why did Amazon hire that game developer to work on this show then?It sounds to me like you think a bad thing happened, and now no good things can ever be done again. Which is incredibly in character for a stuffy book nerd who demands strict adherence to a sacred text. As for me, I’ll just keep my habit of enjoying things or not, instead of deciding ahead of time that they will always be terrible.
Wow you really came out swinging didn’t you? I never even insinuated I think the source material is some form of sacred texts. But if you’re going to write stories that are supposed to be canon with said source material, then it better be damned good and not reach for the lowest hanging fruit. Otherwise it comes off as bad fanfiction.
You absolutely did insinuate that any deviation from the source material was awful. If you think that canon is immutable, then you’re venerating the text. Nobody even said any additional properties were going to strictly adhere to canon. The movies didn’t even do so. But so far this series hasn’t given any worthwhile information about how closely it will follow canon, unless you believe that dwarves can’t be Black.
The problem is that my argument was “This could be good if they have good writers filling in the blanks” and your response was “No, it will 100% be bad because I didn’t like a video game once.”I know you think that you were just giving your opinion, that you don’t believe this has any chance of being good, and that’s fine if irrelevant to this thread. But you phrased your bad argument clumsily and that’s worse in my book than bad fanfiction.
idk, all of Warner Bros’ missteps leave me curious as to what a different publisher might do with it.
I can’t wait to illegally download it for freeThis.
I agree on all counts- Couldn’t really get interested in anything outside the Hobbit and LOTR trilogy, but also could see someone making an at least OK adaptation of the other works. The biggest problem with The Hobbit movies is that they weren’t, you know, really about the Hobbit. They took a fairly light childrens tale and tried to make tonally exactly as epic and grand as the LOTR trilogy, which was just never gonna work.I will say that, in general, I can never really get interested in prequels. Just knowing how the grand story ends… I kinda just don’t care about filling in the gaps after the fact. That said, I’ll still watch this. Man, Amazon really IS the dark lord, and their three rings of power are Prime Shipping, Prime Video, and Whole Foods. I can’t quit them.
The background material was sometimes interesting, mostly flat. And it didn’t really have Tolkien’s way with dialog and characterizations (yet) as they were mostly notes. Along with flat source material, I worry this Amazon series will be like Game of Thrones when that show passed the timeline of the published books. Sure, GoT show runners knew the basic plot beats, but they didn’t have the narrative flair and pulpy wit and toward the end. missing those elements, the last few seasons lacked charm and came across a perfunctory.
Exactly this. If they forget – as the GoT showrunners did – that you need more than flashy spectacle to make a compelling drama, then it could tank badly. I wasn’t interested in GoT when it started, because the concept didn’t seem to be my thing at all. But having been persuaded to give it a try, I loved it, because it wasn’t the show I thought it was. Then, eventually, it became that show.
I tend to agree with your reticence about this project because I don’t know what it is about modern productions in general, but they seem unable to execute a story without a whole bunch of flashy formatting nonsense that leads nowhere in terms of payoff, especially when its an adaptation of like footnotes and pseudo-historical recollections of a word building exercise. Maybe it’s the burn out from the gross mishandling of Game of Thrones and Star Wars, but my lack in faith in adaption with scanty materials is super low.I have similar bated feelings about the new Willow project because both are the kinda fantasy projects that rarely get made…the kind that have wonder and lack a overly cynical tone, but are still kinda exciting.So I’m gonna watch both and hope for the best…still in mourning over the cancelled Dark Crystal show because it hit that exact fantasy movie nostalgia I tend to have and my taste just isn’t getting adapted any more.
I’m with you and feel the same. The teaser didn’t change anything. It didn’t really say or show anything that gets my hopes up. The Wheel of time also made me more skeptic. I know its a whole different team and crow but boy did they miss with that series (just my opinion. I’m glad if others enjoyed it). I’m really hoping this show lives to the name and is the best TV series.I just feel like there enough red flags to make me a skeptic.God I hope I’m proving wrong!
Second Age is REALLY BORING compared to first or third. It also has the most room to make up new stories, so I’m not surprised that they’re using it.
I am willing to at least give it a try, but I don’t really like the look of Amazon’s productions so far and this has the same overly glossy artificial feel. I am in the same boat with you – I loved the books and the LOTR movies, but I have low expectations of anyone recapturing that feeling.
Well, it was there. It was a nice tease to let everyone know that it exists. I look forward to it, but hope the next trailer will add some context as into what kind of story to expect. Otherwise, my feeling is, “I’ll check it out” instead of, “I can’t wait to see this.”
In the one ring dot net chat tonight, anti woke showed up in chat and made racist comments. The chat had to be shutdown. So much hate. What a sad world we live in.
September!? I thought this was Amazon Prime… it should be available by 10 PM tomorrow, delivered by an overworked, underpaid employee who tosses it down my stairwell.
tosses it down my stairwellYou wanted express delivery.
I’d still rather have season 3 of The Tick. Can this reach Game of Thrones-level of popularity without tits and incest?
Spoiler alert: There’s going to be tits and incest in this.
That’s not what the show runner said a few days ago:
The goal, he says, was “to make a show for everyone, for kids who are
11, 12, and 13, even though sometimes they might have to pull the
blanket up over their eyes if it’s a little too scary. We talked about
the tone in Tolkien’s books.
I think the entire world wants magical elf sex and this show could be the only thing to deliver it. But alas….
I’d settle for mediocre elf sex.
Problem is they either leave before finishing, or just slowly shrink down to nothing.
Let me know when the showrunner addresses how much sex and nudity are in this, not just whether it’s violent.
See, I’d have much more respect for GOT fans (you know, those people who all mysteriously disappeared a few years ago) if they were that honest:“So, what’s the deal with GOT?”“Oh, well, you see, it’s an incredibly intricate geopolitical drama played out across the fantasy world of Westeros by deep, interesting, and above all complex characters whose machinations and plotting drive forward a plot that-”“You know, you can just say ‘tits and incest’.”
“if they were that honest”You must be new here. We were making jokes about GOT’s sexposition from the beginning.
It can be multiple things.
It’s going to be ALL tits and incest.
Looking forward to all the “Stupid, Sexy Sauron” memes.
They’ve been coming since this got announced.No pun intended.
They could have 50 seasons of The Tick with this money.
They could mail everyone in America 50 ticks with this money!
I mean, I’m actually pretty excited for this, but same? Tick was the best.D-d-d-d-d-danger Boat.
Although movies and not TV, the LOTR movies were enormously popular without any significant “adult” content (or really much sex/romance at all). Same basic deal with the Harry Potter movies (a touch more romance, but all very child-friendly).So my guess is yes, it is possible. But only if the characters and their stories are sufficiently compelling.
My son, who’s become a HUGE LoTR fan since he first watched the movies around a year or two ago, is pretty excited for it.I’m still kind of “meh,” but that might be my butthurt over The Tick’s cancellation talking.
They’ve got the incest angle covered if they adapt The Children of Hurin :/
No tits and incest, but probably a lot of elvish songs, feasts, and songs about feast.
The video seems to be undergoing some kind of comment bot attack, all quoting the same Tolkien line in English or Russian. Weird.
And they’re not even making the right quote.
Oh, is it that weird “evil blah blah blah” thing? I wonder why they don’t have Tolkien’s quote about the orcs just being ugly caricatures of Asian people when he got upset that they wanted to make a film adaptation of them as lizard birds.
Well it’s a trailer, and trailer’s can bear ZERO resemblance to the actual product.But judged as a trailer? So painfully generic it physically hurt me.
It has way to much of a cosplay with FX feel to it.
I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, for now, as a LotR fan. Straight up, every single high fantasy show looks “painfully generic” in the trailers. I had zero interest in Witcher or Wheel of Time based off of the trailers. At least Witcher was really good.
I have an issue, that black lady supposed to be the dwarves queen, right? But, where is the beard?
She does have one, albeit very small and thin.
She has some sideburns, but they are small and hard to see.
And whispy chin whiskers.
I honestly thought it was a video game trailer at first. Looked way too CGI’d. I think I’m gonna be missing all of those great New Zealand locations.
the first season was literally shot in New Zealand, at least in part.
It’s very glossy isn’t it?
Yeah, I was hoping it would go for the GOT look and feel at least.
The negative backlash to this is insane given we literally just endured this exact thing with Star Wars. Everyone hated the prequels and Hobbit films until the next new thing came along and suddenly history has been revised entirely and now apparently the prequels and Hobbits are *just* as brilliant as the original trilogies…
Critics and audiences didn’t like this thing they liked, so they attacked the new things that everyone actually liked until journalists, worried about reader counts, decided to throw ‘arguably’ and ‘divisive’ into discussions of movies with 90+% RT ratings.
I haven’t really seen that sort of revisionist take on The Hobbit, but I think a large part of the reason why the prequels are in favor with so many people is because the people who were kids when they were originally released are now adults.
So rather than Game of Thrones or even Lord of the Rings, to me this felt more Wheel of Time. Which I don’t even mind so much (I enjoyed WoT’s first season overall). But they were really pushing the appeal of all the cool things we will see over compelling acting performances and well-told dramatic stories. Indeed, the opening narration is basically something a tourist might say.Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since this is just a first trailer, and focusing on the visual work might make some sense. But I also think if they actually want this to hit the popularity heights of LOTR or GoT, people have to be gripped by the characters and their stories. The spectacle is not enough, nor even on the same level, really.
As much of a Tolkien nerd as I was growing up, this preview didn’t really leave me jumping. For one, unlike the long-awaited preview for The Fellowship of the Ring, where you could instantly identify familiar characters, who am I seeing here? Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of names associated with the Second Age. Gil-Galad? Elros? Ar-Pharazon? Durin?This is also the period in Tolkien’s legendarium least fleshed out in prose. So while Peter Jackson had a fully written series of novels to work with, Amazon basically needs to bring life to a series of footnotes. I’ll watch, at least, but I don’t have high hopes.
Good writing and directing should be able to make good TV in this setting without having a lot of fleshed-out storytelling by Tolkien to work with.Of course whether the show will get good writing/directing remains to be seen.
Preview felt more more like a video created by the Middle Earth Tourist Board to get people to go visit than an actual promo for a show
its just going to be the LOTR movies reverse-engineered by hacks with some Tolkien names used. It’s not like these guys have the ability to craft amazing new mythology, if they did they would’ve had a film or tv show released by now
I’m looking at the credits of the writers involved, and I’m seeing some good shows: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones (the good seasons).
If Amazon really does want this to be their own GoT, then telling the part of the story that doesn’t have an already-written part is a great/terrible choice.
Genn Hutchinson is the head writer. She wrote several episodes of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and won awards for her work.Not to say this isn’t an entirely different genre, but I know she has poured her heart and soul into this project. She is nothing if not fastidious in her research and dedication to her work.
I doubt it. The two hacks running the show wrote an awful unused Trek script. All they can do is cynically evoke the LOTR films and use some authentic old names. As if these folks are going to create something compelling on such a short timeline.
Yeah, she has a pretty promising resume. As do at least Jason Cahill (Sopranos/Fringe) and Justin Doble (Stranger Things/Into the Badlands).Of course it remains to be seen how it all works out, but I see no reason not to approach it with an open mind.
Crappy fan fic from the JJ Abrams C team with some elf names sprinkled in. No thanks
JRR Tolkein: *Writes “Story idea: 2,000 years ago the elves fought a goblin or something?” on a cocktail napkin*
Amazon, 60 years later: We shall spend a billion dollars adapting this into five seasons of television.
How is that, in spite of the MASSIVE budget, this looks absolutely no different from any of the other (still massive but comparatively smaller budgeted) fantasy films and tv series that have emerged in the past few decades?
Because fantasy films are usually based on Tolkien tropes and this is an adaptation of a Tolkien work. Lord of the Rings made today wouldn’t be impressive because WETA works on EVERYTHING. The same pioneering studio that did the design and CGI for Lord of the Rings also did all of the same work for Warcraft.WETA is McDonald’s now. Everything that was awe-inspiring visually about LotR is now irreversibly mundane and standard, and the only thing that separates it at this point is writing and acting.That’s the tragedy. It is impossible to recapture LotR’s magic, even with the people who made LotR’s magic because all of that wonder and mystery and majesty is everywhere now.
I know it’s a good few months away, but it doesn’t at this stage look like most expensive TV show ever made. The CGI looks a bit computer gamey. And the sets all look like well, sets. The lighting and production design all look like they have been lifted straight from Jacksons films.
Looks more Hobbit than LOTR in terms of production, which ain’t great. I imagine this will go down like the Wheel of Time series. Enjoyable enough, but forgettable.
Hope they don’t turn The Lord of the Rings into The Game of Thrones.
This feels weird like a spin off a TV series that you used to watch and really generic.
Looks like shit. I don’t mean it looks boring, or uninteresting. I mean it visually looks like shit, especially in comparison to movies filmed 23 years ago (I think LOTR was filmed mostly in 1999?).