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 ...
DH and I, and my sister who is a big reader of SF and fantasy, old and new!
Watched and decided we have seen MUCH worse, and can’t quite fathom all the hubbub.
Shrugs.
We will watch and decide as we go.
Well, when I see movies with White Zulu warriors, I’ll ignore things like a Black Anne Boleyn. FWIW, I don’t care about black elves, but they shouldn’t look like Don Lemon. And they shouldn’t turn Galadriel into “GUY-Ladriel, Infallible Action Hero”.
Roger that. You want a diverse cast in a fantasy epic like this. Actually, so far the character actors and secondary roles are much more interesting than the leads. Better acted too. I think the hard core Tolkien fans are the ones most ticked over this. And most of the actual racists are so used to diverse casts they’ve resigned themselves not to let it get in the way of a good flick.
I forced myself to watch the second episode and it was better. But still I’d give it 6/10 only and half of that is for the CGI and cinematography. I’d give the GOT prequel 8.5 after last night.
Don’t disagree. Their money! If they go woke and it sucks rocks, too bad for Bezos.
“...I think it’s at least derived from the prequel to the LOTR trilogy, The Silmarillion...” [Samurai_Jack, post 53]
You have your internal plot timelines mixed up. Also, your points of emphasis.
The complete story arc of The Hobbit and LOTR occupies only a couple pages at the end of The Silmarillion - a perfectly accurate representation of the amount of time it occupies in the author’s imagined Elder World.
Thus, The Silmarillion is a prequel only in the sense that it was published more 20 years after LOTR. It expresses a bunch of linguistic, philosophical, moral, religious, literary, and other concepts the author had come up with years before, and for long wished to draw together into a coherent, unified work. He wrote some of it down as early as 1917 - twenty years before The Hobbit was published.
Much of The Silmarillion is written in a distant style echoing epics, heroic legends or Biblical material. Possibly too remote for some readers. “Dull” may not be too strong a description. And it does contrast with the concrete, pulse-quickening, you-are-there tone characterizing much of LOTR. Bringing that level of detail to The Silmarillion may have required an expansion to one hundred volumes or more.
The author did write snippets of various sub-tales that are summarized in The Silmarillion, expanding and enhancing them at levels of nuance, detail, and import fully comparable to the best passages in LOTR. Rather more adult, occasionally darker, even somber. Son Christopher (also executor/editor) published several in Unfinished Tales, and a number of later volumes.
Read up and enjoy.
More libiot manipulation.
Have the Orcs and Elves and Hobbits started stripping naked yet?
Jeff Bezos wanted Lord of the Rings to be like Game of Thrones.
“liberals” never like to hear criticisms of themselves so they block free speech.
Like any other created world it has lore. They are not following the lore.
If they want to create their own fantasy world and their own lore it is no big deal.
But you do not change someone else's lore.
If they want to create Karens of the Whiny Butts and have dancing blue dildos who communicate by squirting they are free to do so.
But if you are working inside the frame work someone else created, you follow their lore.
So... if someone takes Black Panther and makes him Asian only people who are racist will be upset?
How about we take Saladin and make him Christian?
In "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" Esmeralda is a french girl who is kidnapped by gypsies. How about we make her Eskimo?
After all, it is just fiction.
The lore matters.
You do?
Why?
I know! Let's do "The Journey to the West" and have it all played by Bushmen.
That would be very diverse.
Calling people who want a particular mythology to be true to its origins “racist” is childish and asinine. Your accusations are the product of a lifetime of brainwashing.
“Thus, The Silmarillion is a prequel...”
Thanks for the affirmation poindexter.
Because it’s a fantasy that uses multiple non human races.
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