Amazon's Lord of the Rings - I've Got A Bad Feeling About This

ah the lord of the rings one of my favorite books of all time and without doubt one of the best cinematic adaptations of a literary work that hollywood has ever managed to pull off the original peter jackson trilogy was a massive critical and commercial success earning rave reviews [ __ ] tons of money and amazingly enough the love and respect of tolkien fans all over the world great stuff but then they tried to repeat this success with the hobbit turning a modest fantasy adventure geared towards children into a bloated movie trilogy stuffed to the gills with unnecessary action sequences too many characters and clumsy attempts to link it in with lord of the rings it wasn't a great idea in retrospect and ended the lord of the rings saga on kind of a sour note but hey at least it was over and done with right [Music] ah [ __ ] yup that's right amazon have found yet another market to gain a monopoly over and what better property to shamelessly exploit sorry develop towards this goal than one of the most beloved and popular film franchises of all time only now it's going to be a tv show spanning at least five seasons and it's going to be set thousands of years before the war of the ring want to know about the fall of numenor want to know how sauron came to be want to know the backstory for a bunch of characters that will be long dead by the time lord of the rings came around no me neither now generally i've kept pretty quiet about this show because i wanted to wait until there was more to actually comment on but the more i read about it online the more i'm beginning to suspect that well it's gonna be a [ __ ] stinker for a start let's take a moment to consider what made the original peter jackson trilogy so good well the acting and direction were all great but fundamentally the trilogy succeeded because it remained faithful to the source material jackson and his mates were smart enough to realize that tolkien had already written a [ __ ] perfect story for them and all they really needed to do was find a way to condense it into about 9 hours of screen time or 11 hours if you were one of those mad lads who went for the extended cuts yeah we never quite got the tom bombadil sing-along hour that we all wanted and the battle of minas tirith was resolved a bit too easily for my liking but overall they did a cracking job with these movies they had all the source material they could ever ask for and their only real concern was deciding what stuff to leave out things started to go a bit off the rails with the hobbit trilogy though because the original book was barely 300 pages long and as charming as it was for its time let's be honest here it wasn't exactly an epic adventure to begin with the solution was to add in a bunch of their own content to pad out the story and the result was a trilogy of movies that felt bloated over the top and well unnecessary which brings me neatly along to the source material for amazon's tv show the silmarillion the silmarillion is basically a collection of interconnected stories legends poems and doodles done by tolkien over the course of his career and patched together into a somewhat coherent format by his son christopher after his death it's less of a structured narrative and more of a mythical history of middle earth and all the stuff that eventually led to the war of the ring and trust me it's not exactly a [ __ ] page turner so that's basically what amazon have got to work with a loosely structured illustrated history book with no dialogue character development or any particular plot to speak of and if you want an example of how this kind of situation plays out consider what happened to game of thrones after dan and dave ran out of novels to copy and paste from mostly because george r r martin's work ethic makes your average glacier look like an f1 car by comparison damn i wish i could grind out one chapter a year and call it steady progress anyway on the subject of game of thrones i'd like to draw your attention to public comments made by jeff bezos the lord emperor of amazon and future ruler of earth who stated that he wants lord of the rings to be the next game of thrones and considering the general lack of imagination and creativity in the world of film and tv today i don't think he's just referring to the success and recognition he wants i think what he really wants is to emulate the dark gritty mature tone of the earlier show and put it into lord of the rings that's why they apparently hired an intimacy coach to help out with the sex scenes which is pretty [ __ ] funny to me i mean these are growing ass adults and they're professional actors they already know how to pretend and presumably they also know how to [ __ ] it's really not that hard to combine the two anyway i think you get the point here they wanted sex and nudity in this show partly because i imagine it'll allow them to work sexual politics into the narrative and give their strong female characters a convenient mechanism to attain power and leverage but mostly because game of thrones had sex and unity and game of thrones was popular and jeff wants his show to be popular too so why not just copy other popular things and hope that it works out why can i never seem to shake the feeling that jeff bezos is like everyone's dorky middle-aged dad desperately trying to hang with the cool kids like he started building space rockets because elon musk did it now he's trying to make the next game of thrones because everyone thought that was cool right jesus what's next for him is he gonna get drunk and start a youtube channel anyway i digress game of thrones succeeded because it was kind of a novelty to have a fantasy show with swearing and boobs and gruesome often unexpected deaths it felt irreverent and unpredictable like oh [ __ ] the normal rules have gone out the window with this one the problem though is that game of thrones is a very different animal from lord of the rings and what works in one doesn't necessarily translate into the other tolkien's work is an example of epic fantasy from a very different age it's about virtuous larger-than-life heroes fighting unmistakably evil enemies stories of friendship honor and loyalty classic tales of good versus evil yeah romantic relationships were still a thing often prompting acts of great bravery and personal sacrifice but they were usually portrayed in a more innocent restrained kind of way like we didn't actually need to see irwin and aragorn [ __ ] each other to understand that they were two people in love we didn't need to see elves naked to know that they were beautiful elegant creatures far above the world of man basically what i'm saying here is that tolkien's work reflected higher grander ideals than that it was about aspiring to bigger and better things rather than getting bogged down in primitive human sexuality jesus as if we need more of that [ __ ] these days i also suspect that tolkien's old-fashioned wholesome idealistic view on good versus evil doesn't factor in particularly well to today's weird nihilistic postmodern creative wasteland where nothing is right or wrong nobody is good or evil and nothing we do means anything his particular brand of storytelling is the polar opposite of the stuff we churn out today because god forbid people might come away from a movie or tv show feeling inspired and emotionally satisfied if this show follows the current trend it'll probably paint sauron as the misunderstood hero but hey these are all petty concerns in the great scheme of things a strong writing and production team could still pull off a great show despite its weak beginnings so let's take a look at them shall we the show's head writers are patrick mckay and john payne can't say i've heard much about either of them so let's have a look at their imdb pages oh oh so basically you've got a massively expensive tv show trying to hammer together a coherent story from the scattered notes of an author that were never really intended for publication by copying the formula of a completely different show headed up by two guys whose only significant writing credit is a disastrously bad star trek movie that nobody watched [ __ ] genius decision making right there do you actually want this show to fail and of course because this is an adaptation of a fantasy work written by a white male that's heavily based around northern european culture it doesn't take long for the brainlits of modern journalism and social media to start swarming around it like flies on a particularly greasy shite already the internet is awash with barely coherent poorly thought out blog posts and articles subtly picking away at tolkien's legacy character and personal beliefs demanding greater diversity and representation that's totally incompatible with the subject matter desperately projecting their own hang-ups and biases and vindictive desires onto something that was meant to be about higher and better ideals and of course angrily lashing out anyone who dares to point out the stupidity of their opinions it's the same tired predictable pattern that gets played out again and again with basically any high profile ip these days and it's pretty much the reason we can't have good things anymore every single piece of artistic work announced today immediately gets pounced on and dragged down into the mire of identity politics by people who are so empty and soulless that they literally have nothing else to define themselves by and openly hate anyone who does and the ones who really suffer most here are the people who just want to get swept up in a good story you know i seem to recall that the whole point of fantasy is to provide an escape from the gripes frustrations and concerns of the real world a chance to lose yourself in a different universe where people don't talk and act like they came out of a social justice seminar a world of adventure and excitement and boundless possibilities a world like middle earth as tolkien once imagined it but i guess that's not allowed anymore ultimately based on everything i've heard about it so far it seems like all the [ __ ] stars have aligned with uranus to make lord of the rings a creative and financial failure for amazon just another unwelcome rehash of an old ip that should have ended 20 years ago helmed by people without the skill or experience to properly steer it through the troubled waters ahead and almost certainly warped and influenced by current day social and political activism fans of the books don't seem all that enthused by the direction it's heading and for general audiences i think the disastrous end of game of thrones has left a sour taste in their mouths this gonna take a long time to wash away luckily i have the perfect solution anyway that's all i've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 1,583,429

Keywords: JRR Tolkein, Silmarillion, feminism, SJW, The Hobbit

Id: BT_RrIobJvo

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021