Amazon’s Wheel Of Time trailer promises swords, sorcery, and massive budgets
Gone Girl’s Rosamund Pike stars as Moiraine, and has she got a quest for you
Aux News Wheel Of Time
Amazon released the first, full trailer for The Wheel Of Time, and boy, does it look expensive. At this point, the studio is just showing off its massive wealth by releasing Wheel Of Time and Lord Of The Rings within a year of each other. Nevertheless, the money is all on screen.
The show stars the Gone Girl herself, the wickedly talented, one and only Rosamund Pike as Moiraine. She will lead a group of adventurers, one of whom is, get this, a prophesied savior, in a quest to save humanity. Here’s the full description:
Set in a sprawling, epic world where magic exists and only certain women are allowed to access it, the story follows Moiraine, a member of the incredibly powerful all-female organization called the Aes Sedai, as she arrives in the small town of Two Rivers. There, she embarks on a dangerous, world-spanning journey with five young men and women, one of whom is prophesied to be the Dragon Reborn, who will either save or destroy humanity.
Obviously, that’s just the broad strokes. The Wheel Of Time is an incredibly popular fantasy series by Robert Jordan, whose books have sold more than 90 million copies worldwide. Comprised of 14 books, the series, which was continued by co-author Brandon Sanderson, following Jordan’s death in 2007, ran from 1990 to 2013.
An adaptation of Wheel has long-eluded studios. In 2007, FX dumped a slapdash pilot on late-night audiences without notice or fanfare. As pointed out by our senior writer Katie Rife, the Winter Dragon pilot was more or less a legal scheme to maintain the rights to the whole series.
But the real money here is Amazon’s “groundbreaking” use of YouTube’s 360 player and spatial audio surround sound.
Finally, you can experience the trailer the way Jordan would’ve wanted it: As a “traditional 2-D trailer in a virtual three-dimensional ‘wheel.” Viewers who “scan to the left or right will reveal there is much more to experience.”
All this is to say, if you’ve ever wanted to watch a trailer with all the grace of trying to spot your house on Google Street View, The Wheel Of Time 360 experience is for you.
We can’t imagine why anyone would ever watch the trailer this way, but it does serve as a nice distraction if you get bored during the two-minute and 15-second spot.
The first three episodes of Wheel Of Time premiere on Amazon Prime on November 19, with new episodes premiering each Friday.
66 Comments
There’s a full breakdown of the trailer by the showrunner here.
That 360 gimmick was breaking something, but it wasn’t the ground.That aside, this looks promising to me as someone who made it roughly halfway through the series, but I worry that it looks too generic to get the attention of anyone who isn’t already familiar with the books.
Well, that’s the problem…a good deal of the series was generic and tropey. What set it apart was the amazingly detailed characters, sweeping scope, and world-building that’s almost impossible to compress into a preview.
I agree with all of this except the idea that it would be impossible to compress into a trailer. I mean, they have a decent beginning on the world building focusing on the Morraine and the Aes Sedai, before the trailer goes off the rails with that bland plot overview.
I fully recognize the oft-cited problems with Jordan’s writing, and I think this series could very well turn out meh or worse, but here’s my optimistic spin on the tropes involved:LotR: Jordan very clearly borrows from Tolkien the trope of unlikely hero from a backwater village actually being the Chosen One who can defeat a supernatural evil, but the world that Jordan creates is actually more expansive than Tolkien’s, if at least in part just due to sheer length. GoT: Once we get past the first couple books, WoT actually has a lot of the political intrigue that people seemed to like about GoT…medievalish kingdoms with power struggles for control, shifting alliances, constant infighting undermining an effective and unified response to the actual existential threat, etc. Star Wars: Chosen One and Hero’s Journey, obviously, but also the One Power is pretty similar to the force, except in WoT, only women can be Jedi, except the Aes Sedai have more political infighting, no lightsabers, and less uniformity in the “force powers”. Done well (big if…still, one can hope), WoT can bring all of those tropes together in a somewhat novel and compelling way.
maybe the wind?
maybe the wind?
As someone who read the first 50 pages of the first book and got bored, this trailer felt incredibly generic. What is this series even about? I got “a lady collects some humble randos to stop the DARK ONE and like monsters or whatever”, but that was it.
To be fair, “X convinces Y to help defeat the evil Z” describes about 90% of fantasy novels in existence. Also, to be fair, quitting on a 14 book series based on 50 pages might not have been the best choice.
So true, I got to book 9 before I quit.
I think I read seven, then skipped to the Sanderson ones.
I was reading them in real time and I got burned out waiting for the next chapter and then laboring through 900 pages while trying to remember what the hell happened before. I’m thinking about starting over again now that the series is complete.
“Also, to be fair, quitting on a 14 book series based on 50 pages might not have been the best choice.”Better that than five books in, though.
Nah, at least you know what you’re quitting on by that point.
I mean, I found reading those 50 pages unpleasantly boring, so I gave up, which is my general approach with books. Sorry if I missed out.For comparison purposes I watched the trailed from Fellowship for comparison and tried to imagine watching it as someone who had never read Tolkien:
It’s interesting to see where they put the emphasis. It’s squarely on setting up the narrative of “Here’s the ring. It’s super evil. This movie is gonna be about some people trying to destroy it.” Only Frodo and Gandalf appear enough to give you a feel of their characters. They don’t talk about the heavy background of the ancient fallen empires, the wizards, the elves, or even the drama of the ringbearers. It uses the ring as an effective focusing agent for the whole narrative and lets the imagery suggest the rest.I thought the comparison was interesting. Hopefully the WOT series is good, despite the trailer feeling sort of unfocused.
Obviously, more than fair to stop reading a book that bores you. Just joking that stopping after 50 pages of a 14 book series is like giving up after a sentence of a normal novel. :)I gave up after seven or so books, then skipped to the last three with the different author. Worked well for me. Your comparison is dead on though…the LOTR preview is far more focused and effective than WOT.
Yeah, good point.How much of the series do you think is necessary to read before reading the final Sanderson trilogy? I’ve read Mistborn and all the Stormlight Archive books and am pretty into Sanderson’s writing. The guy sure knows how to work a fantasy climax.
Having read them all I’d say read 1-6, read a summary of 7-10, then read the rest. I think it’s important to read the first book knowing that Jordan was *intending* to do a retelling of Fellowship of the Ring with a different framing. He wanted to couch the intro to his world in something comfortable. The story goes in other directions and isn’t just a 14 book version of LotR.
I’d go with six or seven, skip the tedious and repetitious books, then pick up with the Sanderson books. I really felt that I didn’t miss a thing, and there are some really good summaries out there.
The thing with this trailer is that it only really goes into one character, Morraine, and then presents the five actors playing the young companions, but doesn’t give them anything to do to distinguish themselves from the standard blandly handsome people you might find on any CW show. Part of the reason for that, I think, is they’re trying to preserve the mystery of which one of these CW-types is the actual chosen one, which I don’t actually recall being that much of a mystery when I read the book (but I could be wrong, I read it a long time ago).
it’s the premier episode of a series that’s trying to contain 14 very LARGE novels in its scope… I expect at least the first half of the season to feel “unfocused.”This is one of those that I won’t even touch until every episode of the season is available, because it has to set a lot of background and generally describe machinations in a huge and very well developed world. There will be some flashy stuff up front, but the payoffs will mostly come in the second half, I expect.
Uhm, yeap. You got it. That’s pretty much it.The extra bit is that she collects those particular humble randos because one of them is special. Special enough to actually have a chance against the DARK ONE and the monsters (actually more like minions than monsters). However, she doesn’t know which one it is and they don’t know which one it is. And if they find out, they might have to kill him quickly, because he might be much more dangerous than the DARK ONE.
I like your description of the hook a lot better. I rewatched the trailer, and that narrative strand is sort of there, or at least the “here’s several people, one of them is the chosen one, I don’t know which” aspect. On rewatch, I think my problem is that about 2/3s of the trailer gives the feeling of scene setting and backstory, which felt less than promising.
There’s also polygamy!
Now I’m in!
I think I bailed…after Book 6? 7? Maybe? I own them all, and it was one of those, “Well someday I’ll want to finish them.”But no. No, I won’t. And there they will sit.
I think I was in the same area when I bailed. There was one book where the series’ narrative momentum completely stalled, and then in the next one, rather than get the main story moving again, it felt like “Let’s introduce three more subplots, each with their own new cast of characters!” I didn’t decide to stop reading as much as I was able to put that book down, got busy, and just never picked it up again.
Exactly. Way, way too many POV characters kept being introduced. I couldn’t keep up.
But it’s a real unique story. There’s this “chosen one” and a prophecy and a secretive order of powerful women witches that aren’t the Bene Gesserit that definitely aren’t searching for the one perfect male.
Yeah, their timing on this is crappy as hell…
Still makes it look far too much like Lord of the Rings, but with a female Gandalf.
Yeah, that only lasts as long as the first book.
True, but 99% of the people watching that preview aren’t going to know that.
Yeeeeah, my poor lil 2017 MacBook Air isn’t up to the challenge of the 360º experience. Fortunately, IGN has a version that’s, you know, watchable.
I think that weird pilot was from 2015, not 2007. Also, it’s SO WEIRD!
Honestly, it looks like this new version could use a little of that pilot’s weirdness.
Some guy shouting “Ilyena!” for 10 minutes.Then 10 minutes of Billy Zane ranting menacingly.
I wonder if the people who watched Game of Thrones for the dragons will be confused when they find out what the true Dragon is like.
Nobody watched Tits n’ Dragons for the dragons.
Dragons? There were dragons?
Uh oh you may wanna give HBO that news before the spinoff premieres.
Then just when they figure it out- BANG, reborn or some shit. That’s when I pulled the ripcord.
I see Rosimund Pike is continuing her quest to look increasingly severe in everything she makes. I was freaked out by her enough in I Care a Lot.
I read the first 4 books of this series a few years ago and I can promise you one thing: this show is either going to be 90% exposition or it’s going to be confusing as hell.
So you scroll to the side and see two and a half minutes of… smoke? Spoooooky scary smoke to the DARK ONE’s side, and the smoke of truth, justice and the American w- er, a better tomorrow, that is- on the GOOD GUYS’ side, with occasional smoky faces (that are also on the regular screen) appearing for a couple seconds? Did I miss anything actually worth seeing?
The 360 nonsense seems like the answer to a question no one asked.Regardless, I’m happy to watch Rosamund Pike.
It’s been decades since I read any of these, but…wasn’t Moiraine really short. And blonde?
She always had brown hair: https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Moiraine_DamodredWhat kills me is the lack of details. From the descriptions in the books, Moraine always dressed like she had money. In this trailer and the photos, she looks like she picked whatever off the rack. Also, it would be great if Lan’s wardrobe was specific to his background, too.
Did they forget that when you reboot you have to make the main characters black, lesbian little people?
She is almost comically short — like Wolverine— enough that narrowing potential actors down by that would have probably been too limiting. But she does have black hair in the books.
Maybe Kristin Chenoweth was busy?
I always imagined her as having blonde hair. I think it’s because on the cover of the first book she’s carrying what looks like a golden staff that’s close to the same color of her hair and the cover itself is rather dark as they’re travelling at night. In my mind, I guess I just imagined, Oh she has golden blonde hair and the lighting just makes it look darker.But yeah, I’m pretty sure the book describes her as a brunette. Still though, books’ descriptions never stopped me from imagining something wildly different.
Ah, that may be it. I remember the cover, maybe that’s why. Good catch.
SPOILER ALERT FOR DECADES OLD BOOKS………………When I stopped reading, it was for various reasons. But one that strikes me as odd for the time (younger guy back then), was that it kind of weirded me out that Rand had not one, not 2, but 3 chicks who wanted to bang him and were happy to share him with each other. It just seemed really like some fantasy-nerd….was fantasy-nerd wanking to me, and really took me out of the books.
Well I am led to believe that Tenchi Muyo is quite popular.
This is the correct take.I unfortunately tried to make it through the series when the books were coming out. It got fantasy-nerd wankier and then threw in some sexual assault, cause why not?
Yeah, I agree. In general, the huge emphasis on….idk “gender politics” was something that was baked into WoT’s DNA. But it was very weird and “Men drive like this, and women drive like THIS.” Beyond all the magic and fantasy stuff, it seemed like Jordan wanted to tell a story about how men and women were completely different but complimentary which…idk. Is just a weird take to me.
I’ll consider giving it a look. I will admit that, like others have posted, it looks like something that gets lost in the middle of lots of other properties. The LotR and GoT prequels have stronger name awareness going for them right now. Plus the Witcher for that matter. Not sure about yet another one. But maybe it is great, time will tell.
Oh no! Will the “chosen one” from “the prophecy” use magic to “save humanity” from the “dark lord”? I don’t know! I’ve never heard a story like that before! What suspense and originality!
“We all know that the forces of good finally, after much struggle, banded together at the last minute to overcome the Great Darkness. But what this movie presupposes is… maybe they didn’t?”
But then what if they tried again and they did defeat it?
If it’s got such a big budget, why does it look like a soap opera?
This trailer was so much better than the first one to me, but I have to wonder if 90% of that was being like “oh fuck yeah they didn’t cut out this scene I like” and 10% “thank fuck they cut out most if not all of the braid-tugging”
Watching the trailer, I realized that as generic as it looked, I would actually be much more intrigued by the show if I hadn’t read the books as far as I did.
In a certain way it seems to be a step back of trying to replicate GoT to instead going to the epic fantasy approach before that and I do think there are interesting stuff that could be done there. However, that series went so hard on the Chosen One narrative, not helped by the fact that they cast the most generic blond guy look to play Rand, that I already feel a detachment from it. Also not helping, and I’ve made this point before, but it does feel like the trailer is almost desperately trying to sidestep the fact that WoT could pretty easily be called “Gender stereotypes: The Fantasy Epic”.