The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is Amazon’s huge fantasy swing. Jeff Bezos, from on high in his dark tower, is putting a ton of money behind this one, so expect to hear a lot about it over the next month and change.
The Rings of Power does not adapt The Lord of the Rings. It’s set thousands of years before that, during the Second Age of Middle-earth. It’s based on the appendices to Tolkien’s landmark work, although a lot of the things you remember from the author’s beloved trilogy are still here, including elves, orcs, and hobbits. There are even some familiar faces around back then; we’ll learn what immortal characters like Elrond, Galadriel and Sauron were doing way back when.
Thus far, the show has gotten a pretty mixed reception among fans. Personally, I worry that Amazon’s ambition to make a Game of Thrones-sized hit is taking precedence over its desire to make a good show. I see troubling signs. For instance, during the Second Age, Sauron isn’t the imposing demon lord he is in The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien’s mythology, during this time he takes on the form of a beautiful deity who is so charming and splendid that he beguiles the elves into making Rings of Power, rings he plans to use to take over Middle-earth.
We don’t have confirmation, but from what fans can piece together this is what Sauron looks like in The Rings of Power:
Does this guy look charming and beguiling to you? He looks like he’d kill your cat and spit in your food if you let him in the house; no one is getting tricked by this man, least of all the elves. Choices like this trouble me.
There’s also the fact that the show will collapse several thousand years of history into a more manageable span. And they’re inventing lots of characters to fill out Tolkien’s relatively sparse appendices. There’re just so many ways this show could go wrong and I’m nervous, if hopeful.
Producers want The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power to stand the test of time
However, some fans are taking aim at the show for another reason, according to Games Radar: if you visit Lord of the Rings forums or check out the YouTube comments under the trailers, you’ll probably see complaints that the show looks “too political” or that it’s being unduly influenced by modern politics.
Now, I’m just gonna be blunt: when someone complains that a TV show is “too political,” I think it’s reasonable to wonder if what they really mean is, “This show has Black/female/queer people in it and I don’t like that.” And given that the cast of The Rings of Power is pretty diverse, I definitely wonder that here. This show may well suck, but it won’t suck because it has a Black hobbit or a female dwarf. That’s a silly line of thinking that should be dismissed.
And according to co-showrunner J.D. Payne, the producers are trying to follow Tolkien’s lead and not let current events influence the series, which leaves only the diverse casting as the root of complaints about politicization. “This was one of Tolkien’s debate points with C.S. Lewis, his friend and colleague,” McKay tells Total Film in the magazine’s new cover story about The Rings of Power. “It was very important that what he was creating was not an allegory. He was not commenting on historical events of his time or another time. He was not trying to transmit a message that spoke to contemporary politics. He wanted to create a mythos that was timeless, and would be applicable – that was his word, ‘applicable’ – the applicability across times.”
"Every single choice we’ve made at every turn of making this show has been to be faithful to that aspiration, because that’s what we want as viewers. We don’t want to adapt the material in a way that might feel dated. We aspire to being timeless. That’s why these books still speak to people so much, because so much of what’s in them has not aged a day. And we aspire to do the same thing. And I think we feel that once people see the show, and see what the stories and characters and worlds are in context, they’ll feel the same way."
Everything everywhere for all eternity is political and it’s time to accept that
Tolkien’s work has indeed stood the test of time; they wouldn’t be making a wildly expensive new Lord of the Rings show 70 years on if it hadn’t. That said, even The Lord of the Rings has influences. Lots of people have argued, for instance, that the story borrows a lot from Tolkien’s own experiences during World War I. The Lord of the Rings may not be an allegory for anything in particular, but it still takes cues from things that happened in the real world; it can’t not. As long as stories are written by fleshy human beings who live on the planet Earth, things that happen on the planet Earth will influence those stories.
That’s one of the many reasons it’s silly to complain about stories being “political.” Politics is everywhere you look, it’s part of the air we breathe, so of course it’s gonna slip in to the art we create. The Lord of the Rings depicts war as a bad thing. That’s a political message, and that’s okay. The Rings of Power will be political too, in its way, and it couldn’t be otherwise. Nothing can.
And having said all of that, I still fear that The Rings of Power will blow chunks, but that’ll have nothing to do with its political messaging or lack thereof. In any case, the show premieres on Amazon Prime Video on September 2.
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