Lukus
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Post by Lukus on Sept 24, 2022 22:57:40 GMT
Yeah she's not a sympathetic character at all, the dour-faced misery.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 25, 2022 9:48:08 GMT
The more I’m thinking about this the more I’m souring on it. I just don’t know why anything is happening. There are no stakes, no context and no sense of weight to anything that is happening. I just don’t care about any of it. Scenes seem to exist for little to no reason and the world just seems very small.
I’ll see it to the end but I’ve decided it’s altogether quite shit.
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Post by Nemesis on Sept 25, 2022 11:37:43 GMT
I would have you smile again. Cheer up Chucklenuts it's not the end of the world!
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Post by Nemesis on Sept 25, 2022 11:39:35 GMT
(I quite like the Galadriel actress as it goes)
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Sept 25, 2022 11:52:28 GMT
Five episodes in, I'm not finding it too bad, some of the individual plots are interesting enough.
But the overall story still feels aimless, things happen almost at random. The dialogue is mostly dreadful and delivered in the most dramatic way possible (I do think the actors are doing their best, it's just that they are probably given shit material to work with and then told to pad each scene for extra time). Frankly it feels like every episode could work better if it were compressed in 20 minutes.
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askew
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Post by askew on Sept 25, 2022 12:00:36 GMT
I'm intrigued by:
- Dark Elf and his Orc Pals
- The Stranger (I'm guessing he'll become coherent by season end, but it's getting a little tedious)
I like:
- Durin (played by a Welshman!) and Elrond, but can they do something other than eat at each other's houses?
I'm bored by:
- Numenor
- Dungaree Lady
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Sept 25, 2022 12:06:40 GMT
Realistically, this season is going to solve almost no plot threads at all.
It does feel like they are setting up the Numenoreans to save the Southerners, but I'm not sure how that would be possible unless these various scenes are not actually taking place at the same time. They have just left port, while the orc army is already on the march.
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Post by simple on Sept 25, 2022 12:51:08 GMT
Not so much on here but I do find it a bit funny that other reviews are upset that the show being slow, about trees and now having songs is very “un-Tolkien”. As if without a publisher cracking the whip he’d have written anything else.
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Post by Bill in the rain on Sept 25, 2022 13:31:08 GMT
I stall haven't quite gotten around to starting it, so it's a shame that it sounds very small.
Fantasy TV shows, and for that matter pre-LotR movies, seeming small has always been a problem, but I assumed this would have the budget to fix it.
When in The Shannara Chronicles the big epic battle is mainly 20 blokes in armour, I'll kinda forgive it because that's clearly all the budget they had.
When Cursed's big village burning evil army was a dozen dudes in red cloaks, I was less forgiving because I thought they'd have enough budget to do better than that. And cos it was shit.
But this is the most expensive TV show ever.. isn't the budget as big as the LotR movies?
Doesn't Numenor have a cgi army of thousands?
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Post by 😎 on Sept 25, 2022 13:54:45 GMT
The army of Numenor was supposed to have been so big and so well trained that Sauron just noped the fuck out of war and went with them voluntarily as a prisoner.
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Post by rawshark on Sept 25, 2022 15:39:58 GMT
Oh the show is very, very Tolkien. And that’s the problem. He was a great world builder but a terrible writer.
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Post by ToomuchFluffy on Sept 25, 2022 17:46:31 GMT
- The Stranger (I'm guessing he'll become coherent by season end, but it's getting a little tedious) Perhaps he's a G-Man cosplayer? |
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Post by GigaChad Sigma. on Sept 25, 2022 20:16:25 GMT
As people have mentioned, the scale is way off.
Ooooh the Southlands are in danger! Given the Southlands seems to be comprised of one small village and the threat seems to be one Dark Elf and a gaggle of Orcs who cares? Numenors solution? Three boats and fifty rookie soldiers...
It looks great but it doesn't feel even close to epic.
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Sept 25, 2022 20:18:00 GMT
Well, we did get an epic battle. In the beginning of the first episode. For all of five seconds.
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Lukus
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Post by Lukus on Sept 25, 2022 20:46:25 GMT
It's got the same issues that Star Wars has in completely failing to get the scale of everything across. It doesn't even feel like these are just small groups of people in a wider society. They feel like the only people.
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H-alphaFox
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Post by H-alphaFox on Sept 25, 2022 20:51:19 GMT
(I quite like the Galadriel actress as it goes)  |
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Post by Nemesis on Sept 26, 2022 17:01:52 GMT
(I quite like the Galadriel actress as it goes) Well..I didn’t want to Galade-rail the thread, but yeah. |
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jp
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Post by jp on Sept 26, 2022 18:07:31 GMT
I’ve not minded the slow approach but I think they’ll have to ramp it up in the last few episodes.
The impression I got was that the Numenor ships were just out on a scouting mission and that it wasn’t supposed to be the full weight of their army (or even their best an brightest). That being said - it has been a little hard to follow at times so I could be wrong on that.
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dogbot
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Post by dogbot on Sept 26, 2022 18:10:01 GMT
I quite enjoyed the last episode.
Although I get the impression that they might be planning for a loooooooong run of series.
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Post by Vandelay on Sept 27, 2022 8:05:48 GMT
Seems I'm starting to like this more, just as everyone else is starting to go off it!
I do think my issues with the first 3 episodes was mostly because I watched episode 1 with quite a bit of jet lag and ended up only taking half of it in. It's taken me up until episode 4 to really get up to speed with the different story threads. Before I wasn't really sure if I was actually enjoying what I was watching, but I'm at least now interested enough to confidently say that I will be sticking through with it.
I agree it is very slow though. It seems every episode has to be over an hour long, even though they probably only have enough content for just about 40 minutes. I can't really comment on the lore, as I only really know LotR from the films and books (without reading the appendices), so don't know anything about the stuff this is mostly based on. There is definitely a lack of epicness to much of it though, as well as the separate story threads all feeling very unconnected.
I could see the season ending as a bit of damp squib, of the Jack and Locke staring down the open hatch variety.
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MolarAm🔵
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Post by MolarAm🔵 on Sept 30, 2022 10:59:21 GMT
Hooray, an episode that wasn't boring! More of those please! Though it was a bit fucking dumb all the same. I'm just going to assume the end was a dream or premonition or something. |
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Post by 😎 on Sept 30, 2022 13:42:13 GMT
I think I’m done. Yeah, nice to see a battle and all but going for a “are we the baddies?” approach with Galadriel? Get to fuck. Tolkien’s work is nigh on unambiguously good vs evil, and throwing in “actually Orcs are wonderful sensitive people” as an attempt to Walking Dead the show is a total bollocks move. |
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MolarAm🔵
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Post by MolarAm🔵 on Sept 30, 2022 13:52:09 GMT
ORC LIVES MATTER
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Sept 30, 2022 15:22:32 GMT
Reactions online are looking good, I'll be watching this over dinner and hope not to be disappointed.
And in the end, I guess even weak LOTR is better than no LOTR, especially on a rainy day.
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malek86
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Post by malek86 on Sept 30, 2022 19:11:38 GMT
Okay, I'd say it was a better episode than most, if only because there was a bit more action (and the tavern scenes were actually quite tense), but it was all a bit stupid anyway. Be kind of funny if it turns out that Mount Doom itself was created by some guy with an indestructible key shaped like a sword that somehow activated a dam. Who even built that? Though I don't know if that's what they are aiming for. Maybe it's just some... random volcano? Yeah...
It all still feels very low-stakes too, with the big battle for the Southlands being some village raid by a small-ish mob, which is then defeated by a smaller still horseback company made up of newly-drafted amateurs. Who knows, maybe if we are lucky, this season is a setup for much grander things later on. I think I’m done. Yeah, nice to see a battle and all but going for a “are we the baddies?” approach with Galadriel? Get to fuck. Tolkien’s work is nigh on unambiguously good vs evil, and throwing in “actually Orcs are wonderful sensitive people” as an attempt to Walking Dead the show is a total bollocks move. I've read that Tolkien himself, as a Christian, was actually dissatisfied with his own depiction of orcs as a race beyond salvation, but never managed to come up with a good explanation for why they should not be so. At any rate, even in a modern series like this, I'm not actually expecting to see any case of Orcs being anything but evil. |
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Post by Whizzo on Sept 30, 2022 19:28:10 GMT
Blimey that was some episode.
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Post by GigaChad Sigma. on Sept 30, 2022 21:22:33 GMT
It's enjoyable though there was some teleportation going on.
I'm not sure why all this activity centres on a three building Village. Are there not hundreds of villages that make up the Southlands
It's very contained.
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Youthist
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Post by Youthist on Sept 30, 2022 22:12:35 GMT
Why won’t anyone think of the Orcs?
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Post by Nemesis on Sept 30, 2022 22:13:44 GMT
For the whole show I thought Waldreg was actually called Baldrick. Which made it weirdly entertaining whenever he had a cunning plan.
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Post by gibroon on Sept 30, 2022 23:25:03 GMT
I really enjoyed that. It wasn't the greatest of starts and felt a bit clichéd but the last part was great. It's the birth of Khaazadooooom ffs. Awesome! /may not be canon |
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