The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Prime

Agreed, the best scenes belong to Elrond and the dwarf prince. The only character development I can think of was related to the dwarf prince character, after he was given an interesting dilemma which tested his loyalties, forcing him to make a decision.

They should have just anchored the story around this, with glimpses of what was happening in the Southlands as the B plot, building up a foreboding threat in the background.

Instead they bizarrely centered the story around a warrior version of Galadriel, gave her some vague, contrived reasons why she's the protagonist, and stuffed the series full of largely irrelevant scenes.

Finally got around to watching this. Wow, it's really stylistically beholden to Jackson's trilogy, lifting lines of dialogue (maybe these are from the books?) and shamelessly copying camera shots and editing. Hope PJ is getting some sort of royalty, he arguably deserves it more than Tolkien. It does look lavish, but it's all somehow quite cringey at the same time. I think that's due to the source material more than anything.

Finally got around to watching this within the last week or so. Enjoyed it!

Having read the appendixes 20 years ago, but not really remembering anything from it, I felt like they teased a few things that vaguely made me excited for the coming seasons as well, without me remembering why I was excited.

I actually think it's a positive, not having any big names in these roles. Naturally it's a "need" to have some kind of feature of Galadriel and Elrond that makes them similar to the PJ film versions, but it worked out in my opinion.

The biggest negative comes from being a prequel, and trying to fit into an existing continuity, and so the over-arching story of the season didn't really grab me, but I was still eager to watch the next episode to see where the story developed. If the episodes were shorter I would probably have binged this in a short time span.

Hmmmm I don't think Mr Polycron's lawsuit will be successful somehow..

It would explain why the show was such bollocks.

He's quite clearly a fantastic author, look at this excerpt that's on Twitter.

Not enough dwarven erotica.

Maybe Bezos and Co. could countersue on the grounds of his book-story being less than stellar (I guess I'm being diplomatic here) hurt their very expensive TV series...

In more important news www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/ian-mckellen-lord-of-the-rings-gandalf-b2321643.html

Oh gosh. That's a shame. Was really looking forward to it. Gosh. Oh dear. Etc. Hopefully it gets so delayed they decide not to bother doing it. The irony of work derived from Tolkien that very much pushed the virutes of living in harmony with nature and was against mankinds destruction of natural habitats in turn causing stresses to the ecosystem isn't lost.

Just can it guys. You had a shot and it turned out shite.

From someone that has seen it, I can only advise that you don't bother.

Yeah I really enjoyed it too. If you liked what you've already seen I'd advise you stick with it, but to each their own!

Sums it up honestly. Unless you're utterly enthralled with everything you've seen thus far, it... doesn't exactly improve.

I didn't hate it, I just found it very bitty and inconsistent, which meant it never really built any momentum and I didn't care that much about any of the characters. Which meant once I drifted away there wasn't much pulling me to come back.