The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power trailer goes for shock and awe

Yesterday, we got a ton of new info about House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel show. Not to be outdone, Amazon today released a trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The company is spending an ungodly amount of money on the series, which is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before Bilbo or Aragorn or most of that crowd was born. It still feels like a Lord of the Rings series, though. Watch the trailer below:

Everything you expect from a Lord of the Rings story is here, including elves, dwarves, men and hobbits, here called harfoots. Also sweeping landscapes and a haunting, ethereal song. There’s a lot of sweep to the trailer, as there would be; a lot happens in the Second Age, including the rise and fall of the island nation of Númenor and the arrival of Sauron on the scene as a proper Dark Lord.

There are even a few familiar faces. Fans will recognize younger versions of the elves Elrond (Robert Aramayo) and Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), although given that they’re immortal, “younger” doesn’t mean as much as it normally does. By and large, this is a whole new cast. “We were not interested in doing a show about the younger version of the same world you knew, where it’s a little bit of a prequel,” showrunner Patrick McKay told Entertainment Weekly. “We wanted to go way, way, way back and find a story that could exist on its own two feet. This was one that we felt hadn’t been told on the level and the scale and with the depth that we felt it deserved.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power production is “breathtaking”

The Rings of Power has gotten a lot of attention in part because of how expensive it is. To hear director Wayne Che Yip tell it, you definitely see that money behind the scenes. “Being on set was just breathtaking,” he said. “We were there for weeks, but every day I’d notice a new detail I’d never seen before, like graffiti etched into weathered stone, or a small shrine. There was a whole wall made out of oyster shells. Every corner you’d turn, there was just so much storytelling.”

Yip was talking about the set for Númenor, an island populated by powerful humans that’s eaten from the inside out by corruption. “It was one place that we were just laser-focused on saying, ‘We need to get this right,'” said showrunner J.D. Payne (he and McKay oversee the show together). “It’s never been seen before. People have some ideas of what elves look like or what dwarves look like and what those kingdoms might look like. But Númenor was, in some ways, a blank canvas.”

And Númenor is just one of the many elements Payne and McKay will have to nail if they want this show to work. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Amazon Prime Video on September 2.

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