It's hard to put into words just how terrible this show is. How to properly summarize the level of treason achieved within a single season of television. And just how badly they screwed this up. To take a story with so much potential and strip it down to the most basic, generic, childest version imaginable.
Amazon's attempt at buying a fan base rather than actually telling a great story. A show that emphasizes the geography by showing us the map of Middle Earth, only to ignore it when it gets in the way, having characters teleport long distances, and attempting to swim across the ocean. across a huge ocean, making no sense at all.
A show that desperately wants to display the same kind of heart and soul as the Peter Jackson trilogy, only to betray their characters as spineless manipulators, sociopathic savages, racist assholes, and the most unreasonable elf ever born. There isn't a single aspect of this show that isn't badly written, but I think one of the best ways to make my point is a simple scene comparison. Taking a look at two battles, one from the ending of the Fellowship of the Ring, Aragorn vs Lurtz, and the other, episode 6 of the Rings of Power, Elfguy vs Big Chungus, I want to try to highlight how good writing can truly elevate a fight scene, and the downfalls of relying strictly on spectacle.
After an incredible solo effort from Boromir to protect Merry and Pippin, Aragorn arrives at the very last second to save him from being executed. And before the fight even begins, I have to praise the fact that rather than just having him show up to make a dramatic entrance, he's actually responding to Boromir. And they show an overhead shot to get an idea of the terrain and how far he will have to travel, which lines up with the time of his arrival, the type of detail that is often overlooked in the pursuit of a cool payoff.
They clash weapons and you get a clear idea for the difference in raw strength as he easily tosses him back into a tree, hard enough to make this experienced warrior drop his sword, which lines him up perfectly with the terrain. for a shield throw nearly decapitating him. And he wastes no time and charges in to finish the job as Aragorn barely escapes, throwing a body shot only to be strung off again.
Lurtz swings his sword trying to chop him in half, but he dodges and kicks the sword out of his hand, and then quickly lands a good stab to the thigh, which lines him up for a big punch after being disarmed. He limps over and continues his assault with a headbutt and a left hook, dropping him to the floor. Then he proceeds to rip out the dagger and throw it right back at him, only to be deflected.
Then he grabs his sword and charges into attack. But Aragorn uses his speed and the fact that his leg is injured to push him back and land the killing blow. Then we get a display of the true mentality of the orakai and a sign of things to come.
So why is this well written? Well, the answer for me is simply the respect for immersion and the understanding of what this fight represents. Every aspect of the choreography feels constructed to specifically portray two swords.
men desperately trying to kill each other. Rather than dragging it out for drama, they had the good sense to keep it short, which is a much more realistic depiction of medieval combat, where fights would generally be decided within the first few exchanges. Not only do both fighters make full use of the weapons that they have on hand, they made sure to show moments of both of them being disarmed in order to justify the hand-to-hand portions of the fight, and have them grab their weapons to resume the combat. Now this may not sound like much, but these are the type of details that really give a fight scene a chance to be meaningful in a rewatch.
and get a better understanding for why you enjoyed it in the first place. Now let's compare that to the fight scene in the Rings of Power. After getting yanked off a rooftop, Elfguy randomly bumps into a massive orc. And I want to note that not only are they in the middle of a battle, but unlike Lurtz who was built up throughout the entire movie, I have no idea who this orc is or why this is significant in any way.
The fight starts in a medium- do one of the things that frustrates me in so many fight scenes. Where rather than just snapping his neck or choking him out or anything logical, he decides to just throw him to prolong the fight. And for some reason he is the only orc on the battlefield that just happens to be unarmed.
So we get to see them use their Wing Chun skills instead. But the elf's tiger claw is no match for the orc's sha- Sheldon fists. So he switches to capoeira, landing a big wheel kick to the head. And then he stands there.
He just stands there and waits to be punched in the ...face. And instead of being knocked back to the ground, he somehow falls forward in a daze. And then the orc grabs him and looks at him. He just stands there and looks at him.
But he has options. He has many, many options. He could continue to beat him to death. He could bite his face.
Orcs are known to be vicious. He could look for a weapon and end this. But instead he just throws him again and gives him a kick to the ribs.
And then they cut to the rest of the people fighting, just to remind you how stupid it is that they are somehow in a 1v1 battle in the middle of all this, and nobody is interrupting. They cut back to the fight, and I guess they were both just standing there again, because they were in the same position they were before. And he is only now picking him up off the ground. Only to fucking throw him again, what is this shit?
Elf guy picks up- up an arrow and the orc literally teleports and is suddenly standing right in front of him. They don't even bother to show him walk over and follow up on his throw. They just cut to him standing right there and hope you won't notice. And then the clown show continues as he stabs him in the foot, kicks him in the shin, and then stabs him in the eye.
What a combo. This is obviously a good time to get a weapon right? Wrong. He jumps on his back and tries to choke him out.
Only to be slammed onto a well. And in a well written show his back would potentially be broken. And we would have to see how this affects his character going forward.
But the show needs him to stand up so the orc can throw him one last time. to establish the difference in strength between the two fighters. They ignore all that and have the orc struggle to overpower him for almost a minute.
He shows up out of nowhere with no weapon ready for a fist fight in the middle of a battle. And as soon as he gets his hands on a weapon you zap him with all your strength just so you can have your shitty payoff. So why is this terribly written?
Where the first fight went to great lengths to make sure it was realistic. even accidentally making Viggo Mortensen reflect a real knife. This fight, decades later, is borderline insulting for how poorly choreographed this is from the very beginning. I don't even understand how any of this was approved with a budget this large, and so much on the line.
I'm not- I'm not talking about the entertainment value of the techniques and whether you enjoyed it personally. I'm talking about the decisions they made in the fight that destroys any possible chance for immersion. It's almost impossible to take this fight seriously as for not a single moment do you get the impression that lives are on the line in a significant battle. How can you convince me that this is a fight to the death when they do everything in their power to extend the fight and avoid anything that could potentially end it?
This is not the place for wheel kicks and spinning back fists. What the fuck were they thinking? This confrontation is basically made up of two people. meaningless.
There's nothing stopping Elfguy from running away or trying to pick up the sword that he dropped when he fell off the roof. And not only did he make no effort to pick it up, he managed to disarm a smaller orc moments before Big Chungus arrived. But he just drops that weapon too so we can have a wrestling match.
It's pathetic. In the first fight, we have the uncrowned king of Gondor versus a creature literally bred to destroy the world of men, on the verge of executing one of his comrades in a scene that was completely earned and set up perfectly. And in the other, we have random orc number four, who either forgot his sword or prefer his martial arts in battle versus an elf who is so underdeveloped after six episodes it's just embarrassing I don't even know what this battle or these people really mean to him I have no understanding of his skill set or his backstory I have no idea what drives him they've done so little to help me understand or get invested in this journey that it's almost impossible to care about this fight or anything he does or says he shoots a bow he likes a girl and he will fuck up your chess game if you're not careful that's it that's all I know about this guy I don't even remember his fucking name nor do i care to look it up for the sake of this video and when i compare that to how i felt when i first watched aman hend it's like the fate of the world was at stake that's how compelling it was which is the kind of reaction that can only be earned through good writing and attention to detail something that the show just doesn't seem to understand that pales in comparison to peter jackson's masterpiece the lord of the rings a trilogy made with love and respect where after the first season of rings of power i'm convinced that not only did they not have any love or respect for this friend franchise, they didn't even have a coherent idea for a story. They simply had an IP to make money off of, and this is the result.
Enjoy. Did you have some kind of mechanism, in a sense, so that you could make sure that you were true to Tolkien? Well, we didn't want to put any of our own, certainly in terms of the thematic material, we didn't want to put any of our own baggage.
I mean, we had no interest in putting our messages into this movie, but we thought that we should honor Tolkien by putting his messages into it, and we thought he cared about things. you know, the countryside and the rise of evil. And he cared passionately about certain issues, and we thought what we should do to honour him is to make sure that what he cared about ends up in the movie. That's what we tried to do.
Oh, let it go, knife-ears! The lot you lump us in with died off a thousand years ago. When are you people gonna let the past go? Hup! What do you...
What do you need, you people?