Rings Of Power - The Ultimate Insult To Tolkien

oh Amazon why do you hate us so I mean I know people often make jokes about movie reviewers like myself having to suffer through bad content so that they don't have to but rings of power season 2 is one of the rare cases where I actually began to feel it to put this into some kind of perspective I once climbed the highest mountain in the UK on a boiling hot day with an absolutely stinking hangover every step of the way and that experience was less of a SLO than getting through three episodes of this show in time for open bar it was to put it bluntly one of the most miserable and depressingly tedious media experiences of my entire career that somehow found new and creative ways to defecate on token's Legacy and prove once again that modern culture is an absolute blight on Humanity from the cringe inducing dialogue straining for grandio pomposity and peppered with so many tortured metaphors that the writer should be arrested for crimes against literature to the idiotic character choices and a ridiculously convoluted plot held together by so many conveniencies and shortcuts that it makes JJ Abrams look like Christopher Nolan to the overwrought performances by a cast of effeminate gen Z [ __ ] that ticks almost every diversity box except acting ability to the hamfisted direction and oversaturated cinematography that's so dark you literally can't see what the [ __ ] is even going on half the time it all adds up to a billion dollar slab of ARS cancer that shames the legacy of Lord of the Rings and makes a complete mockery out of everything that tolken stood for put in another way the rings of power season 2 [ __ ] sucks now I'm going to do my best to summarize whatever passes for a plot here but in the interests of my own sanity I'm going to speedrun this [ __ ] because the less time I have to spend talking about rings of power the better anyway allow me to give you the meat and give it to you raw the show gets off to the worst possible start by devoting a good 20 minutes to an extended flashback sequence explaining how siron got traed by his own lieutenant and eventually got reborn as howand before running into gadriel not a great plan why are you wasting all this time by telling us stuff that we already know do you guys even understand what storytelling is or is this whole thing just an amusing little side project for you also I love the idea that Sauron a Godlike being of unimaginable power and influence commanding armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands by the sheer force of his will is reduced to this dor in a shitty wig trying to argue with a couple of dozen Orcs in a cave somewhere for a show that cost a billion dollars rings of power somehow manages to make everything that should be grand and epic feels small and cheap I mean do you really think an entity as powerful as siron would need to argue his case to get Orcs to follow him anyway they decide that they don't like him anymore so they stab him to death but then his blood turns into a flumpy black goo monster that eventually climbs out of the mountain and rolls down the side like a turd until it gets stuck in the wheels of someone's wagon before it eats them this is real this is stuff which actually happens in this show honestly I could probably spend an hour breaking down this opening scene alone because it perfectly encapsulates how the writers completely misunderstand almost every aspect of what saon is but let's just keep moving for God's sake So eventually we get back to the present day where saon allows himself to get captured in moror and brought before Adar who for some reason doesn't recognize him or sense his power and manages to convince the guy to release him by using the following gambits saon is alive again and I know you want him dead even though I totally shouldn't know that because you betrayed him hundreds of years before I should have been born but don't think about that too much and I don't actually know where he is or what he looks like now but the important thing is that he's totally not me and if you let me go then I can go to the elves and maybe find out where he is and then report back to you so that you can March your not particularly strong armies halfway across Middle Earth to the most heavily defended stronghold in the entire world and possibly take him out and I'll totally do all of that and not just disappear and never come back trust me bro and the amazing thing is it actually works so he teleports over to Kell brimo and says that it's ringing time buddy and even though Kell brimo has been specifically warned never to deal with him again saon transforms into a fire demon Angel thing and he's like don't worry man I've been sent from heaven to help you out trust me bro so KB brimar is like sure okay I'm convinced meanwhile elron steals the three Elven rings that have already been made and decides to destroy them because they might be influenced by Sauron but [ __ ] Doughboy here wants them anyway because he already wears more finger jewelry than your average gypsy taxi driver so elron throws himself off a waterfall and magically survives so that the rest of the plot can happen but then they catch him anyway and use the Rings to bring the elf trees back to life or something then there's gandal and the not Hobbits who are wandering through the [ __ ] desert looking for stars or something none of them seem to know or care why they're in this show anyway and frankly neither do I but I did kind of laugh when we get introduced to this doofus played by Kieran Hines literally this was your one chance to introduce a racially diverse character and have it actually make sense in universe and you chose possibly the whitest actor in the entire [ __ ] industry to play him what is wrong with your brains like do they just not operate like regular brains or what also it's nice to see the real Grim Shady make a come back because those guys totally weren't a laughing stalk from the first season oh yeah and is zelder is alive again because wow it turns out that baiting the death of a major character that we know can't die yet wasn't the best way of sustaining dramatic tension neither was bringing back Don Lemon last who was a pointless character even in season 1 and hasn't changed much here it did make me laugh though when they had to explain away the death of bronwin even though she was totally alive and well at the end of season 1 yeah those orc arrows just take a while to kill you I guess don't think about it too much there's also a tedious storyline in morio where the dwarves are running out of food but they can't do anything about it until Duran and his father reconcile but they won't because they're basically idiotic children now I guess and lastly there's a Growing Power struggle in downtown numor where discount KL Marx is trying to Stage a coup against diverse female Queen and he's so smart about it that he literally talks openly about overthrowing her in the middle of a crowdy Tavern truly it's the last thing they'd be expecting you know one of the big questions going into season 2 was would they have learned any lessons from the nuclear level backlash they took in season 1 do you think we should hire better writers better directors and better lore experts should we tone down the girl bosses and the weird Sauron galadrial romance angle and the forc diversity and the clumsy political allegories nah it'll be fine everything that was bad in season 1 is somehow even worse here there's all the usual tropes like the girl bosses who fight and strategize right alongside the men as if that's normal procedure the modern Metropolitan diversity projected hilariously onto northern European medieval cultures that totally don't support it but bizarrely absent from the Middle Eastern cultures where it would actually make sense the cheap looking sets and the actors who look like they're allergic to testosterone but that's just what we expect from Modern Hollywoods the dialogue is so clumsy and long winded and pompus so blatantly trying to replicate the Epic tone of the books that it actually had me grit in my teeth even Ian McKellen couldn't make verbal diarrhea like this sound good and no offense to the actors but they ain't exactly on Ian McKellen's level in fact no [ __ ] it all offense to them because they suck at their jobs they've had like two years to up their game and if anything they come across is even worse than before characters range from idiotic to the point of actual medical retardation to making such insane leaps of logical deduction that it can only ever be in service of the plot writing sophisticated characters like elves is always going to be a challenge because each of them has got thousands of years of wisdom and experience to convey and well this show is proof that a character is only ever as smart as their writer and that ain't much then there's the morality question season 1 had only a tenuous understanding of the morality of tolkin world and that understanding seems to have completely vanished here the show seems to want us to empathize with the arcs for some reason there's some misunderstood oppressed minority or something there was literally a scene where an orc begs his Commander not to send him off to war before hovering protectively over his orc wife and baby that is horrific you still would though wouldn't you I mean do you not understand that Orcs are not individuals in the sense that humans are they're a force of nature they're a blunt instrument to be wielded by evil they don't care if they charge into battle and get slaughtered by the hundreds they exist only for war in the two towers they get spawned into existence have a helmet slapped onto their head and a sword thrust into their hand and their first question is literally what do you want me to kill and destroy they don't have private lives and you can't make me empathize with them they are monsters at this point tolken must be spinning in his grave so fast that you could hook him up to a Dynamo and power the entire National Grid with him this show is quite simply an Abomination a ruined corrupted form of entertainment twisted and mutilated lost beyond all hope of redemption and if Amazon had any common sense whatsoever they would cast it into the fire destroy it before it consumes us all anyway that's all I've got for today thank [ __ ] go away now