I'll be posting more reactions as they appear. Here's Jeremy Jahns, one of my favorite go-to reviewers, criticizing Amazon's "Rings of Power" on the basic level of story and character:
Jahns is also not a conservative as far as I know, and as with other reviewers I've already cited, he doesn't talk about "Rings of Power" in terms of its woke agenda. Instead, for him, the series fails in terms of its plot and the people of this world: none of it is compelling—to the point that Jahns comes right out and calls the show boring.
Perpetually angry Ryan Kinel, meanwhile, harps on the enthusiasm gap between the simpering professional reviewers and the regular citizens. Critics are busy sucking this show's dick while the hoi polloi hate the show. Here's a screen shot I just took at Rotten Tomatoes:
 |
| the fabled enthusiasm gap |
Ouch, baby. Very ouch.
Kinel's point is that, now that the show is out, Amazon can lie all it wants, and Rotten Tomatoes can try desperately to censor all the one-star reviews it wants, but the truth is clear: the show is dogshit, no one (aside from paid shills) loves it, and Amazon just wasted a billion dollars—not to mention people's time—pissing all over Tolkien without once considering the audience it should have been respecting. As Kinel says, audiences have been right the whole time: this show was never going to amount to anything. Go back to the Shadow. As much as I appreciate the convenience of using Amazon, I have to wonder what malefic (or maybe just clueless?) spirit prompted the making of this misbegotten show. Amazon has proven to be woefully inconsistent in what it churns out: "The Terminal List" plays to rightie audiences and is a watchable—if not exactly profound—action drama; meanwhile, "The Boys" is an R-rated lampoon of both sides of the political aisle with a pretty compelling story and visceral action; now, we've got "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power," and it's the sputtering diarrhea trickling out at the end of an overlong fart. I have no plans to watch it; let others suffer.
What interests me more is the response to this series. I look forward to reactions from Chris Stuckmann, Mark Kermode, The Critical Drinker, and Nerd Cookies. Stuckmann will be the least negative. He's a budding filmmaker and has explicitly said that he now looks at movies through a filmmaker's eyes, which means he's very sympathetic to how people try (and often fail) to put a story on screen. Stuckmann will be reluctant to trash what he will see as an earnest effort, even if he finds some elements of "Rings of Power" to be misguided. Kermode, by contrast, will be brutally honest, and I already know what The Critical Drinker (who hangs online with rightie critics Nerdrotic, HeelsVersusBabyface, etc.) thinks since he's been hammering the series for months, but I'm most intrigued by what Miss Nerd Cookies will have to say given how she's talked about the importance of canon in the past. Stay tuned.
ADDENDUM: he's not one of my go-to people, but Paul Chato has insights:
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