Amazon, Warner Bros in Talks for LOTR Series Adaptation: Variety

Some will be crabbit, some not. As is proper.

But yes, the crabbit will suffer neither sleight of hand nor half-truths.

I think the Harfoots will suck box ticking bollox. No point on me going to ToRN I would only get myself banned again.

Oh TORN has latched on to Amazon the way they did to PJ? I suppose that's to be expected. I may have to amble over and check out the Harfoot fest.

the crabbit will suffer neither sleight of hand nor half-truths. - Forest

{{Oh I like that! I'm having that! It's going in my sig that is. }}

Took a few tries to phrase it how I liked.

Talk of a show trailer over on the Discord to play during the Super Bowl on the 13th or something. Who knows.

I think I shall leave the Discord, too many movie fans.

It truly has been too long since I have re-read the LotR. I forgot that Eomer did say a very close line to this:



The reason it feels so false is through abridgement. Eomer does of course make such a threat (albeit with the honorific of "Master Dwarf"), but only after Gimli has offered to give Eomer "more besides" in addition to his name, and after Gimli has suggested that Eomer must be a half-wit incapable of comprehending the nature of Galadriel.

And Legolas bends his bow and draws an arrow, but does not aim it at Eomer's face. Far too many fully-drawn bows with deadly tips inches from faces in this series...

My main complaint about that scene was when the Rohirrim wheel around after Aragorn calls out it was supposed to look remarkably coordinated, but instead it looked pretty ragged. Hard to get right, I'm sure. Eomer whistling and gesturing over two horses by name wasn't in the book, but was pretty cool, largely making up for the lack of military precision in the horsemanship.

{{ Castingnews for a leading role- one of the 'proto-hobbits' a pretty young Australian actress I know nothing about.
More concerning than proto-hobbits is information, of a sort about the person the hobbits find who falls from the sky. Apparently he is called 'meteor man' has lost his memory of who he is and he comes out of an asteroid that falls.   Sauron will apparently also spend time with the hobbits and at some point in season 1 he will attack them (Makes it more likely meteor man is Sauron in some fashion)}}

I like the way Strajder spells his name.

Lots of crabbit inducing stuff. Where did these "exclusives" come from? Might they be deliberate diversions?

Disinformation, those in the know would call it.

{{ Unless of course those in the know are actually being fed disinformation about what they know }}

For the amount of money being risked on this, I can't believe they'd do anything as silly as meteor man. I can see the impetus for multi racial hobbits and the like, but a man who falls from the sky in a Tolkien series with sky-high fan scrutiny? There's got to be some chain yanking going on.

{{ Only way I can vaguely see it being real is if they have Sauron start the story having been cast into the Void and then escaping back to Middle Earth in (in an asteroid?) and then the hobbits, sorry Harfoots, sorry proto- multi-ethnic-probably led by females hobbits find him, they help him out and then eventually Sauron turns on them and attacks which is what drives them west over the mountains. And the proto-Rohirrim, probably consisting of 90% shield-maidens, a Queen, and black and asian folk despite them being well known for their Scandinavian appearance, will somehow be involved in all this (the only bit of which would be Tolkien would be early hobbits and early Rohirrim sharing land near each other and having enough interactions to have some shared language). }}

Huh, what? where/when was that?  Oh an interview.

Crabbit about the timeline condensation.  I thought they couldn't contradict Tolkien's outline.

That is NOT what a dwarf woman would look like.  Should be closer to man like.

The rainbow tendency is strong here.

The hell are they doing with castaway Galadriel?  

The hell are those "nomadic hunters?"

get one free read, don't waste it.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look

In the novels, the aforementioned things take place over thousands of years, but Payne and McKay have compressed events into a single point in time. It is their biggest deviation from the text, and they know it’s a big swing. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” says Payne. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”

No words.

This look dire.

The male Elf is the worst. Silvan Elf Orondir played by some dude from the hood. ffs. Galadriel and Elrond are bad as well. She is just Tauriel with blonde hair on a bloody raft in the sea?     and Elrond looks horrible casting, what's with the quiff?

 hate this.

Elrond should NOT look like somebody from a boy band.

One would certainly expect younger actors for elven characters from LotR: these are their younger selves, after all. Surely we anticipated that maneuver and so it does not surprise.

Galadriel looks kinda... Australian. No offense intended, but Cate Blanchett is kinda the exception to the rule.

I'm liking a lot of the costuming. The woman in the village with her boobs half-out and her thigh outlined in leather? Not so much, but a lot of the promotional posters are very beautiful.

I'm hoping Elrond's actor will have a great deal of charisma and so make us enjoy the casting, despite his boyish looks.

Goodness, that compression of events sounds drastic. It is an understandable maneuver, but requires great delicacy to avoid cheapening the histories with over-simple abstraction and rushed events.

Over on the Discord the usual loud-mouths are back-patting each other over their progressive-thinking, while with the other hand they chastise anyone who dares question why Tolkien's elves, dwarves, and hobbits are getting the "multi-cultural enrichment" treatment for the first time ever.

Hollywood and the BBC should create their own legendaria, instead of fucking around with other people's.

Oh geez I really shouldn't post anything when I get worked up about these things, but I can't seem to resist. I may or may not add another banning to my credentials in a minute over on Discord.

{{ I said right at the start of all this they had only two choices in telling it- to tell a generational tale in which many of the leads would have to change regularly, or to compress it all. Though I didn't expect them to compress it all to a set of events in a short time frame either, not quite that drastic.

I think its a huge mistake however. In this case telling  a generational tale would better suit the themes. If we see elves as consistent characters across series, but the mortal cast get old and die off throughout to be replaced by the next generaiton, then by the time we get to Ar-Pharazon its easy for viewers to grasp ( and even to a degree sympathise with) his desire for immortality. Its one thing to want to live forever just as among mortals and escape death, but far more understandable when your friends and allies do seem to live forever and escape death and you dont. And doing the show generationally would have emphasised that nicely.
Its also been done successfully before, going back to at least Shakespeare and his set of plays the BBC called the Hollow Crown, by time you get to Henry V everyone in the cast is different and you are a few generations on from Richard II and theres been a civil war started inbetween, but by that time the viewer has seen how all the history has led to this point and gives it all more meaning and weight.
What Amazon are doing is the equivalent of starting a story with Richard II, having the War of the Roses in the middle ending on Henry V winning Agincourt but making it all happen in one life time.
I dont see how that would work, either in Shakespeare or Tolkien. }}

Between the ages of about 24 to 36 people don't change their looks much, and could easily last for 5 seasons. They could definitely have the same faces for elves to anchor the audience while men cycle through the various seasons. It would be something never done before, and if the elven cast were strong enough that uniqueness would generate buzz. Hell, there's been plenty of shows with time travelling characters, or even crews of ships visiting different lands. Come to think of it, it's not that new at all. Damn it all, Petty, you're right. Using elves as the anchor would be the key.

I'll watch the dratted thing, but they've already blown it. A billion dollars down the drain when they could have done it right.

I think that the younger cast is ok I guess, don't have a problem with that apart from Elrond's stupid boy band hair.
Its the Afro-American Elf, surely that was originally a piss take on Twitter?, but they went and did it. Its aesthetically weird.  don't give a toss about the multi-cultural thing if its done for a purpose, like having southern realms, but fucking up the Elves is a step too far for me. I would last two nano-seconds on ToRN so wont bother.

Good point Petty!

I'm not sure which version is a more daunting task: compressing everything into a hundred years, or cycling through generation after generation of Men.

I'm reminded of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings actually. Earlier on Tolkien thought to have Bilbo as his main character in LotR, but this seemed wrong considering that Bilbo is meant to have lived happily ever after at the end of The Hobbit. There's the closest example we have in Tolkienian adaptations of a multi-generational story with recurring characters.

I'm still early on in my re-read of the Silmarillion, so will withhold further thoughts about the second age compression until I reach it.

The Sil only touches on the second age in the sections The Rings of Power and Akellabeth. Outside of that it's appendices all the way.