Posted on 09/05/2022 12:32:35 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Where’s a wizard to fight trolls when you need one?
The mega-budget fantasy series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is under fire from some of its viewers. A day after the first two episodes of Amazon’s billion-dollar baby debuted on Prime Video, the show’s average audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a “rotten” 37 percent, and reviews on Amazon have been outright suspended.
Compare that score to TV critics giving the show a very fresh 83 percent average, and many of the reviews were highly enthusiastic (“It’s great: a gorgeously immersive and grandly ambitious spectacle, packed with stunning imagery and compelling plot threads,” wrote TV Line). The Hollywood Reporter dubbed the first two episodes a rather successful, promising start.
The scores come a couple weeks after Marvel’s She-Hulk was declared review bombed on the site, with 88 percent critics score and an initial 36 percent audience score.
How The Rings of Power is doing on Amazon’s own user review ecosystem is not yet clear because the company has taken the unusual step of suspending user ratings for the show. An Amazon source says reviews are being held 72 hours to help weed out trolls and to ensure each review is legitimate. The source later claimed Prime Video started the policy this summer on all its shows.
“Review bombing” is when a group of online users post numerous negative reviews for a product or service due to its perceived cultural or political issues rather than its actual quality. Perusing Rotten Tomatoes’ audience reviews for Rings of Power, there are some one-star entries that meet the definition. “They wanted to involve such an important work with current politics and they have succeeded,” reads an example.
(Excerpt) Read more at hollywoodreporter.com ...
It just doesn’t bother me.
As Bob Costas said about sports: “Look it’s a wacky business. Who cares?
I saw a contrived inter-racial romance between a black "elf" man and a white village woman. The slanderous rumor in her village is that her white husband deserted here because she was having an affair with an elf. We are supposed to approve.
I saw black hobbits and a cute white tomboy girl. No boys.
Yes, I am thoroughly tired of seeing blacks cast in unsuitable roles as obeisance to current political correctness. Can you say, "cultural appropriation"? The "woke" crowd sure can.
I saw Galadriel cast as a neurotic warrior-princess, defying orders from the male patriarchy and experiencing mutiny by her cowardly male squad of soldiers. It is a trope which has been used in dozens of other movies and they weren't any good either.
The old white guys cast as the elf high king and councilors look like a bunch of hair-salon poofters and metro-sexual politicians. Their decision to disband military forces makes no sense at all, considering that the high king admits that he knows "the shadow" is still extant somewhere.
Apparently, he does not want to stir up any trouble by keeping Galadriel around to find "the shadow".
The cinematography was stunning. That was the only good part of the episode.
Yes, I watched the first episode. That is all I will watch.
I tried to watch it, but, 15 minutes in, it was just plain painful to watch.
Watched the first Rings episode and it was awful - could barely make it through. Very boring. Bad writing, bad dialogue and bad acting. I won’t bother with anymore. Not surprised they shut down reviews.
It could work because the white guys with blonde hair came from ships from faraway lands (Afrikaners).
Very boring. Bad writing, bad dialogue and bad acting.
Yep. I think writers are the worst part. They are doing the job half-@$$ed. And they don't care. No one is holding them accountable.
It's important to have a producer who holds everyone accountable. Tom Cruise is one guy I know who is doing that. Few folks are like that in Hollywood right now.
Unfortunately certain people now think Wakanda is real.
Third age, From the book series/Jackson popular films showed there were not African/sub-saharan characters. Must mean either there was some genocidal purge or Bezos is going to fund theatrical releases of his vision of the Lord of the Rings books/Hoobit for good measure as well.
Sorry, should be “The Hobbit”.
Who will watch them? How can you do better than Peter Jackson's trilogy?
Musk’s review is pretty close to dead-on. What they’ve done with Galadriel is an abomination. Turning her into a Mary Sue action hero is bad enough, but they’ve really diminished who she is. She’s is treated as just some impulsive kid who won’t listen to her elders, but she herself is royalty, and either the second or third eldest Elf in ME. She would be viewed with reverence/awe, not as an annoyance. And Elrond is shown as being her superior, or at a minimum her peer, when she’s in fact his mother in law and far more powerful.
Just as bad. Peter Jackson stretched a short fun book into three tedious and seemingly interminable movies.
I may go back and watch at least Ep 1. In the first episode after a minute or so an elf showed up with a haircut that made him look like he’d just stepped out of a Beverly Hills hair salon and I stopped streaming.
I know in an interview one of the showrunners asked “don’t you want the show to look like the world around you?”. I figured she was talking the diversity angle, but apparently she meant the cast would literally look like hip young people of today. That may be ok for younger folks, but I first read LOTR 50 years ago this month and I guess I’m not in the target audience.
I think that's a fair point, although making him both black and having an affair with a human woman is a bit heavy-handed in terms of pushing a narrative.
But that's far from the worst thing in the show. The whole part about Galadriel essentially being exiled back to Valinor -- a very un-Tolkien concept itself -- and her leaping out of a boat right before it reaches Valinor (presumably), is just jaw-dropping.
What an odd question. Of course you don't -- it is Tolkien's Middle Earth, not the good 'ol USA circa 2022. I mean, isn't a fantasy supposed to take you to a world different from your own?? I mean, would you want Hogwarts and its denizens to look like your local high school?
The annoying part of this is that there are/were storylines in Rings of Power that would have involved other races. Specifically, they could — and very much should — have told the story of how the Numenoreans (Aragorn’s ancestors for those who don’t know...) fell into corruption by enslaving and exploiting people of other races who lived in the southern parts of Middle Earth. That’s kind of why Sauron was able to rally some of them to fight with him later on.
You made a good observation that showing a black actor wooing a white actress probably makes the KKK and Nazi types very unhappy. I hadn’t thought of that.
Your other points are well taken as well. As I said on an earlier thread, the writing is lazy, dull, and unoriginal, with chunks of dialog both large and small lifted almost verbatim from other equally average productions. It is just dreadful.
Fair enough. Still, it’s a shame.
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