The Rings of Power Season 1

I wish this was fantastic. I wish this was good. This seemed like it would be such a good series, and...it just wasn't. I'm devastated that this series was just okay, with lots of wasted potential. This is not what Lord of the Rings should be.

The story is split up into several parts. We have the elf Galadriel, who teams up with a mysterious man named Halbrand to find and defeat the dark lord Sauron. There is a plotline about the Harfoots, which are basically Hobbits, whose peaceful life is shaken up when a man literally falls from the sky. We have the story of Elrond, another elf who attempts to enlist the help of the Dwarven prince Durin to help save the entire Elven race. And then we have the southlands, the viewpoint characters being an elf named Arondir and a woman named Bronwyn, and they have to contend with orcs attempting to take their lands over.

Lots of plotlines, and a lot of them end up being...just okay. Like there are good scenes to all of them, except maybe the Harfoot stuff, that was pretty bad, but even then, it felt like a completely different story that didn't fit into the world of Lord of the Rings that I knew. I didn't care for much of the characters, and the pacing, oh the pacing, is so slow. Lord of the Rings is a 9 hour story, and this season, being 8 hours long, ends up doing almost nothing until the final episode. That's really bad. It feels like the writers had no idea what they were doing and just slapped the Lord of the Rings name on some generic fantasy series.

Now, we get to the acting and visuals. I want to say that yes, the visuals are gorgeous, since this is one of the most expensive TV series of all time and it shows, for better or worse, where Amazon felt they should put most of their budget. As for the acting, I think it was fine, but the material was so lacking that not even good performances (of which there were many) could save it. Considering the characters were written more like plot devices than actual people, well, that is not how you do writing.

There are some cool sequences like Galadriel and some elves searching for Sauron and encountering and fighting a snow troll, or the battle between the orcs and the people of the southland, but even then, it wasn't to the same level as Helm's Deep from The Two Towers or Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King, which I consider to be the best battles from the Lord of the Rings films.

As the show continued on, I found myself caring less and less and practically begging for the season finale to come because the prospect of writing all of my frustrations about this show was more appealing than continuing to watch this mediocre and bland slog of a show without an identity.

Overall, this show was a disappointment on almost every level. Other than some good visuals and fight scenes, it had no interesting characters, confusing and annoying writing, bland storytelling, horrendous and slow pacing, and barely felt like what I would expect Lord of the Rings to be. I feel I have wasted eight hours of my life, and I hope that never happens again.

Next time, we get to journey with a team of astronauts who, after crash landing on a mysterious planet, find there is more to this new world than they ever thought possible. Look out for Planet of the Apes.

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