That commitment needs to be stronger than Netlix, who seemingly kill anything and everything at the drop of a hat.
As you just explained, it almost has to be by default.
Recent Dr Who, for me. The writing’s been pretty terrible since basically the end of the Ponds, but I still liked it a fair bit.
And I love, both ironically and unironically, lots of movies with bad writing. It’s definitely easier to tolerate when it’s in small doses and compensated for with things TV shows usually can’t afford.
This for me too. I watch a ton of terrible horror/sci-fi movies and I’m a lot more forgiving of a 90-minute indie film from Gravitas Ventures than I am of a $1billion boondoggle from Amazon.
Iranian good looks with a British accent. Impossible to resist, even in her early forties. If I actually met her in person, I’d probably lose the power of speech and immediately trip over my own feet and fall down.*
*okay, maybe that last part only in my twenties/thirties. ;-)
I really liked this, too. And it appears quite a few people watched:
100m, and that was 12 days ago. I have no idea what Amazon expected, but this sure seems like a hit.
True, the point of course I’m making is streaming services have been known to bail on things early that cost a lot less than a billion and counting.
The Guardian did not like it.
Sharpe
1674
I think my big problem is my own level of personal disappointment and the opportunity cost that we will never get a good 2nd Age adaptation (and probably no good First Age adaptation either). If I’m objective about the show, overall it’s mediocre, not crap. However, I had vastly high expectations given the source material and the budget and those were not met, which made me a bad angry bitter person. Also, I am very saddened by the opportunity cost: just the mere expenditure alone means other adaptations are unlikely.
It’s like Tom’s lists of Most Disappointing Games - they are not always the worst games but the disappointment, it is saddening. Cry.
Oh well. Time to move on from this.
orald
1675
Yikes, they surely did not. Of all the nits to pick, the acting would not have been mine.
Haha! Don’t ever stop being you.
Whether the royal you liked the show or not, this is a fine fun place to hang out and kibbitz about it
So basically you loved this as great looking D&D with crappy writing.
Way to rub it in Tom.
antlers
1677
As someone who was in the “Meteo-man is Sauron” until it became untenable after the penultimate episode, I think they managed the whole Halbran/Annatar/Sauron story-line fairly well if regarded in isolation – Sauron was headed for Numenor to do his work there, but when he encountered Galadriel seized the opportunity (probably caused the shipwreck himself) to work his way into the confidences of the most powerful elves. It just makes the Meteor-Man/Harfoot/3-Magi-from-the-east storyline extra insufferable that it was all an artificial misdirection.
Chief complaint with the show remains not the plot adaptation but the budget-stretchers. It seems like the lesson the writers learned from the Peter Jackson trilogy is that the long soulful dialogue scenes between Frodo and Sam were what people liked best about the movies, so they are trying to stuff as many long, soulful dialogues in as they can, even when their writing is terrible and they are thematically incoherent.
You’re the hero we don’t deserve
What. The. Fuck.
The fact that these guys don’t seem to understand that Tolkien’s Sauron is a malevolent force of pretty much pure evil and malice who was damn near all-powerful and could only be stopped on each occasion he suffered defeat because the forces for good across all of Middle-Earth banded together at great sacrifice and cost to accomplish it tells me they have no idea what they’re doing. Trying to humanize Sauron in the vein of Walter White or Tony Soprano completely undermines the entire composition of the character.
I enjoyed the spectacle of this first season. It was beautiful, it was interesting, it was Middle Earth come to life with all the trappings one would expect of a Lord of the Rings movie. I thought many of the actors did a fine job with their roles, and I even enjoyed some of the Elrond-Durin banter and some of the Harfoot Hobbit stuff (the final two episodes especially). Even the story had a lot of potential…BUT, I felt like the writers failed to mine that for all it was worth (dwarf pun intended). It was too transparent right from the start, and some of the resolutions to events of this season were downright painful to watch. Example : Sauron becomes Sauron because Galadriel refuses to be his queen and puts him in the not-even-be-friends zone instead. And the less we talk about mithril the better. Come on…
All that said, I’ll be back for Season Two because it’s Middle Earth on television with amazing production values and I will fail my saving throw against that every time.
EDIT : Also meant to mention that I agree 100% with Tom on the multi-cultural casting. The big stink over it (in social media, not here on QT3) was total racist nonsense. At no time during any of the 8 episodes did I feel that an actor’s ethnicity negatively affected their ability to portray their character in any way, and in some cases like Durin’s wife Disa, Arondir and Sardoc I thought it actually helped enhance the intensity or gravity of their character. I very much enjoyed Middle Earth as a more diverse setting than it was originally written 75 years ago.
He began as a Maia, a craftsman with allegiance to Aule. He was then seduced by Melkor. So, it’s not like he was born as a force of pure elemental evil. I think there is room for an telling in which he has some complexity. That makes for a much more interesting villain.
It depends how far they push it, of course. If he’s portrayed as some kind of anti-hero, that would be tough to swallow. Season 1 Walter White is quite different from S5 “I am the one who knocks” WW. Let’s see what they do.
Saurbrand + Galadriel = Teehee teehee!
The bolded part is important, as it’s all about the timing. If this show was telling Sauron’s story from the time before and shortly after he was corrupted by Melkor, than sure, that would be a great time in which to tell a story of complexity where Sauron’s intentions might have still been somewhat noble, but influenced and corrupted by evil. It’s not though. This is Second Age Sauron…thoroughly corrupted and evil from the get go. Even his offer to Galadriel to rule together to “heal” the land rang false, as by now his idea of “unity” is to simply subjugate the races of Middle Earth under one banner…his own. This is not a good man whose circumstances have spiraled out of control to create a flawed, violent and callous person, this is an all-powerful being whose very soul has been corrupted by evil…and he’s fine with it.
I’m not going to claim there isn’t an interesting story to tell centered around Second Age Sauron as I’m certain there is, however I am also almost certain this particular writer’s room is not up to that challenge. Hopefully they take some of this season’s constructive criticism to heart and bring in some additional writing talent.
Hahahaha. I missed this bit from the article you posted the first time I read I read it.
Sauron in the books comes to the Elves as Annatar, the “Lord of Gifts.” Halbrand is never referred to by that name, though one tell of his identity early in the episode is that Celebrimbor thanks him for his gifts. Did you decide having someone call him Annatar would be too obvious?
Patrick McKay: We were concerned about a situation where the part of the audience steeped in lore is six or seven episodes ahead of the characters. If deception is an important part of the journey, we wanted to preserve that experience for book readers too. The idea that the shadow can take many forms was part of what we were attracted to. The reference to gifts is a nod to the Annatar of it all, but also, at the end of season one, three rings have been crafted, and as you know from the song Fiona Apple sings at the end of the season, there are still seven for the dwarves, nine for the men, and one for the Dark Lord to come. There are more gifts yet to come.
Sharpe
1684
To me this is a sign the writers just don’t “get” Tolkien in a very deep way. There is plenty of fantasy in the modern era doing more nuanced takes, with great work being done by Martha Wells, Daniel Abrahams, Brandon Sanderson, N.K. Jemisin and many others. But that’s not Tolkien. Tolkien wrote fantasy as myth, as struggles of archetypes. Sauron as the dark lord is almost a force of nature, not an individual personality to be humanized. The same thing goes for the Adar plot and efforts to “humanize” the orcs. Heck Rich Burlew had a better riff on the nuances of “evil races” in old Order of the Stick comics than that Adar crap, which didn’t fit Tolkien at all. The actor who played Adar was excellent, and the individual role of Adar was good, but the whole “humanize the orcs” theme was just off.
Basically, the writers just don’t get Tolkien. On top of that, their writing was inconsistent and often of poor quality. Overall the show as a profound disappointment to me.
If they wanted to do “nuanced fantasy mystery box show” they could have saved a quarter billion and gotten a different license, or written their own setting.
Fair enough. I choose optimism!
Helps me get through the days ;)
