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Another great example is the end of the third episode, start of the fourth. Arondir and the other elves make an escape attempt. They fail, Arondir is about to be killed, but for some reason he wasn't. They took him to their leader instead, who just lets him go with a "message".

- Why did the orc leader wait until the escape attempt to send someone with a message to the humans?

- Why would he believe an elf would relay his message, that humans could surrender and join him? Aren't the elves trying to prevent humans from being corrupted?

- Why did he give him back his weapons?

- Why are other orcs attacking him? Did Adar not even care if Arondir made back to the humans alive?

It makes more sense if you consider that the plot was written that Arondir would get captured, meet the bad guy, save the kid, and go back to the woman he's in love with to face the bad guy with the humans. Once that was decided they just threw together some scenes to fill in the blanks. No consideration was given as to whether the characters decisions made sense in the moment, only that they move the plot to where it was supposed to go.

They killed too many people earlier in the episode, the ratings board wouldn't allow for that much dramatic tension at TV-14 :p

Exactly. Mind you, I like Arondir, I like his relation with Bronwyn, I love how they did the Orcs, and I can't help but enjoy those spectacular leaps the elves make. The individual parts are fine. It's just how they tie everything together, dragging characters by their hair to wherever the plot wants them to be, that makes the whole thing make no sense.

And I don't see why any of this is necessary. Couldn't they have Arondir meet Adar before the escape attempt, make the escape attempt succeed, and when the Orcs pursue him, he manages to steal some weapons from the first Orcs he defeats with his bare hands. It wouldn't be the most inspired writing, but at least the decisions the characters make, would make more sense.

This is one of very few series where I've watched each episode at least twice while waiting for the next. Yes, it's slow, but it's also stunning.

I liked the scene with Galadriel riding. Until then she'd been shown as a hardened, argumentative and strident warrior except in the very start as a child. The scene shows a different side of her, which makes her happy; she's not entirely broken even after centuries searching for Sauron.

Thanks for the alternate perspective. Haven't seen it yet but I always seem to contradict these bandwagon opinions on shows.

same here... I watch every episode thrice. It's _that_ good, to me, and way better than the films.

What do you like about the show more than the films so far?

The films were really annoying to see end to end, the long version are unbearable. Music is better in RoP, every character and place has their theme, and they blend superbly like in Wagner or Monteverdi, unlike in the films. I also feel like dialogs are better in RoP, and the whole thing feels less "heavyweight" in everything... in a way, closer to the books. One thing distinctive in Tolkien universe is evil inside familiar things, and this is definately there in RoP, almost everywhere.

If they skipped the rock splitting contest they would play exactly to your expectations. By showing the actual events you might believe Elrond has a plan or a way to win. I didn't know what would happen. And that made that scene better for me.

The entire story of this show is well known in advance. If you know anything about LOTR you will know who Isildur is and what's going to happen. So should they just skip the entire show?

It's the characters and their interactions, atop the beautiful visuals, that this show can establish itself with.

> So should they just skip the entire show?

This is a good question actually.

Yeah, I have no problem with the rock-splitting scene. For me it's the boat to Valinor. Just that one boat trip already has at least half a dozen things wrong with it. A few I could have ignored, but it just keeps getting worse and worse.

There's still many great scenes too. I love Elrond's friendship with Durin, Durin & Disa's relationship, the Harfoots, the Orcs, how Numenor Looks, how everyone in Numenor looks, how their ships look. I even enjoy the spectacular action scenes with insane leaps by the elves. There's lots of good stuff in there, but it's all held together why really awkward plot twists that make no sense.

Totally agreed. As a LotR fan who read all the other books as well, I have difficulty understanding what everyone’s problem is - either you know the story and enjoy the fantastic visuals of what you always had in your head or you don’t and you then you might also enjoy to learn some of the deep mythology behind LotR.

I have read all his books back to back several times since I was a teen, each reading contributing more details to my head cannon… where elves don't have pointy ears, dwarves are not humans afflicted with achondroplasia, Galadriel is not an impulsive warrior shorter than every human she meets, etc. Somehow, that cannon of mine has survived my RPG years AND decades of memes extracted from Peter Jackson's movies but woah… watching that show with my daughter is painful.

She doesn't have the same kind of relationship I have with the original material, though, so she loves it so far.

but I imagine, as a purist, PJ's movies were then painful as well, or weren't they? personally I respect that opinion, but it's not quite how I see the LotR universe - to me, the 'mass market' entertainment aspect of it is fine. I'd rather have more people to be inspired in any form, than to lock it down to a small group of purists like e.g. Christopher Tolkien.

> but I imagine, as a purist, PJ's movies were then painful as well, or weren't they?

I didn't watch them.

> personally I respect that opinion, but it's not quite how I see the LotR universe - to me, the 'mass market' entertainment aspect of it is fine.

I'm fine with it too. How it is adapted is just not my cup of tea. Besides, I wholeheartedly agree with William Gibson, here:

> The assumption that a film adaption is the final and/or highest state, for a novel, is as woefully wrong as any assumption can be.

I like to watch movies, but I like to read novels more and the original material is more than fine as-is. Tolkien's estate and William Gibson are just as much entitled to accept colossal cheques as "we" (this includes the authors themselves) are to reject what comes out of it.

> I'd rather have more people to be inspired in any form, than to lock it down to a small group of purists like e.g. Christopher Tolkien.

Well, I'd rather see the milking stop and have more people creating original stuff. If only because expectations would be low to non-existent.

> I didn't watch them.

This is really fascinating to me that someone would not watch the movies but is watching Rings of Power. Would you tell your story a bit for how that happened?

As a lifelong Tolkien fan, I tend to at least check out everything even if I don’t read or watch it. And I don’t have the self control to avoid the movies. Especially ones as great as Jackson’s (Return of the King has the most Oscar’s ever awarded to a film, tied with Ben Hur).

Well, as I mentioned in my comment, I have no interest for movie adaptations in general. I like movies (and I'm even somewhat of a film buff) but I don't think of them as a superior art form at all and I literally never hope for a movie adaptation of anything I read. In my opinion, a novel isn't enhanced or magnified or whatever when it is adapted for the screen. Quite the opposite, and I would prefer "Hollywood" to work on original ideas rather than whatever their current strategy is.

There are, of course, plenty of cases of good adaptations that can live side-by-side with the original material, Blade Runner comes to mind, but they tend to be outliers.

The movies were direct adaptations of the original material and the trailers I watched at the time were too off-base for me and I preferred my own head cannon to Peter Jackson's so I skipped the whole thing.

On the other hand, the series was sold more like an ad-lib inspired by the annexes of The Lord of the Rings, which are as fuzzy as it gets, so it was supposed to be less tied to the original story and, in theory, less off-base with my head cannon. It turned out to be even worse than the little I now know of the movies so I will stop here. Some of it certainly is pretty but, as hinted above, I tend to value stories and characters more than visuals.

In fact, the delta between my head cannon and the series is far greater than with the movies so I might as well watch them one of these days.

Written word FTW.

I feel you, if you enjoyed that then I don't want to take it away from you. It's frustrating to me because the best part of that episode was the negotiations they held immediately afterwards. I would have happily traded in the contest scene for the opportunity for the writers to really explore Elrond's relationship with the dwarves. It seemed like the sort of thing a Lord of the Rings adaptation might do, rather than succumbing to spectacle when it fits the pacing of the show best. But I guess everybody is looking for something different, I'll concede that I mostly wanted this to be Game of Thrones with less sex/violence and more interpersonal development & worldbuildiong.

The rock-splitting contest is exploring Elrond's relationship with the elves.

It isn't about smashing rocks. It's about Elrond submitting to a Dwarvish custom and making a not-terrible showing (for an elf). It demonstrates the respect he has for them and shows the half-measure of respect he earns from them.

That is the key scene of the episode. The reconciliation would not have been possible without it.

> there sure are a lot of scenes where nothing happens.

"Look, we spent a lot of money on this filming and you will damn well sit through them!"

(see also Thor: Love and Thunder for another thing that needed a stronger edit but presumably didn't for the same reason.)

I actually liked Thor: Love and Thunder. It works for me because they're explicitly poking fun at themselves. It's not a serious movie, so it gets away with the stupid stuff because it's part of the joke.

Rings of Power does not have that excuse.

Yep, it's a good film[1] but it drags something terrible in places. Could have been done in 90 minutes without losing any of the important bits.

[1] modulo the "blacker than a black hole" bits where it was impossible to see anything even on a UHD TV.

I’ve never read The Silmarillion, and other than the hobbit cartoon back in the day, the LOTR movies are my only real connection with JRRT. I read the first book, but found it to be a forgettable slog largely due to a weird musical wizard that (thankfully) never showed up in the movies.

Regarding the rock-splitting competition spoiler - I thought he was going to win. I’m only two eps in, but I’ve enjoyed the show so far. It’s much better than I expected, particularly given everything I’ve read about it being so poorly executed. I had much lower expectations. I’m not raving about it, but I’m not panning it either.

I imagine that if you’re much closer to the source material, then there’s no way this show could have possibly met your expectations. On the other hand, if you want to catch a decent LOTR spin-off, and you’re neither a film student nor a die-hard JRRT fan, I’d say give it a shot.

The horse riding scene perfect.

- There is no build up, nothing is at stake, they are just travelling to the setting for the next scene.

- The gratuitous close ups of the horse.

- Its one of the three ways people get places, why would the millennia old Galadriel be so ecstatic? There has been no hint that Galadriel is really into riding horses.

- The music and slow motion are so comically over the top.

I don't mind a slow pace. It's when the humans (unusually pale compared to the rest of the show's diversity) started complaining about elves taking their jobs that I checked out.

Right! When they unironically take the "Dey took 'er jerbs!!" line from South Park with zero awareness of how ridiculous it was in context. Why would the Men of Numenor be worried about elves stealing their jobs when no elf had set foot there for many, many years?

It's not a movie, it's a TV show that will have a run time of ~40 hours.

The scenes where no story development happen also serve a purpose: allowing the viewer to not be drowned in over-information.

The show is easy to follow because of that reason, even for someone who hasn't watched anything LOTR related before.

All the comments about the development being too slow or some scenes being just for spectacle are nonsensical. The ones mentioning the budget as if it had been allocated to the first 4 episodes are even worse.

> It's not a movie, it's a TV show that will have a run time of ~40 hours.

Game of Thrones is 70+ hours start-to-finish, that wasn't an excuse to slow the pacing down or write impotent dialogue. It knows how to direct characters, and the showrunners understand that 60 seconds of horse riding doesn't make good television. Allegory is used sparingly, and the world is fleshed out through it's characters rather than CGI environments. It leads to a story that can be followed by bookworms and football dads alike.

The Rings of Power doesn't build it's world in the same way. Instead we're whisked away to exotic locations that most viewers are unfamiliar with, and the following scenes do nothing to really characterize the world these characters inhabit. It's like the writing team and art directors never met to share notes. I'd argue that this lack of cohesion makes it decidedly harder to follow than other contemporary fantasy shows.

> The ones mentioning the budget as if it had been allocated to the first 4 episodes are even worse.

Okay, I'll be generous then. Why can't $125 million dollars buy better writers?

> Why can't $125 million dollars buy better writers?

I know this is really a rhetorical question but imagine just being able pay more for better writing.

(The writing sucks because this is a commercial project first and foremost)

> imagine just being able pay more for better writing.

Is it that difficult? What if you ran a contest to write the best script, winner gets a million dollars and top billing in the credits?

Seems there should be plenty of college students who can write better than e.g. last season of Game of Thrones.

You'd need someone to judge the contest so you have the same problem that people with large budgets in modern film making completely lost the ability to tell if a script is very, very not good.

Part of the problem (as I understand it) is that this series is being directed by first-time showrunners. Amazon took a big gamble, and I would not be surprised if some of these cinematic/writing failures are the result of that.

> It knows how to direct characters, and the showrunners understand that 60 seconds of horse riding doesn't make good television.

And the result was a soap opera set in a “fantasy” world. They teased us with white walkers in the first episode, and then… nothing, for like 7 seasons. We didn’t even get to see any dragons for what seemed like forever.

I literally burst out laughing when the slow motion scene of the horse’s hooves came on TV.

I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but I did too! It was the hardest I had laughed at something unintentionally bad in a while. It's particularly hard-hitting because it's preceded by some really pretty CGI vistas and camera sweeps in full-motion that almost bring you back to the immersion of the Peter Jackson movies. And then the steering wheel veers hard left, mixing in weird slow-mo shots that evokes images of stock footage and Getty Images watermarks.

As viewers, we know the outcome of the entire story. Why bother making it at all? Unless …

The Titanic sinks???

The nerds get revenge?

The bad guy was the father?

The storm was perfect?

The Adventure was Excellent?