Streaming review: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

“If The Rings of Power wants to compete against the like of House of the Dragon and The Sandman, it will have to prove it is more than just a pretty face”

Five years after a return to Middle Earth was announced, the first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power have been released. So does this two-hour premiere live up to what’s expected after Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies? Well… sort of.

Created by JD Payne and Patrick McKay, Rings of Power takes place thousands of years before the events of Jackson’s films, presenting stories from several corners of the second age of Middle Earth. Intent on justice for her brother, the elf Galadriel seeks out what remains of the dark lord Sauron’s forces, a man falling from the sky in a ball of fire lands at the feet of two halflings, a lone elf seeks to protect a village from an encroaching darkness, and the great Celebrimbor seeks to build a forge that will forever change the fate of Middle Earth.

Amazon has broken records in producing the most expensive TV show ever made, with nearly half a billion dollars spent on the eight episodes that comprise its first season alone. This is not difficult to believe, as watching the show you can see where most of the money went.

The show is absolutely gorgeous. While some of the show’s beauty certainly comes from the landscapes of Aotearoa (how they hope to get the same effect filming the rest of the show in Scotland I will never understand), it would be unfair not to point out that the sets and special effects are to a standard that would make most feature films envious. So where does my middling response come from? Well, while it can do wonders to improve sets, props, and visual effects, you can’t improve the words on a page simply by throwing money at them.

The first episode of a series should act as a tantalising hook. It should introduce the premise of the show, the characters you are expected to be invested in, as well as being compelling enough to make you want to return the following week.

However, I found the first two episodes of The Rings of Power to be kind of boring. It feels like the writers know that some of the most well-regarded scenes of the films are not the action sequences, but the moments where we spend time with the characters and see how they interact with one another, and so are determined to fill this series with as many of those scenes as possible.

Unfortunately, these scenes are half-filled with platitudes, and the odd phrase to remind you of the films you already know. Combined with the multitude of story threads we are given right off the bat (and a couple of performances that feel as if they’d be more at home in a pantomime than a drama), you reach the end of the first two episodes with a realisation that not much of anything has happened.

The landscape of popular media has changed drastically in the past 20 years. We are no longer left wanting gripping fantasy stories. If The Rings of Power wants to compete against the like of House of the Dragon and The Sandman, it will have to prove it is more than just a pretty face.

Maybe these first two episodes were simply a prologue. Maybe now that the pieces have been moved into place, we will see the real story begin. For if this is what we’ve waited five years for, if this is what we are to expect more of, I’d rather the shores of Middle Earth had been left alone.

3/5 stars

Nat Dolan is an Auckland actor and movie enthusiast