Vanity Fair has an article that (finally) provides some real information about the forthcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power television series (from Amazon).
Overall, I regret to say that I’m quite disappointed.
This paragraph, explaining the key difference between the series and the original Tolkien history, is most dismaying:
‘In the novels, the aforementioned things take place over thousands of years, but Payne and McKay have compressed events into a single point in time. It is their biggest deviation from the text, and they know it’s a big swing. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” says Payne. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”’
Good grief. This is so …infuriating.
If one is going to make a series with five seasons during the Second Age, that series could easily be broken into two parts covering the following two pivotal periods:
A. The forging of the rings of power, followed by the War of Elves and Sauron (SA 1500-1700).
B. The capture of Sauron by Ar-Pharazôn, the downfall of Númenor, and the War of the Last Alliance (SA 3261-3441).
While no mortal characters (dwarf or human) could carry over from A to B, there are mortal characters who could persist for two centuries throughout both periods (given the long lifespans of Númenoreans and dwarves [just over two centuries, conveniently enough!]). And the persistence of Elrond, Galadriel, Gil-Galad, and Sauron would provide the narrative connection between the two periods.
There are many other things in the article that do not look promising, but the above misstep strikes me as the most calamitous.
That's your biggest gripe? Wow, you're in for a terrible surprise! Just my prediction...
ReplyDeleteHave you watched Foundation on Apple TV+? Because they totally screwed that one up royally in an attempt to make it TV friendly.
ReplyDeleteI was excited about that series but haven't watched it yet. My enthusiasm cooled considerably once I read some things about it.
DeleteYou missed out. It was brilliant. Forget how faithful or not it was. It was brilliant Sci Fi TV.
DeleteWell I can still watch it...
DeleteExpecting anything good from an adaptation of a novel into a TV series is already a recipe for disappointment.
ReplyDeleteYou can get some decent entertainment, maybe. Or you can read the novel.
I'm quite tired of the complete lack of creativity in the movie industry. Everything seems to be either an adaptation of some super-popular novel or a remake of some super-popular '80s movie. Or both. Usually, neither of them compare well with the original.