The prequel to The Lord of the Rings - "Rings of Power" is scheduled to be released by Amazon this Sept. WooHoo !!!

Hope it's better than the Wheel of Time series :/

I'm hopeful, with reservations.

We'll see.

Link to Verge article

It's better than the Hobbit movies.


I mean, it would have to be, no?

I might have to wade through The Silmarilion again

quote:

Originally posted by Blackmore:
I might have to wade through The Silmarilion again

It's dry as KJV and that puts a lot of people off, but that book, and The Children of Hurin tell a story ten times bigger than TLOTR books. It's definitely time to go through it all again for me.

I MAY have to get Prime Video for this. Big LOTR fan here.

If the teaser is any indication (focused on the creation of the rings), this will only be covering the very last part of the Silmarilion, which is a shame. For a theoretically boundless (time-wise) streaming production, they could have done the entire history.

Of course, most people would have stopped watching long before it got to anything they'd recognize, I suppose.

-Rob

quote:

Originally posted by BurtonRW:
If the teaser is any indication (focused on the creation of the rings), this will only be covering the very last part of the Silmarilion, which is a shame. For a theoretically boundless (time-wise) streaming production, they could have done the entire history.

The show is set in the Second Age, and will reportedly cover the rise of Sauron, the forging of the Rings of Power, the fall of Numenor, and the Last Alliance.

But that's still roughly a 2400 year span, so I'm not sure exactly how they're going to pull all that off. Probably primarily set in the 3300s through 3400s (Sauron's corruption of Ar-Pharazon, the Fall of Numenor, the founding of Gondor and Arnor, and the Last Alliance), with flashbacks to earlier stuff from the 1000s-1600s (the rise of Sauron and the forging of the rings).

Adapting the entire history of Middle Earth, from creation through the Second Age, wouldn't really be feasible for a traditional TV series. It might be doable as an anthology miniseries, with each separate vignette tackling one major self-contained story from the Silmarillion. BUt even that would be quite tricky.

So it makes sense that they'd stick to just one cohesive plotline involving the Fall of Numenor and its (relatively) immediate aftermath. Plus, that would let them anchor the end of the series on the opening scenes of the Fellowship of the Ring movie.

Okay, that's pretty cool. Apparently, most of the shots from the above teaser are actually practical effects:

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:
Okay, that's pretty cool. Apparently, most of the shots from the above teaser are actually practical effects:

[FLASH_VIDEO]<iframe frameborder="0" height="630" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sZEpWvQFXqQ" title="YouTube video player" width="1120"></iframe>[/FLASH_VIDEO]

Alright. That's pretty cool there!!

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:

quote:

Originally posted by Blackmore:
I might have to wade through The Silmarilion again

It's dry as KJV and that puts a lot of people off, but that book, and The Children of Hurin tell a story ten times bigger than TLOTR books. It's definitely time to go through it all again for me.

Oof...I gave my Guide to Middle Earth reference book away a few years ago. I would need another before I were to attempt the Sailmarilion again. So many names, objects and places.

I didn’t know there was such a thing. I may have to see if I can find one also. There’s an awful lot to keep straight in that book.

It's worth picking up, especially if you're slogging through the Silmarillion.



Or nowadays, there are also online wikis that you can reference for free, like https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page or http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Main_Page

Okay so the the "trailer" for this upcoming dumpster fire has dropped. Of course it's going to be a nasty filthy mess, but I wanted to drop this video here because while I don't know who this girl is, she makes some really good points.

What really made this video though, for me, was the last 3 minutes. I can't imagine how cool it must have been to be a part of the original LotR trilogy project. Start at 13:40 if you don't want the commentary on the new show.

Saw some screenshots of black dwarves. Friend of mine said there's an interracial couple. That's what was missing from Middle Earth, fantasy pre-Britain wasn't inclusive enough and was too white.

I'm six minutes into the cute nerdy tatted girl's video. Yeah, I'm out. I'm not doing diversity hire Tolkein. There's got to be a line somewhere, and I draw mine there.

"On the other hand, their "Tolkien scholar" in charge of lore supervision is a gender studies "Diversity officer" with a research towards feminism in Tolkien's works - obviously, people fear that the deviations from the source material are politically / ideologically motivated."

I'm noping the fuck out on this one. Nope. Just nope. Stuff like this? The fans are nerds. That's a segment of the population that DOES NOT tolerate people finger-fucking the source material. There's been heated, loud debates over the tiniest minutiae of everything from comic books to Star Trek, and you're going to fuck with the great grand-daddy of everything they hold dear? Good luck with that one.

I think I finally found the reason for my hatred of the series. When even you Lord of the Nerds that are into these books say The Silmarillon has to be plodded through, it explains a lot. You see, it was the first Tolkein book I picked up. That made it also the last. I almost made it through. Maybe I should have picked up The Hobbit first or anything lighter. I watched the LotR movies and they were rather boring. Mostly because of my bias against the Silmarillion and having no idea what I was watching.

Yeah, you didn't know it, but you did it wrong. It's like the King James Version of the bible compared to NIV for the rest of Tolkien's work - it's very dense, it's very verbose, and it kind of seems to not go anywhere until he hits his stride. I read it AFTER reading all the other stuff and it was a slog.

If you're not totally ruined for all of it now, try reading The Hobbit. It's like the kid's version of the material, and it sets you up for the rest of it.