Why Doesn't The Rings of Power feel like The Lord of the Rings?

Season 2 of the Rings of Power is over and to many the show simply doesn’t feel like The Lord of the Rings, Middle-earth or anything in Tolkien’s world – and I find this extremely interesting! So in this video we will dive into the Rings of Power - both season 1 and 2 and see what is lacking in terms of the fundamental elements that makes up Tolkien's stories. One thing is getting the lore wrong, but when you work against the fundamental philosophy it not only deviates, but it becomes its own thing. A thing that isn't exactly successful, if we look at the numbers. To put it simply - The Rings of Power is not very good

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Intro: 0:00
Chapter 1: The Man, The Myth & The Tale of Middle-earth 01:44
Chapter 2: The Cosmology of Middle-earth 04:35
Chapter 3: What is the Lord of the Rings truly about? 05:52
Chapter 4: The Nature of Evil 07:19
Chapter 5: What makes a hero? 10:31
Chapter 6: A Tale of Death & Deathlessness 12:57
Chapter 7 - Conclusion: The Fundamental Problem of The Rings of Power 15:00
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Clips and images from Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Guillaume Ducos
Ted Nasmith
Images of J.R.R. Tolkien
Ralph Damiani
Images from The Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit Trilogy – Warner Bros.
Jake Murray
Joseph Feely
Roger Garland
Mariano Merchante
Nia Kovalevski
Anthony Catillaz
Sean Vo
John di Giovanni
Matthew Stewart
Giovanni Calore
Eterea Edizioni
Painting of St. Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne
AlystraeaArt
Lorica-Art
Aegeri
Kapriss Art
Steamey
L J Koh
Paul Lasaine
Kip Rasmussen
Marko Manev
Borja Pindado
BembiAnn
Fran Fdez
Concept art from LOTR Rise to War
Andrea Piparo
Joan Wyatt
John Howe
Gellihana-art
Sara Morello
Snouart
Daniel Kolpakchi
Alan Lee
Concept art from Guardians of Middle-earth
Pedro Blanco
David Boudon

Some of these artworks were commissioned by Coasts of the Wizards and all rights belongs to them.

#Lordoftherings #ringsofpower #Tolkien

[CounciloftheRings]

Thank each one of you for clicking on this video! I hope this can be a good start for some of the great stuff coming on the channel! I want to dive deeper into Tolkien's lore and philosophy and I hope you'll join me on this journey. The Rings of Power seemed like a fine spring board to this topic, as it gets pretty much all of it wrong. This is also why I couldn't keep watching. Hopefully the vastness and depth of the lore makes it even easier to understand why the Rings of Power bothers me so much. There's one more video to go, and then I hope not to think or speak of the Rings of Power in a VERY VERY long time!
Cheers and have a great weekend! 🧙‍♂✌

[MrNimbus]

The only good thing this show did was get me to rewatch the LOTR series again and appreciate its beauty

[InspiringPhilosophy]

Great work. I knew the show was rejecting Tolkien’s philosophy in the first episode when Finrod said one must touch the darkness to know the light. That is antithetical to Tolkien in every way.

[rafaelgustavo]

Bad writing. Sauron, in the second age, was supposed to be a pseudo Promethean figure generating religious engineering in Harad and Rhûn with the metallurgical revolution he made in the east and south. He was like Mephistopheles from Goethe's Faust or Azazel from the book of Enoch.

Galadriel, in Eregion, was supposed to be a sage and a political opponent of Annatar's reformist ideas. She could be like a philosopher-queen archetype.

[exnihiloism]

What's missing? Love for Tolkien, soul, respect, passion, interest...

[drpants]

For Amazon, Lord of the Rings is just a name. A marketable and profitable name they don't wish to understand deeper or present it with care and love.

[PotterMarauder]

This is the only analysis I’ve come across that accurately pinpoints the actual heart of Tolkien’s story and why ROP fails so badly. Thanks for your work

[Jayako]

Man's even citing Augustine of Hippo, this is several levels above so many popular channels.

Amazing work.

[JayTeeGR]

-Lack of creativity and skill.
-No respect to the source material.
-Horrible casting.

[nosotrosloslobosestamosreg]

Lack of respect for source material and specially no writing talent there.

[Ryansghost]

Amazon have tried to contemporise a mythological fantasy, and it just doesn't work. It's lost all its epic grandeur and heart. PJ had more sense.

[christosvoskresye]

You're pretty much spot on here. It is a sadly common phenomenon that writers today are not only unable to see things from any perspective but their own, they often don't even seem to be aware that other perspectives actually exist.

[JonasGrumby-OO]

It’s the writing. All sound and fury—no depth. They aren’t trying to tell a story. They’re just trying to make a show.
EDIT: I wish I knew some people worth sharing this wonderful video with. It’s so spot on it’s nearly painful

[chandran]

Its a poor man's adaptation of Peter Jackson's films. They copied the scenes, the dialogue and used up 100 times the budget and still failed Spectacularly

[offtheshelfET]

Great video, I loved how you delved into the themes of his work. Another thing that I find feels very anti-Tolkien about this show is it’s lack of respect for time and distance in middle earth. Characters seem to almost teleport to the other side of the map within days which is in stark contrast to Tolkien who would put thought into how many miles characters could realistically travel and how long it would take them. It’s a seemingly small thing but it helped make middle earth feel real and massive.

[zirkalda]

I think something else that makes ROP feel so hollow compared to Tolkien’s work is how inconsistent the characters are. Tolkien is known as the man who defined archetypes through consistent characters. Some do grow and mature (just look at Bilbo in the Hobbit), but it’s never at the comprising of their core.

In ROP, characters will flip on the whims of the story the show thinks it’s trying to tell. I’ll list some examples.

- Adar. Supposedly he cares for the orcs deeply. They are his children. And yet in the first season alone he is reckless with their lives in battle, does not punish Arondir for killing several, and needlessly burns one just to monologue. Nor does he do anything to curb their darker impulses and behaviors, and this attitude continues into season 2. Now I’m sure the showrunners might say that was the point, that he has become what he despised Sauron for. But there can be no fall if the character was never consistent with his desires in the first place. It’s lip service to an arc, not actual development.

- Sauron. In this show Sauron starts out supposedly remorseful, wanting to start a new life away from his role as the Dark Lord. He even makes the repeated claim that his fall to evil was Morgoth’s fault, and that upon Morgoth’s defeat it was “as if a veil had been lifted”. Yet we see in the prologue for season 2 that this is not true. Sauron was ready to continue being evil of his own free will and only stopped because the orcs mutinied against him. Yet his resistance to Galadriel’s attempts to get him involved in events seems genuine, and season 2’s prologue supports this as a genuine attempt to turn over a new leaf, even remarking to Galadriel in Mordor that fighting by her side for a good cause made him feel good. Yet all of this is down the drain once he wakes up in Eregion because he is now fully back on board with being evil. It’s an abrupt shift in his personality and goals with no catalyst for the change beyond “it had to happen sometime”.

(TBC)

[Snoopydoop]

This video is like a 2 hour massage and you've hit every single triggerpoint of each and every muscle in my body.
Very thankful for your effort, and hoping it reaches many, many people.

[jiiyl]

The thing that bothered me from the first minutes of Rings of Power was that the elves were just people with pointy ears, not ancient people. Galadriel was supposed to have walked the Earth before there was a sun to mark the days, but comes off as amazingly immature and petty. Dwarves, orcs, and hobbits were little better.
A story with truly different races allows us to see ourselves through alien eyes, or to see other things that people might be.

[sofiamarin]

I think one scene exemplifies this and that is the scene of the two towers when the battalion of elves arrives and enters Helm's Deep, although it is not canonical it is great, and you can feel the grandeur of the elves, as magical, powerful beings from another world, and then when Haldir speaks poetically, but beautifully. All the money in the world could not have gotten The Rings of Power to show a scene like that.

[kalzium]

I think that the mindset was to fix lotr instead of adapting it. Fantasy inspired by Tolkien has evolved and the showrunner want to "modernize" lotr.

Orks were at the beginning mostly swordfodder, but in latee depiction they got more nuanced. Do these modern interpretations of the orks work with lotr? I think not.

Also the grey in grey morality that is more in common in modern media doesn't work with lotr. If Sauron is not that bad, then it is not that bad when he rules middle earth.

Rings of power has more in common with these infamous bad live action adaptions from Disney then their source material.