During last night’s Super Bowl, we got a new trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Amazon’s upcoming adaptation of stories from Middle-earth’s history that we’ve not yet seen on screen. Here it is:
I was a bit too caught up in the game (which did not go as I hoped it would) to give it a proper watch, but now having rewatched it, I can give a brief assessment. It has to be brief, because we had strikingly little to go on. We get basically half-second glimpses of some major characters in action, and slightly better looks at settings and production value than were present in last week’s Vanity Fair spread about the series. And . . . that was pretty much it.
In commenting on that spread, I wrote that “what glimpses of how things actually look that we do get are strongly evocative of that elusive Tolkien ‘feel.'” Much of what we saw in this trailer looks competently done, but I think I might have been too hastily charitable in my initial assessment. I am not sure it yet deserves the “Tolkienesque” moniker. In fact, despite the millions being poured into this series, it seems possible that the show’s creators will succumb to modern CGI sickness instead of striving for the grounded approach of Peter Jackson in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. That would be a disappointment.
It would be even worse if this defect signals a larger failure of the project: that it “only” ends up being a well-done fantasy series instead of a fitting adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work. Many of the trappings of the genre are present in Legendarium, but that’s in many cases because Tolkien originated or popularized them, and used them to bring his efforts to a thematically transcendent level. It’s not just fantasy “I.P.” that can be mined by success-seeking studio.
Again, I am willing to withhold judgment, and I want it to be good. But I am slightly less optimistic after seeing this trailer.