Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

[Frustration]

I am very curious as to what their motivation for doing this sort of stuff would be. The most common answer you might see from critics out there is that they wanted to push woke messages and those folks weren't on board, but if we set that aside what sorts of other reasons might be the answer? In other words, if it's not about politics, what is it that Amazon wanted that these people weren't giving them?

It's proverbial that executive meddling is awful, although in reality there are lots of cases where it was helpful or even essential. But there are still endless stories of executives having unrealistic, or artistically awful, demands, and killing shows or movies when they didn't get their way. (Or even worse, mandating that their ideas affect the end product and generating an abomination instead of killing the project cleanly.)

It's entirely possible that the writing teams refused an executive demand, and the executive simply fired them all and replaced them with compliant yes-men.

I suspect the poor choreography and so on comes from Amazon wanting things to be done in-house (with people who can be reused with other/future productions) rather than hiring outside experts.

[BBally81]

Some update on the show's viewership so far:

https://twitter.com/Luiz_Fernando_J/sta ... 7zNqhaSWFQ

[Lazerlike42]

The firing of the scholar hired to assist with the Tolkien lore, AND the entire writing staff, should have been a serious warning sign.

This show has failed on everything, everything, but scenery and music. Fight choreography, dialog, plotting, acting - it's all awful. A group of high-school drama enthusiasts would have demonstrated considerably more competence. Most fanfic is better written than this stuff. Random YouTube commenters have suggested alternate versions of scenes that make considerably more sense than what made it onto the screen.

I am very curious as to what their motivation for doing this sort of stuff would be. The most common answer you might see from critics out there is that they wanted to push woke messages and those folks weren't on board, but if we set that aside what sorts of other reasons might be the answer? In other words, if it's not about politics, what is it that Amazon wanted that these people weren't giving them?

Doubtful it has anything to do with so called woke politics being pushed onto the unsuspected masses.

Maybe it has more to do with expanding Amazon more into the TV world and getting a flagship series. Lord of the Rings seems like good series to use.

Yeah I am not sure how they would make money off of this series. Gaining more Amazon Prime members? You got a better chance at getting more of them through Thursday Night Football since that isn't being aired on the regular channels now.

Also not that hard to borrow a family member's Amazon Prime account to watch the show. My parents have mine so they can watch on Prime and my Dad to watch Thursday Night Football.

I'm the ''Go Woke, Go Broke'' guy and I don't believe that's what is happening here. Its everything else that Frustration just mentioned. Its hard to see where the budget for this show went. And when it comes down to it, Game of Thrones is just inarguably better than this. Amazon is selling us an inferior product.

I think there are certainly a fair number of "woke" things in this series but I'd generally say that none of them are the reason the series is, in my opinion, pretty awful - at least not directly. Is there some roundabout way? For example, did they get rid of the Tolkien guy because he agree with some political element and the result has been a series that is worse off, not because of the politics, but because the Tolkien guy was not involved any longer? Is it one of those cases where they were so focused on the political messaging - whether any viewers disagree with it or not being irrelevant - that they forgot they had to actually tell an interesting story?

I'm not sure, but I actually think even those things are less likely. I think ultimately the problems are that:

1) The people working on the series really do have an insufficient understanding of the source material and so of what made it popular and successful

and

2) The entertainment industry has become extremely formulaic or, perhaps better put, tropey in the past few years and Rings of Power is no exception. I think this makes for a weak product in the best of circumstances, but the thing is that fantasy in general works very badly within these common modern tropes.

[Frustration]

I get the impression that the people in charge are completely focused on visual appeal and lack the ability to evaluate dialog, plot, etc. In terms of visuals, the series is fantastically beautiful. It's almost the only good thing - the music has been recognized as being nice, and Bear McCreary is a well-respected composer with a long history of quality soundtracks.

I suspect he managed to turn in something good because the show creators didn't involve themselves beyond hiring talent.

[McAvoy]

The firing of the scholar hired to assist with the Tolkien lore, AND the entire writing staff, should have been a serious warning sign.

This show has failed on everything, everything, but scenery and music. Fight choreography, dialog, plotting, acting - it's all awful. A group of high-school drama enthusiasts would have demonstrated considerably more competence. Most fanfic is better written than this stuff. Random YouTube commenters have suggested alternate versions of scenes that make considerably more sense than what made it onto the screen.

I am very curious as to what their motivation for doing this sort of stuff would be. The most common answer you might see from critics out there is that they wanted to push woke messages and those folks weren't on board, but if we set that aside what sorts of other reasons might be the answer? In other words, if it's not about politics, what is it that Amazon wanted that these people weren't giving them?

Doubtful it has anything to do with so called woke politics being pushed onto the unsuspected masses.

Maybe it has more to do with expanding Amazon more into the TV world and getting a flagship series. Lord of the Rings seems like good series to use.

Yeah I am not sure how they would make money off of this series. Gaining more Amazon Prime members? You got a better chance at getting more of them through Thursday Night Football since that isn't being aired on the regular channels now.

Also not that hard to borrow a family member's Amazon Prime account to watch the show. My parents have mine so they can watch on Prime and my Dad to watch Thursday Night Football.

I'm the ''Go Woke, Go Broke'' guy and I don't believe that's what is happening here. Its everything else that Frustration just mentioned. Its hard to see where the budget for this show went. And when it comes down to it, Game of Thrones is just inarguably better than this. Amazon is selling us an inferior product.

Dialogue doesn't bother me. The elves do in part that they really do feel like humans with pointed ears. That and it really feels like a chore to go through.

[Frustration]

You really need to raise your standards for dialog if the material in this show doesn't bother you.

[Lazerlike42]

You really need to raise your standards for dialog if the material in this show doesn't bother you.

An interesting piece on the dialog in the series: https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2022/0 ... 8p0rRqkU8o

[McAvoy]

You really need to raise your standards for dialog if the material in this show doesn't bother you.

Has nothing to with standards. It's called having different standards.

What if I told you I thought the visuals were lazy, ugly and cheap looking? What if I told you the music sounded generic and uninspiring? And I told you to raise your standards?

Maybe I am trying hard to give this series a chance so I am not paying attention that much to the dialogue as much as I should.

[Madner Kami]

Something that regularly throws me off when watching US-movies and serials in particular, is the sound-mixing. Music and especially sound-effects are of such a high volume, that I regularly have to adjust the volume between scenes of normal conversation and anything even remotely action-related, so as not to prompt my neighbours complaining about the noise.
This usually gets adjusted quite nicely in the german dubs, where spoken language tends to get emphasized a bit, making the overall volume curve much more smooth. Here however, this completely fails. It's annoying to the max in episode 6, as there's several battle-scenes intermixed with quiet conversations, so I switched to the US-dbu for comparison and it only got worse. Why is that? What's with the US' obsession of being blasted by loud noises all the time?

Also, "humanizing" the Orcs... Not a good idea in my opinion. Their origin is a tragic one in the original material, yes, but they're supposed to be born of evil and evil to the core because of Morgoth's hand in their creation. In hindsight you have to wonder, why nobody bothered to try to actually have a talk with the Orcs and see if something can be arranged within thousands of years. We're left with even more racism by consequence within a work that already has enough of it.

[hammerofglass]

Something that regularly throws me off when watching US-movies and serials in particular, is the sound-mixing. Music and especially sound-effects are of such a high volume, that I regularly have to adjust the volume between scenes of normal conversation and anything even remotely action-related, so as not to prompt my neighbours complaining about the noise.
This usually gets adjusted quite nicely in the german dubs, where spoken language tends to get emphasized a bit, making the overall volume curve much more smooth. Here however, this completely fails. It's annoying to the max in episode 6, as there's several battle-scenes intermixed with quiet conversations, so I switched to the US-dbu for comparison and it only got worse. Why is that? What's with the US' obsession of being blasted by loud noises all the time?

As a USian it drives me up the wall too. I basically always need subtitles on for anything Hollywood, the dialogue is so quiet compared to everything else.