Why The Rings of Power isn't what we want, even though it's not bad.
Let's start with the basics: RoP isn’t bad —it’s clear that a lot of money has gone into it. It has great CGI, sets and costumes. The performances are okay (the actress playing Galadriel is just awful ), and for what it is, it has an ok script. Sure, it took some liberties with the lore ( A lot ), but so did Peter Jackson’s movies, and apart from some hardcore fans attached to the source material, most of us just want to see a good story. Yet, a lot of people (myself included) don't like it because it's not what we expected. The problem isn't that some dialogue could be better written or that certain plot points could have been different.
The issue is the story they chose to tell.
This story, especially in the way it’s structured, just doesn't work in this world and fails to evoke the sense of "Lord of the Rings" because it demystifies the world.
But let’s take a moment to look at what we know about Middle-earth from what Tolkien gave us.
In The Hobbit, a classic fairytale, we learn about Hobbits and a small group of wandering Dwarves going to steal a treasure. Elves and Orcs appear only briefly, we have a wizard who doesn't do much magic but feels magical, and plenty of magical creatures (trolls, eagles, talking wolves, men who turn into bears, dragons, etc.). But apart from Smaug, who is central to the plot, we learn almost nothing about the rest—maybe a few vague stories.
The Lord of the Rings follows the same pattern but in a more adult story, focusing on the stories of humans and Hobbits. We never spend much time with Elves, Gandalf, or magical creatures unless they are accompanied by a human or Hobbit.
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Perhaps the closest we get to understanding other races are Legolas and Gimli (best bromance ever—I cried in the appendix when they leave together). But even these appearances are mostly about the rivalry between Dwarves and Elves.
So what do we know?
Not much beyond humans and Hobbits. Elves, Dwarves, and other magical creatures are shadowy presences in the books and films, appearing briefly, and we know almost nothing about their societies, motives, or feelings regarding the major, terrifying events unfolding in Tolkien’s turbulent world.
And what about The Silmarillion, someone might ask? That's where almost the entire story of the Elves is.
Indeed, The Silmarillion is almost entirely about the Elves, but it’s written like a history book or a Norse epic. We know that Elves, besides being heroic and wise, can wage civil wars, scheme, kidnap princesses, and so on, but there's no close examination of an Elven story.
The stories we follow more closely in The Silmarillion are those of Beren and Lúthien and the Children of Húrin, which, though they feature many Elves, are primarily about humans.
Where am I going with all this?
Tolkien didn’t randomly choose the stories he wrote.
To begin with, he focuses almost exclusively on the mortal races in the stories where he goes into depth because he understands it’s impossible to give the perspective of immortal beings. To do so, he would have to humanize them, so he could write them and so we could identify with them. The way other races are presented in his stories is deliberately distant. By leaving them on the periphery of his tales, he lets our imagination fill in the unknown, allowing us to form our own thoughts about this world full of wondrous things and adventures.
In this way, he plays with our emotions and takes us back to our childhood, when the world as we understood it was magical. Beyond the hill, we didn’t know what lay, and we made up stories from what the grown-ups told us. As dusk fell, we spun tales of ghosts for the abandoned houses in the neighborhood that we were too scared to approach.
Tolkien intentionally wrote stories focused on humans so he could preserve this veil of magic over his world. He only clearly talks about what we know, while leaving everything we can’t define at the edges, giving us the opportunity to wander if we wish into the mists of the fantastical. And that’s exactly the problem with RoP—it lacks the fairytale sense of fantasy and magic that permeates Tolkien’s works. It’s lost because the unknown has been removed—what lies beyond the hill, the thing that makes you want to set off on a grand adventure, the allure of the mysterious.
Because that’s the magic of Tolkien.
P.S I have watched the entire second season of RoP I am still not ready to write a review but I will probably re-watch it and then write one.