Season 2 of Amazon's Rings of Power
Ring, new trailer for the world's favorite small-screen fantasy series has just hit the internet . Everything is here. Glittering swords, roaring monsters, men with big bangs pouting in the candlelight. Yes, the second season of Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon is boring. And that's just Matt Smith's hair extensions blowing in the wind.
But that wasn't the only fantasy saga to poke its head above the parapet this week. Hours earlier, Prime Video lit the beacon of return for its $1 billion Lord of the Rings prequel, Rings of Power, with a promo every bit as intense and stunning as the House of the Dragon promo.
There was a lot of what you would expect from a Tolkien spin-off. Elves, volcanoes, a man with a staff, vaguely similar to Ian McKellen. But the overall purpose of the trailer was to remind us of the return of Old Big Flamin' Eye himself, Sauron – the great trickster of Middle-earth, the Dark Lord and, as viewers of Peter Jackson's films will remember, ace hobbit killer.
There is a LOT of Sauron – mostly in his “fair” incarnation as Annatar (sort of like his glam rock/Ziggy Stardust phase). He has taken on the new form of a shining elf, completely unprepared and determined to conquer all of Middle-earth.
Besides Sauron, the promo looks like a Marvel movie with better wigs. There's an Avengers-style shot of the beautiful Queen Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and some of her elf pals standing in a circle with weapons drawn. A soft monster mutters in the shadows. Orcs behave like orcs. “One franchise to rule them all” is back – or it will be when the series returns in August.
As with any huge fan base, the Lord of the Rings “community” has varying opinions. Reaction to the trailer was divided. Some expressed approval for the scope and scale of the series' vision of Middle-earth. They even have good things to say about Sauron's elven hair. Others, however, fear that, like the series' first episode in 2022, Rings of Power will be a triumph of style over substance.
“It looks like a major industrial incident. I'm looking forward to two hours of YouTube documentaries about everything that went wrong to make this happen and minute-by-minute analysis of the event itself,” one fan wrote on Reddit. “Do dwarves still have Scottish accents?” – sighed the other. One commentator noted that while the House of the Dragon trailer received 44,000 likes and only 416 dislikes on YouTube, the ratio of “no” to “yay” for “Rings of Power” was 70,000 to 32,000. The hate is strong.
Undoubtedly, some of the backlash is racist. The show's diverse cast has drawn the scorn of many on social media, although it is remarkable that House of the Dragon has managed to avoid such backlash despite also featuring a diverse cast of stars.
Morfydd Clarke in Rings of Power Posted by Amazon
However, it is equally true that many of those who hated the first season and are not thrilled with the new trailer are true Tolkien fans who are tired of The Lord of the Rings being turned into just another Hollywood franchise. They were already alarmed by the news that Peter Jackson was returning to Middle-earth to direct two new Warner Bros. films, the first of which is about Aragon's search for Gollum (directed by Gollum himself, Andy Serkis).
The Ranger's pursuit of the unfortunate creature takes up several paragraphs in the novel The Fellowship of the Ring. This is part of a long anecdote by Gandalf, who was probably just killing time while Frodo gathered the strength to address the Council of Elrond. In any case, there is already a 15-year-old fan film, The Hunt for Gollum, available for viewing on YouTube (Warner Bros. ordered it removed this week, but relented amid protests).
B This Christmas, Serkis' film will follow the animated film War of the Rohirrim, which traces the origins of the Riders of Rohan. You can see why it was given the green light. Who hasn't lay awake at night thinking: “Riders of Rohan – where did they come from?”
Get ready for a new wave of Tolkien video games, too. The deluge has already begun with the widely panned Lord of the Rings: Gollum, where you play the artist formerly known as Sméagol (it was so bad that plans for a Nintendo Switch version were cancelled). Next up is Tales of the Shire, a “cozy fantasy” game in which the player grows vegetables and ignores the return of an ancient evil outside of High Hey in Buckland.
That The Lord of the Rings has been called the new Marvel has been more or less directly confirmed by Warner Bros. boss. Discovery by David Zaslav, who said that Middle-earth is not monetized enough. “The vast, complex and dazzling universe imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien remains virtually unexplored in cinema,” he said last year. He might as well have said, “Give me a franchise worthy of Warnerrrrr.”
But you wonder if he, or anyone else greenlighting these projects, ever found time to read The Lord of the Rings. If they had, they might have realized that Middle-earth is an elaborate love letter to Western European myth-cycles, rather than a sandbox bent on plunder.
Additionally, many of Tolkien's most beloved tales remain beyond Hollywood's reach because the author's estate has not licensed them. Warner Bros. owns the film rights to The Lord of the Rings, and Prime Video is allowed to adapt the supplements containing a brief history of Middle-earth included in the final volume of the trilogy.
Ian McKellen as Gandalf in The Return of the King Photo: Kobal
However, some of Tolkien's best stories are under lock and key. This is because they are contained in his vast cycle of legends, The Silmarillion, the rights to which the estate did not put up for auction. Unless the Tolkien family changes their minds or Hollywood pulls out its checkbook and starts lobbying hard, the stories of Beren and Lúthien, the Fall of Gondolin, or the dragon Glaurung are doomed to remain untold.
Just a few years ago, Tolkien had a faithful guardian in the person of the writer’s son Christopher. He was a zealous defender of Middle-earth's heritage and disapproved of the Hollywoodization of his father's work. He even hated Peter Jackson's magnificent original Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, after his death in January 2020, the floodgates opened. The rights to LotR TV were auctioned off, resulting in the dreaded Rings of Power. What's next? Magic the Gathering cards based on Tolkien? It's too late – they came out last year and made $200 million in sales.
Depending on your point of view, this is either a golden era for Tolkien fans or the beginning of the dark ages. Never before has there been so much Middle-earth in our culture. However, few of these adaptations have the goosebump-inducing quality of Tolkien's work (the One Ring RPG comes close).
It's like we've fast-forwarded to the end of Sovereign. from the Rings, when the evil wizard Saruman imprisoned the hobbits and turned the Shire into a huge capitalist enterprise. Frodo and his friends send him packing. However, David Zaslav and Prime Video will be more difficult to deal with. We have entered a new time in Middle-earth, where the great unblinking eye of the corporate balance sheet looms over everything and it is impossible to escape its withering gaze.
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