MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE SHOW, YOU MIGHT WANT TO CONSIDER WAITING UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE DONE SO TO READ IT.

Despite being one of the most lavish, ambitious, and expensive television shows in the history of the medium, the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was not quite the overwhelming success that Amazon Prime Video hoped and expected it to be. Although it quickly became the most-watched Prime Video original series in history, and although it received generally positive reviews from critics – particularly for its visuals and designs – many Tolkien purists took great exception to the fact that showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay took some creative liberties with the source material. Not only that, the show was also the victim of racist online ‘review bombing’ stemming from complaints about the casting of non-white actors in key roles, as if that matters in a fantasy setting. Such is the way of toxic fandom today. Despite this, I thought it was absolutely outstanding, one of the most impressive television productions I have ever seen. Read more…

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE SHOW, YOU MIGHT WANT TO CONSIDER WAITING UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE DONE SO TO READ IT.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is one of the most lavish, ambitious, and expensive television shows in the history of the medium. It’s a prequel to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film series, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings histories, The Silmarillion, and its various appendices, and is set in the Second Age of Middle-Earth, thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings took place. Essentially it tells the ‘origin story’ of several key events in LOTR lore: the fall of the Dark Lord Morgoth and subsequent rise of his chief servant Sauron, the creation of the land of Mordor, the fate of the island kingdom of Númenor, and the forging of the Rings of Power, as well as the relationships between various elves, dwarves, and men, who make and break alliances in an effort to combat the tide of evil. Numerous familiar characters from the film series appear, not least the elves Galadriel and Elrond, as well as a race of creatures known as ‘harfoots,’ the ancestors of the hobbits. Read more…