Yeah, what they\'ve done to Galadriel is a travesty. They didn\'t have much canon to work with, but they\'ve gone and stuffed up much of what little they did have. There\'s barely a shot of her in the first two episodes where she doesn\'t look angry, and it just left me thinking, did the writers somehow forget that she\'s Gil-Galad\'s great aunt? The show (and the other Elves) treat her like some impatient, single-minded, borderline adolescent. It\'s deeply off-putting.
My mum says I'm insidious. -Nobby Nobbs
I agree on Galadriel, Youtuber Abbie Emmons has made some great videos about how lot of writers and creatives overcompensate trying to make female protagionists tough and not girly (i.e weak) and end up making them just petulant and dickish. Galadriel is someone who is allowed to be gently femmine as Princess Peach becuase she\'s immensely powerful anyway. I know there\'s drafts and notes Tolkien had about her being more amazonian and I don\'t mind the idea of her Legolas it a bit, but having her be a agressive jerk who tortures poeple is just spitting in Tolkien\'s face. I like this show more than others, but the choices they made with Galadriel were straight up terrible.
Y.20
Galadriel is basically that angry Sergeant in Wreck-it Ralph throughout. I am hoping that the final twist of the series and her burying the hatchet (in a sense) means she gets to be a bit more chilled out character in future.
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I\'ve noticed that there\'s been a lot of anger and hatred in female characters in recent years. They all come out of the same sort of hot-headed belligerent mold. I wonder what\'s up with that, but it doesn\'t give me much hope that Galadriel\'s going to calm down any.
I don`t agree, Galadriel is pretty distinct.
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Uninspired spectacle
Speaking as someone who has only the expected amount of nerdy passion for Tolkien's work, I can accept a certain amount of artistic licence when it comes to adaptations (from what I've read, the creators only had very limited source material to draw from, thanks to stifling legal restrictions). So, this review won't be about faithfulness to Tolkein or the canon-breaking inclusion of multi-ethnic Elves or god knows what else - it'll just dissect the story as it is presented on its own merits.
Unfortunately, it doesn't have many.
What distracted me most about Rings of Power is that it really, really doesn't want to be a TV series. It wants to be an epic trilogy on par with Peter Jackson's Middle-earth cinematic universe, complete with sweeping CGI spectacle, dramatic monologues, slightly corny dialogue, and excessive lore dumps. It's bizarre and off-putting in a way I've never quite experienced before, and I think it boils down to the inherent expectations of the medium clashing with what's presented onscreen. With live-action television, we expect a certain amount of pathos, realism and familiarity with the characters, as we spend far more time with them than we would in a single movie. The show seems intent on keeping most of the characters at arm's length, giving you little space to truly understand their personalities and motivations outside of what we're told about them. Instead, we're invited to focus on the admittedly impressive CGI sceneries that feel ripped straight out of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Galadriel is a perfect example of this breakdown of communication. Portraying her as a hot-headed warrior clad in armour was an odd but potentially interesting direction to take with her character, but I just couldn't vibe with her at all. We're clearly supposed to empathise with her dedication to eradicating evil in Middle-earth, but she comes across as inflexible, overzealous and frankly exhausting to put up with. Her only personality trait in this show is her hatred for Sauron. I don't expect all protagonists to be immediately likeable, but I like it when there's some shred of humanity to relate to on some level. By the end of the first episode, I just wanted Galadriel to take a bloody day off.
The other characters all come across as similarly one-dimensional - okay for a 90-minute action movie, not so much for an ongoing series. I don't doubt that there's ample time to fix this, but the first couple of episodes don't fill me with much enthusiasm.