UNCUT EARLY ACCESS The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power Ep 1
Added 2022-09-02 16:54:26 +0000 UTChttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4bzUukuM6ZrRxGb1Dplmgt7l73RHr_v/view?usp=sharing
Comments
Glad you enjoyed this - I did too! I thought this first episode was very charming and entertaining. I do agree that the elves didn't feel as otherworldly and magical as they did in the movies, but I feel like that's more of a small nitpick for me than a full-on complaint. I did particularly like how we started to see some of the problems, prejudices, and racism between elves and men, and in particular relating to their very different outlooks stemming from their very different lifespans. Arondir's commander speaks about the humans of the valley as though they themselves are servants of Morgoth, and he clearly despises them for it. But that was hundreds, perhaps as much as a thousand, years ago - so these particular people had literally nothing to do with it apart from being their distant descendants, and they don't deserve the elves' scorn. Meanwhile, the humans likewise hate the elves for continuing to hold it over them, but how can they not - for those elves, many of them fought in that war, or if not them personally, they had direct friends or family who did. I think that makes for a really interesting tension. And I was initially skeptical about the Harfoots, but I thought they were very well done as proto-hobbits. You can clearly see how they are different, but similar enough that you can also see the direct line of ancestry between them. This is roughly 5000 years before LotR, and Tolkien didn't actually write very much about this history of hobbits, so they had a lot of leeway to play with, and I thought they did that well. I look forward to your reaction to episode 2 - I didn't hate it but I didn't love it, and I felt it was a little awkward. I'm curious if you end up feeling the same.
Neil Silverman
2022-09-03 02:24:13 +0000 UTC
