 For those of you that watched my initial reaction video to the first two episodes of the show, this is gonna be very night and day. It turns out those six or seven hours of additional content didn't actually help the show at all. In fact, it kind of buried it. Let's begin. Really quickly gonna tell you where I stand on The Lord of the Rings. It's my favorite movie trilogy of all time, Full Stop. The Hobbit trilogy, I also love it. I don't care that it's three movies and that it's padded beyond all belief when it does some things different than the books. I'm not a book purist. I have no interest in reading them. I recognize the brilliant works that should absolutely be respected and that the movies and the show are separate things all together. I don't have a chip on my shoulder going into these properties. I understand that The Rings of Power isn't really going off of any of the books. It doesn't have the rights to it, okay? I don't care about the legalese mumbo jumbo. I just really like Middle Earth. I like seeing the magic, the dwarves, the humans, the elves, all interacting, going on adventures together. That was the promise I was gonna get with The Rings of Power. A massive world-building adventure featuring all these different walks of life and the mystery of Sauron rising back into power and these mysterious rings being forged to take on any threat or obstacle in their path. What do we end up getting? A very slow, long, padded, boring, dull show with moments of greatness sprinkled in but ultimately a complete failure. Not in terms of what it's representing but in terms of what it's trying to become itself. My wife and I really enjoyed the first episode. We liked all the new characters introduced that it was making this big new world featuring some of the older characters thousands of years ahead of Lord of the Rings, Galadriel being the main focus, Elrond being in the mix. There's the awesome dwarf Prince Durin, one of the highlights of the show. Then you have the Strider type human character. Then you have another human character with a big rack which is nice to look at once in a while. Take my focus off the boredom that's going on. You have a black archer elf that's cool. I don't know most of their names so I'm sorry if I'm just going off the easy basic appearances of people. And I thought okay, we're maybe getting a little bit too many characters in this but it's all gonna come together. It's all gonna keep moving forward. It never does. It never moves forward. Things happen, sure. Yet they also don't happen at the same time. It's remarkable. The show is an hour plus long, like an hour 15. And it's not like a Disney plus show where 15 minutes of that are credits. No, no, no, no. This shit goes like all the way to the end. It's way too long. There's way too many characters and there's such a lack of focus. It's remarkable. I was talking to my brother about the show which he's also watching and I think he still enjoys a little bit more than I do. I've fallen off. My wife and I don't even know if we're gonna finish it. We're so disappointed. Anyway, the show's called The Rings of Power. No ring is mentioned yet. Eight episodes in almost. No ring yet. No power either, really. They've alluded to it, I guess, because of what's going on in the minds, but then we find out Mythroll is what they actually found and I don't know, is Mythroll important? All I know about it, it was the chain link armor that Bilbo was given and then he gave to Frodo. That's about all I know about Mythroll. Maybe it'll have a bigger role. Clearly, I mean, clearly it will. But outside of that, we got nothing on The Rings of Power so they're really, really slow building this thing. As for the writing, people were saying nonstop. The writing's terrible, the writing's awful. I just didn't really see that until a couple moments in these later ones. It's definitely showing through. But as far as dialogue goes, I thought there was some pretty solid dialogue choices. Some of the stuff people say, I was like, oh, I like that, I like that. I'm not gonna quote it again, but it was good in the moment. The biggest issue with the writing is just the massive amount they're doing. There's so much talking. There's so many characters. You have Galadriel, who's hunting down Sauron, who she doesn't know is still alive, but she made a promise to her dead brother in the first 15 minutes of the show that that was gonna be her life's work. So for centuries, she's been going after this guy. People say Galadriel's a Mary Sue or whatever bullshit term they wanna use. No, she's not, she's an awesome elf who's been alive for thousands of years, doing nothing but honing her craft. Cool character. I like her voice, I like her look. She's a smoke show. She's kind of a female Legolas going on. I'm a fan, okay? Then you have the Black Elf storyline. I believe his name is Arundir, Arundir. I don't know, it's tough to say for me, I'm an idiot. Anyway, very cool character as well. He's more serious, he's more stern. I don't think he ever cracks a smile in the seven episodes so far, and that's okay. I don't need him to. I just need him to be a badass. Unfortunately, he's not really a badass until a later episode. And even then, it's done in so much slow motion that it's just not exciting to watch. So what's he up to? Well, he's guarding a small little town because at some point or another there were jerks to the elves and the elves have to stick around there to make sure things don't go south or something. I honestly don't really remember why he's there. It doesn't seem that consequential to the overall storyline because things do end up going south there anyways and he certainly doesn't protect it. Then we have the Hobbit characters, which I believe are referred to as half-foots or little-foots, something like that. Nori and Pop, you're the main ones here. They're kind of like your Sam and Frodo. What are they up to? They travel a lot. They keep their heads down until they stumble upon a man who crash lands from a meteor. Is he a wizard? I think so. Is he Gandalf? Probably, but we don't know. It's a mystery. Kind of like who's Sauron. That's also a mystery. Lots of shady characters that could be him. There's also a troubled teen who has the handle of Sauron's sword who he stabbed himself with and now he has this blood connection he can sense when the sword's around. That's a thing that's happening. Then there's Elrond, who's hanging out with Prince Turin because he's spying on the dwarves on behalf of the elf nation, although he doesn't really want to. So there's a back and forth there as how friendship goes and how it's honored. And honestly, all that stuff's really good. The writing's solid, the acting's great. It's compelling. It's just sandwiched in between 15 other plot points. I'm legitimately not even through half of the characters that have a solid amount of screen time. There's a warrior guy and his sailor son who have storylines going on. There's a queen who's trying to do what's best for her kingdom. And then on occasion, there's three witches that roam around the lands, tracking down probably the wizard, I think is what they're after now. But everything is just all over the place, herky jerky. I don't have a centralized goal here. With Lord of the Rings, it's simple. There's a ring that's evil. Throw it in the fucking volcano. Move on with your day. With rings of power, there are 15 different branching plots going on. There's the rise of Sauron's army. Or maybe we don't know if Sauron's even alive anymore. He is, we know he is, but the show's trying to pretend like we don't know. Then there's the volcano itself, erupting the evil coming back to the world. Then there's the tree of life with the elves. It's dying. The elves might be wiped off the face of the earth unless they find a power that can sustain them. Then there's Turrens fighting with his father about how to run the kingdom in the mines. I kept telling myself all this is gonna add up to something by the end of season one. These people are all gonna come together, coalesce around one unified goal. But seven episodes in, and not a single ring is even mentioned yet, it has become incredibly clear that Amazon's goal is to milk this shit as long as humanly possible. The reason there are so many slow moving character stories is because they're going to keep going this route for seven, eight, 15 years, however long they can keep the train moving until inevitably no one's watching anymore because it's petered out. Well, I'm already there. I have no interest in the finale. I couldn't even make it eight full episodes and I was high on this when it came out. I was called every name under the sun. I was told I was paid by Amazon. Spoiler, Amazon doesn't care about me. I'm not gonna bring them any money. I'm a small channel in comparison to what's out there. I'm a shill, I'm a hack, like fuck off. Just because I like something, I have to be paid off. That's the world we're in now. That's the level of maturity we have. That's the discourse, right? Only online, thankfully. In real life, people don't talk like this to one another, at least not the ones I walk around. Even people I disagree with, we can have conversations and see eye to eye on some things. Like, oh, that's why you like it, because visually it is a beautiful show. Oh, you like that Amazon spent a dumb amount of money to make this show look pretty? Why is that bad? I'm sorry. People will throw in the comments like Amazon spent so much money on this shitty show. Like, okay, when did it have been worse if they spent no money on the show? Like, they could've. They could've just rushed it out half-assed it. I do think they genuinely want to make something of quality. It's just they're burning it so slowly. And that's probably also intentional. Make something that looks and sounds fantastic. You can string these folks along for a while. A good long while. Now, even though the show has totally turned me off, I do wanna point out that there were still some great moments throughout each episode. Little nuggets. For instance, one of my favorite things so far in the entire season has been a half-foot moment where there's a song playing in the background. One of the characters is singing and it's overlaid with just a montage of them walking through the different areas, looking at the stars in the sky, helping each other out. That's Lord of the Rings to me. Wonderful character moments. And those are throughout this series, but in between is just a sluggish, snoring bore. Now, to get to the script writing stuff, there are moments in the last couple episodes where I turn to my wife and I'm like, what the hell is happening? There are gonna be tiny spoilers here, not much, because honestly, if you are watching, you're caught up, and if you're not watching, you don't care to watch anyways, and I don't blame you at this point. Gladrile charts three ships, just three, to go across Middle Earth where they end up saving that small town that's being attacked by whatever goblin things are going after them. How the hell did they know where they were at? How did they get there so fast? The passage of time is head-scratchingly non-existent. We're assuming things are going on in tandem. If they're not, if Gladrile and her crew left like six months earlier to get there, fair enough, but they didn't portray that well. It's not like The Witcher on Netflix where they did a very smart job jumping around the timeline, but then they gave you those shots that would remind you of a previous episode where you'd say, oh, that's what happened, okay, he's caught up to this sequence. You know, do that here. Instead, in some of the most puzzling editing ever, the characters are inside of a house, which I don't know why the goblins and started on fire right away, but whatever, we'll move past that stupidity, and it's peer night time out. We then cut to Gladrile and her crew on a horseback running in the middle of the day for three shots, two or three shots, and then back to the night shot again, and in the next scene, Gladrile and the team are there. What in the fuck is that? It made no sense at all. I don't even know how they got there. I don't know how they charted that course, and if this was Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, this moment in the picture would have been such a treat to watch. It would have been in beautiful slow motion. It would have been grand. You would have had some amazing music playing as Gladrile's leading the forces down. It's the first time these teams are coming together, but no, they're just there. The fight starts, it's kind of shitty, and then it's done, and I'm super pissed and annoyed. Another thing that happens in this very same episode that's beyond stupid is they're looking for the handle of Sauron's sword. That's the big reason they're going after this town. Well, it turns out the goblins got it at some point, and they didn't say anything, and it was a trick, and so when Gladrile hunts one of them down and gets what she thinks is the item, it turns out to be an axe, but she doesn't even look. She takes the wrapped thing, gives it to the archer, who gives it to the kid, and the kid's like, oh, I'm not sensing it, that's weird. Opens it up, he's like, it's not even here. How do you not look? This woman's been tracking down Sauron for thousands of years when she finally gets a handle on his handle. Sounded sexual, it wasn't meant to, it was just meant to be a pun. She doesn't even look. Are you fucking kidding me? Just bad, just bad. Awful writing and decision making there. I don't understand what they're thinking. If you saw my previous video, you'd know I gave this more than a fair shot. I was very excited, I was loving the direction, I liked the foundation, and it just crumbled on the weight of itself. And now I'm left just thinking, okay, well, good luck, because if you couldn't even keep me, a guy that likes the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, that's a rarity. If you couldn't keep me invested, then who you have left? Well, find out, I guess. Maybe the show will vastly improve in the inevitable second season, and they'll make some big shake-ups, some big changes. I don't see it happening. I think they're gonna slow burn this thing all the way to its inevitable demise. Let me know in the comments below though. Are you still liking it? Are you invested? Are you doing this weird comparison with House of the Dragon, which also kind of sucks, and I stopped watching that like two weeks back? Maybe I should make a video on that one too. I just don't care that much. I just don't have that much to say about it. Let me know. Like the video if you had a good time. Please think about subscribing if you haven't. I post tons of movie and TV show related stuff all the time. Would love to have you here. And with that, I slowly exit the video, because this is an hour and 20 fucking minutes long for some reason. Thanks again for watching. Since you're here, maybe think about joining me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Adam Does Movies or become a YouTube join member. I run this channel by myself. It's a ton of work. You can see how much time I put into it. 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