[Formendacil]

Boro brings up an interesting topic: Jackson vs. the Amazon team: who does it better?

Honestly, I think it's not a fair comparison, if you're comparing the LotR movies to RoP--RoP relies so much on the movies for establishing what the cinematic "feel" of Middle-earth is (New Zealand, certain looks for the Númenóreans, Howard Shore's motifs, etc, etc, etc.). And to make an LotR movie, Jackson had to compress Tolkien's story.

However, if you want to compare the Amazon team to Jackson's Hobbit movies, then I think it's a much fairer comparison: both are making prequels that rely on the LotR movies for Middle-earth's cinematic feel and both have a LOT of blank-filling (whether that was necessary in Jackson's case is another matter--let's pretend that it is). I think on that front that it's clear that the Amazon team has a deeper knowledge of Tolkien's lore and themes--and I'm not saying that Jackson doesn't love Tolkien, but I think Jackson loves The Lord of the Rings specifically whereas it's clear the Amazon team knows more than just the LotR--it's clear they know The Letters, the Silm, Unfinished Tales, and possibly more given their clear awareness of Tolkien's themes and ideas.

If you compare RoP to the The Hobbit movies, I think RoP comes out looking quite good in comparison (literally, if you remember the 48 fps decision), but it's not without flaws. For all that I want to praise the showrunners for their clear awareness of Tolkien's lore, I'm not at all convinced they're good writers or experienced storytellers. When I say "good writers," I mean their dialogue, which was rarely memorable, sometimes baffling (even just from an in-universe perspective), and just rarely sounded to my ear like "Tolkien." Granted, he's a HARD writer to mimic, but it should surely have been easier to get in the ballpark.

I also think that they simultaneously did very little this season and crammed too much in: when we FINALLY get to the making of the Rings in this final episode, it felt like this rushed by incredibly quickly and that we'd wasted most of the season getting to this point. The fact that Arondir, Bronwyn, Theo, Adar--i.e. the entire Southlands plot, was missing from this episode had that entire, time-consuming plot feeling overblown and digressive, and I think Númenor has been given the shortest shrift of the canon elements--so far, it has borne nearly the entire burden of the time distortion, and the motivation for this massively large civilisation sending a (tiny? powerful?) fleet to Middle-earth is hard to understand and really feels like it happened because "that's the plot."

My final verdict, I think, is that I overall liked the show (faint praise that I nonetheless only remember giving to one of the The Hobbit movies), found it quite flawed, yet nonetheless found it had enough interesting things and well-done things to hold my interest. Given how much that was through the lens of a Tolkien fan who enjoys dissecting this here, I'm not sure I'd recommend it for the general public, but I probably would defend it against the indiscriminate haters.

One thing that I find almost baffling, though, is how it cost so much--the most per episode of any television show ever. How? They're not paying famous actors. They're clearly not paying the most expensive writers. There are ample complaints I've seen (admittedly, on the Tumblr-verse) of how Amazon cuts corners with costume designers, CGI artists, etc (you know, basically, Amazon is the World's Worst Capitalist Excesses Evil Overlords™--in other words, they'll do everything that Netflix and Disney+ do to keep costs down and then some, because they are The Most Evil). I'm not saying that Amazon made this on a shoe-string budget, and it's clear that a lot of resources were poured in here, but... it's eight episodes. Perhaps it's simply a case of "money can't buy success," because the result feels exceptionally middling and it hasn't had the cultural impact Amazon wanted.