It is TV that has no interest in being TV - a quality I suspect will extend to embracing the exhausting “eight-hour movie” style of plotting, though I would be happy to watch episodes beyond the first two and be proven wrong. It is storytelling by monetary brute force. Even if that kind of unflinching earnestness isn’t to your taste, it’s impossible to say the show doesn’t achieve the emotional and tonal palette it set out to create.Īt the same time, every aspect of The Rings of Power’s immensity is also a steely-eyed refusal to be ignored, an effort to ram itself past the split attentions of Peak TV through sheer, undeniable size. Everything is about Friendship or Honor or Greed or Strength, and it’d be so easy for it all to read as completely goofy if it were not utterly committed to that sincerity in every single beat. It is a forthrightly sincere show, with no room for cynicism. Its emotional core, though simplistic, is just as big and openhearted. The story is expansive enough to fill up the show’s huge map, and where its fantasy premises promise impressive set pieces, like a battle with an ice troll or ships sailing into the Undying Lands, The Rings of Power lives up to those promises. The whole kit and caboodle is simply too big to be a failure.
#Large caboodle full#
It’s also great at making you want to buy a tiny, perfect Rings of Power–branded Harfoot Playmobil set with a collapsible tree house and six miniature baskets full of acorns and feathers. The Harfoots, a newly created species that feel like a mash-up of Hobbits, Borrowers, and Beatrix Potter, live in a world of hypertangible, painfully adorable accessories. The dwarfs march around their mountain caves with glorious Rube Goldberg–esque machines and grunt with bearded gruffness. Galadriel - a Lord of the Rings veteran character, now appearing in origin-story mode as played by Morfydd Clark - is ethereal and inhuman in all the right ways.
In its very best and most beguiling sequences, The Rings of Power is all brightness and tactile, detailed beauty. It helps that, unlike a recent swath of science-fiction and fantasy franchises, The Rings of Power’s visual language avoids gloom, preferring to overwhelm with sparkling fires, glinting treasures, and walls of dazzling light. Still, some of the appeal will translate regardless.
#Large caboodle series#
Funneling this many resources into visual effects is appreciated, certainly, yet it seems like a bit of a shame for a series that many viewers will watch on palm-size screens. Most viewers will see The Rings of Power on a small screen, but it is best designed for a theatrical experience (like what was offered to some critics before release).
You will get a scene in which someone stands on top of a tower and gestures at a vista out of a video-game cutscene, your hair will be blown backward, and you will like it. Elves will have pointy ears, dwarfs will have beards, orcs will be gross, and the stakes are a continent-size battle between good and evil. You will remember what New Zealand looks like. The Rings of Power, thankfully, is closer to a best-case scenario: The immense budget has been translated into something that does feel nearly as huge as its price tag.Īs the first several minutes lay out generations’ worth of backstory and the camera swoops enticingly across a massive, detailed map, The Rings of Power leans on Bear McCreary’s score as a canny extension of Howard Shore’s original motifs to underline the main message: Whatever this behemoth is, it’s a Lord of the Rings joint first and foremost. In the worst-case scenario, that amount of money could have resulted in an absurd disappointment, like one of those thousand-dollar stunt meals that gets dreamed up by Vegas hotels, a mediocre burger piled high with inedible gold leaf. Those elements are secondary, though, because the immediate, gut-level response to The Rings of Power is that it feels like looking at the Grand Canyon: You knew it was going to be a pretty sizable situation, but when you finally step up to the edge and look over, your brain cannot help but scream, “Big! Really big! Look how big it is! It just keeps going!”Īs has been reported and exclaimed over for years since it was first announced, The Rings of Power, which debuts its first two episodes on September 1, is the most expensive series in TV history. There are other qualities to mention - its themes, maybe, or, as my colleague Jackson McHenry instantly noted, how much the series’ younger iteration of Elrond looks like a yassified Niles Crane. The first thing to say about Prime Video’s new Lord of the Rings series is that it is big.
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