2 out of 5 stars

No discussion about Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is ever fully complete without some kind of evaluation of everything in the J.R.R Tolkien universe that surrounds it. So, for the time being, here’s some noteworthy context. For one, The Lord of the Rings media franchise has only ever been on a downslope since the insurmountable height that was The Return of the King (2003).

Following the release of Peter Jackson’s impossible landmark film trilogy, Jackson was enlisted into directing another epic film trilogy in the form of The Hobbit films (2012-14) after Pan’s Labyrinth (2003) director Guillermo del Toro was ousted from production. The fundamental problem with that endeavour was a matter of source material. In contrast, the nearly thousand-page, triple-volume Lord of the Rings lent itself naturally to the scope and scale of an epic trilogy, while the meager-in-comparison 300-page Hobbit was a single younger-age novel intended to be read to Tolkien’s children. The result of it was an over-bloated, tonally confused, direly rushed series of three films whose aimlessness was largely representative of the fact that Jackson and his team were winging nearly the entire series as they were progressing.

In the wake of the announcement of The Rings of Power’s first season, expectations were set to a very different point. Amazon’s colossal purchase of the rights to The Lord of the Rings from Tolkien’s estate brought with it plans for a very different kind of adaptation; one that would focus more on the external lore that took place thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Here, the team behind the show—led by showrunners J.D Payne and Patrick McKay—would instead redouble their efforts on adapting materials like the appendices of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, containing various myths on Middle-earth and the realms that surround it. And if the title of the show was any indication, its focus was going to be less on the wars that defined Tolkien’s work in The Lord of the Rings, and more so on the fateful forging of the Rings of Power that would precede those wars by thousands of years. All seemed well for an ostensibly natural fit between expansive mythos and an equally expansive multi-season TV series.

To a certain extent, the first season of The Rings of Power lived up to those mythical expectations. Its story focuses on what directly precipitates the forging of the Great Rings—we follow a cast composed of Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), Elrond (Robert Aramayo), Dwarven prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur), Elven forge-smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and his father Elendil (Lloyd Owen), along with a handful of original characters, as they prepare against the coming rise of a seemingly defeated Sauron as he sets his plan to dominate Middle-earth in place. Season One, however, ends with the characters’ collective realisation that Sauron’s plans in question were far less obvious than they anticipated.

Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), heir apparent to the throne of the Southlands, who assists the protagonists in fending off the forces of Orcs led by Adar (Sam Hazeldine), is a guise of Sauron himself, who’s covertly consulted Celebrimbor in forging the Three Elven Rings, the first piece set in motion of his grand scheme. By the time the second season rolls around, the noble kingdom of Númenor is without a king of Men; the Dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dûm is reaching imminent decline; the Harfoot halflings, Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy (Megan Richards), following a mysterious Stranger (Daniel Weyman), are reaching a troubled leg of their journey; the magic of the Elves is fading; and Sauron is one step closer to reaching his dark hand over all of Middle-earth.

And yet, if the issue plaguing The Hobbit was that its obvious mismatch of children’s-book source material and epic-scope film trilogy led to countless tonal and pacing problems, the issue plaguing The Rings of Power is a mismatch of emotional distance. The Lord of the Rings, even despite all its spectacle and overpowering depictions of wartime brutality, is a trilogy that lives and dies by the heart of its characters, its epic-scale momentum elevated by its deeply moving, humanistic perspective on the spirit of perseverance in the face of overwhelming evil. But that spirit is hardly anywhere to be felt in The Rings of Power’s first season, easily blinkered out and containing less than a fraction of the sincerity to be found in Jackson’s first trilogy, totally overshadowed and dominated by the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of VFX and SFX that make up the resplendent wonders of Amazon’s rendition of Middle-earth.

The true problem with The Rings of Power isn’t a matter of deviations from the canon, or the crassly bigoted denigrations of “DEI hires” towards the casting of multiple people of colour in the series. No, it’s the fact that those talents of colour are then wasted on a story that hardly gives them a chance to touch their audience on a level deeper than superficial wonder, that those deviations from the canon squander an opportunity to meaningfully expand on Tolkien’s canon. I mention all of this now because the second season of The Rings of Power is more or less representative of the same inadequacies in storytelling. It deepens the scope of Sauron’s evil throughout its story but is never quite sure of what to make of it or its effects on everyone else on a humanistic level. It reaches more daringly towards that spirit of perseverance but is still far too caught up in its spectacle to forge anything remotely meaningful out of it.

Initially, the second season of The Rings of Power appears to have its sights set on narratively prioritising Sauron, as demonstrated by how its opening scenes are dedicated to showing how he successfully deceived the protagonists as Halbrand. But it soon moves on to more various pastures, as even with this deception in mind, the Elves find the Rings useful to preserve the magic they need to sustain themselves and vow to use the Rings as a weapon against Sauron. In the meantime, Sauron visits Celebrimbor as Halbrand and deceives him once more, switching forms into “Annatar, Lord of Gifts,” an apparent emissary of deities who now tasks Celebrimbor with forging Rings of Power for Dwarves and Men to further Sauron’s reign.

As Mount Doom erupts, meanwhile, Khazad-dûm’s structural integrity and sustainability are threatened, endangering the lives of all the Dwarves that inhabit it, while Númenor crowns Ar-Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle) as King, who gradually begins to turn his people against each other due to a conspiracy that involves Queen Regent Miriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson). Meanwhile, The Stranger, Nori, and Poppy continue their perilous journey towards the land of Rhûn, encountering the enigmatic perhaps-deity Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear), who guides the Stranger towards his destiny as a wizard, all while riders pursue them under the command of a Dark Wizard (Ciarán Hinds) who intends to capture the Stranger and use him as a means to an end against Sauron.

Once again, however, it remains incredibly hard to distinguish just what all of this piece-placing is meant to be emotionally and spiritually in service of. The Rings of Power carries on with its matter-of-fact, procedural storytelling nature, navigating its webs of relationships in such a practical way that it becomes hard to ignore how empty it all feels even beneath the razzle-dazzle of its presentation. Yes, it’s hard to deny the fact that the millions of dollars invested once again into this new season have been well-utilised on a formal and visual scale. Every distinct location, costume, character design, and so on in this story has a powerful sense of character and spectacle that’s frankly more worth seeing on a bigger screen than most Prime Video streamers can use for themselves. It’s gorgeous, dominating, and bedazzling all at once, but in a way that still pays scant lip service to the aesthetics of Jackson’s trilogies while portending to create a world of its own. It’s a testament to just how much raw manpower has been invested into enlivening the previously unadapted realms of Tolkien’s universe—but to what end, exactly?

Loose ends from the first season regarding characters such as Isildur are merely carried along dully with gradually diminishing intrigue until they find some kind of resolution. The introduction of new, frankly uninteresting mysteries such as the Dark Wizard’s pursuit of the Stranger and the Harfoots only works in service of an Abrams-esque “mystery box” that raises more unsatisfying questions. Multiple quarrels among ruling regents of Númenor and Khazad-dûm only reinforce the fact that the quarrelling parties in question, whether they be Dwarves or Men, are only ever truly presented as thuddingly obvious archetypes rather than multi-dimensional political figures with individually shifting plans and agendas. Sauron’s presentation as a deceptive Satanic figure is by far the most intriguing fixture of this season, providing the most interesting tragedy in the form of Celebrimbor’s downfall, but even then, the focus on this specific arc of evil and betrayal is vexingly overlaid by the Elves’ constant bickering over the usage of his Rings, as well as every aforementioned storyline clanging around in its periphery.

“History became legend. Legend became myth,” Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) says at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Here, she speaks about the millennia that passed following the defeat of Sauron by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, and how the One Ring faded from knowledge after being lost by Isildur at the moment of his death. But she also might as well be speaking of the transitory period we have reached with The Lord of the Rings franchise—where we’ve almost fully lost the magic that made Jackson’s original trilogy so special, where its perhaps repeatable impact has become unattainable.

The Rings of Power (if it is ever to complete its intended five-season cycle after a near 100M-viewer drop between these two seasons) serves as a perplexing, foreboding reminder of how, within a full generation, the sincerity uplifting the spectacle of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings has been lost to creators and executives who have mistaken that spectacle for the substance itself. To be “epic” is to tell the tale of characters who never start in an “epic” place, who rise to that status from a grounded foundation of humanity, even despite their many foibles and flaws, and because of their perseverance and willpower. But when every conceivable narrative element starts at that “epically” powerful, pompously foreboding, spiritually empty high… there’s only one way to go but down.

USA • NEW ZEALAND • CANADA | 2024 | 8 EPISODES • 538 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • SINDARIN

Cast & Crew

writers: J.D Payne, Patrick McKay, Gennifer Hutchison, Jason Cahill, Helen Shang, Glenise Mullins, Nicholas Adams & Justin Doble (based on ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and its appendices by J.R.R Tolkien).
directors: Charlotte Brändström, Louise Hooper & Sanaa Hamri.
starring: Morfydd Clark, Charlie Vickers, Robert Aramayo, Benjamin Walker, Daniel Weyman, Ciarán Hinds, Rory Kinnear, Markella Kavenagh, Megan Richards, Charles Edwards, Sam Hazeldine & Peter Mullan.