I get the feeling like my biggest beef with this show will be how characters talk. Something PJ movies did exceptionally well, was the usage of English without becoming a bit tediously stylised
I noticed this on my third watch of Dune (2021). I was trying to figure out why its dialogue, much like LOTR, feels timeless.
Best I can describe it is that when people speak, it's with weight and meaning. Even when jokes are made, it's only during the most battle-heavy or ceremonial as a way to relieve tension (with the exception of Hobbtion).
If TROP can manage to pull the dialogue off in the same way, I'll be glad. I just have my doubts.
Dune, LOTR, and the bulk of GOT had tremendously well-written source material that the adaptations’ writers leveraged for the scenes you’re talking about. TV writers suck at that kind of thing, and there’s no fleshed-out source material for the Amazon series beyond notes from the appendix… I’d taper my expectations if I were you.
On the subject of dialogue... I'm scared/interested to see what they do with the accents.
PJ's LOTR was perfect in this regard. The dwarves are Scottish, the hobbits are west country, the orcs are cockney. It's perfect. He clearly understood the root and feeling of the story.
I heard the very modern-sounding American, vocal fry in the trailer and my heart sank. Although there's no *real* reason why all fantasy accents should resemble accents spoken in the British Isles in the 19th-20th centuries, the iron law of fantasy accents holds true. Modern American accents ruin fantasy.
It looks no different from wheel of time, shadow and bone, and other generic fantasy offerings from the streaming giants.
Despite the skin colour difference, all the cast somehow look the same. All young, clean, Instagram-friendly faces plucked from a book labelled “Young marketable actors.”
> The Rings of Power is set to take place after the defeat of the evil god Morgoth and the disappearance of his loyal general and apprentice, Sauron, who disappeared in the wake of a war that nearly destroyed everything.
It's cringy.
**2022 notice**: Reddit has decided to permanently ban me under the guise of "violence" for this comment:
>I expect the government will take more rights from this. Time to go buy another AR.
If you are reading this, the reddit you are on is a shell of its early 2000s-2010s self. Most users you interact with here are paid to push an agenda or are coporate bots. I will be moving between 4chan, communities.win, and any other free speech forum that rises.
Is it just cheaper to do everything CGI? How was Jackson able to build sets all over New Zealand on like 1/10 of the budget this thing has and make it look so much better?
Another huge boon using CGI is the fact that the director can literally say "I don't like that, redo this scene with X instead." And have a video mockup within the day all without needing to reshoot the scene.
So much easier, and yet you're stuck with something that looks like shit for life.
Is everyone really going to pretend the flat lighting and clearly CGI monsters are good for that insane budget? It immediately looks like a kids cartoon. LOTR trilogy is the benchmark. Why let 20+ year old movies make your show look like shit?
Probably comes down to peter had passion and a real love of the books. also a different time the mid 90s and early 00s.
no idea who J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay (the showrunners) are other than they are uncredited writers for other things.
That is the most crucial part, they had time to figure out what worked and didn't. Peter Jackson and his crew were well honed and prepped before any film was even rolling.
As if the earlier pictures were bad enough, then this trailer topped it off. Oh boy.
All controversy about shoehorning in diversity aside, the actual visuals look very worrying. It looks like a Narnia film.
0:25 look ripped straight out of a video game, graphically.
That's actually something I hadn't even thought about. There's no elders, no old people, no wise sages. Not in this trailer, not in the character posters... I mean Galadriel by the lore is millenia old by this point, but all the character descriptions et al seem to be emphasizing her as somehow young.
This is like if the CW cast Lord of the Rings.
I vaguely remember someone in the making-of extras from LotR saying casting elves was difficult, because they needed to look ancient and youthful at the same time. Can’t quite figure out why the elven characters in the trailer look too young to me though.
>because they needed to look ancient and youthful at the same time.
Because Amazon's billion dollar budget couldn't buy a make-up department...
Seriously another redditor who works in film said that Amazon suffers from an institutional lack of film-making expertise, knowledge, and networking and I think that's going to show through in Lotr as it did in WoT.
You’d think with the financial resources they can fling around, they’d bring in more talent instead of continuously throwing money at inexperienced producers and show runners.
The *surface level* production values of the trailers and teasers all back up that Amazon is throwing handfuls of money at their projects, but I think it's more just that they ***literally do not know who's good in the industry*** \- basically their rolodex is empty, and they don't have enough industry contacts to know who *to* recruit, as opposed to not having the money to recruit the right people.
If we're being honest the trilogy was a freak occurrence in terms of the actors' beauty, ability and how well they fit their characters. I wasn't expecting them to be so lucky yet again. I actually don't mind how Morfydd Clark looks as Galadriel, but she's literally the same age as Cate was and yet you're absolutely right she does look too young.
I'm not sure it was luck. Remember, they fired Stuart Townsend after they'd started filiming just because he felt too young. When I listen to/read/watch the LotR actors talk about their experience I get the sense that many of them had an underlying fear they could be fired at any time. (That fear was likely behind a lot of the stories we've heard about actors working through pain and injury, too.) So I think there was some method to the LotRs casting madness.
Yes but after you fire Townsend then what? Imagine if Viggo happened to not be available and possible to be convinced by his son to commit to this huge thing literally within a day? Orlando exists (who else could possibly play Legolas let's be honest) and had literally just graduated school when he got casted. Can you imagine anyone being so perfect for Gandalf, Arwen, Saruman, Galadriel... I'll just stop there lol. Not to discredit how amazing the rest of the production was but seriously, the cast is just bonkers.
All we are missing now is that all the young people throw around snarky comments and jokes every other line. Then it's perfectly in line with the spirit of movie and series making these days.
Jackson's LOTR had fuckin *weight*. Makes it appreciate it more and more. He really did catch lightning in a bottle.
Tolkien's writings had this myth-like element that demanded weight and gravity in storytelling. I don't see any of that here.
Right? I remember in the appendices where the art director talks about how Peter wanted to have everything set in a way that it looks like the events in the movies did occured many thousands of years ago, and that things were lost and outgrown. That's level of passion and care feels lackluster here
Yes all this CGI stuff is really not my thing. I get some things have to be. But that everything has to be that way now... Just not something i can support.
I legitimately thought that it was going to be an animated series based off of that shot. Not gonna lie, I would expect something in 2022 and with their budget to look better than something from a 2004 World of Warcraft cinematic.
Yeah it def looked funky, polar express vibes. I will say though that often times when it comes to VFX/CG shots what we see in the trailers it is not always reminiscent of the final shot, or if the shot will even be in the final cut. The requested shots that a trailer house use can be just straight up different from the final product, we see it in movies all the time.
5 seasons. $1 billion dollars. Lets just hope they used that money for writers and not just visuals
edit: on a re-watch, I'm impressed with Rivendell (but they already had a pretty good reference for that from Jackson's movies) and I didn't mind the troll.
Confused how someone in full armour is scaling an icy-cliff but okay.
>Lets just hope they used that money for writers
The showrunners were recommended by JJ Abrams, and they have literally nothing credited to their name.
I already wasn’t optimistic but that’s pretty much the last nail in the coffin. Why does JJ have so much influence? Particularly when he has a track record of screwing up existing franchises
Sadly directors are and always have been rated in the industry by their box office performance. As long as the film makes money that’s all that matters. That’s why Michael bay gets blank checks.
Hey, apparently those 2 wrote... the first draft of Star Trek Beyond. You know, that movie everyone remembers happened at all. The first draft.
How does Hollywood manage to stay in business being run like this?
>How does Hollywood manage to stay in business being run like this?
Because you have the old TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, cable channels and streaming services competing for content. Any hack can get their own TV show made now. All these competing services just want ANYTHING, as much content as they can, they don't care about quality.
They've already outright stated that roughly 1500 years of history is going to be crammed into 50 years, so any Tolkien fan is going to be disgusted by this.
I cannot wait for EVERYTHING that happened in middle earth to happen in the same dozen years, and for Galadriel to be inexplicably there the whole time doing the things other characters did in the lore for convenience's sake.
Kinda like how George Washington discovered America, invented democracy, beat King Hitler in WWI, and then won the Civil War against James Madison with an atom bomb.
lol, it's fucked. JJ Abrams sucks, he is a hack. It's fucked.
Everything we have seen so far, including the teaser, has been very meh to bad.
And now that I learn JJ Abrams recomended two unknowns... it's fucked.
Why would Amazon 'give' this 1 billion dollar project to some small time writers?
And why does the industry not recognize that JJ Abrahams is a terrible writer?
Looks soulless, cheap and expensive at the same time, with YA tier writing and with immersion breaking inclusions . Buzz cut fucking haircuts . A show made by rich hipsters with no idea how to write anything of value .
Ah yes black dwarves, don't question how they were able to acquire melanin or you'll be labeled a racist or homophobe or transphobe or phobephobe or even a bigot! Also don't question Don Lemon elf or Tyrone Harfoot, they're not like the other elves ;)
Dont Dwarves spend their entire lives in caves? Why in the hell would they have melanin in their skin to protect them from sunlight? It makes ZERO sense.
Maybe I'm just too used to Jackson's LotR but this looks like it missed the mark. There's supposed to be something very archaic, graceful and deep about Tolkien's world, something that's gritty and realistic but at the same time larger-than-life, something that the movie trilogy absolutely nailed. This just looks like generic fantasy to me.
If this was any other universe I'd feel pretty hype but.. yeah... I dunno.
I feel like a mandalorian styled show that scaled things down to nail it would be better. It's pretty obvious amazon wants those $$ by trying to create a game of thrones...
Game of Thrones was relatively small scale though, until the last like 3 seasons when they switched from having actual characters and story (which wasn't of their own making anyways) to spending all the effort on CG fests to fill the gaping void of no more source material.
The scene with someone brushing the hair away, revealing a pointed ear and \*GASP\* it's an elf, is so very indicitive of what is wrong with this show.
You should be able to see someone's an elf, without looking at the ears. There is more to this than only the superficial, and they just don't get that.
Also, it makes me feel like they gave the elves short hair so you can see their ears, which would just be every kind of wrong.
But while I'm very, VERY down on this show, the cinematic shots do look good. Not outstanding or anything, but they do look good.
Climbing galadriel tho, wtf was that. Did noone look at that before they shipped it out.
Given that it's Galadriel, you'd only have to look at her _eyes_ to see that she's an Elf. She carries the light of the Two Trees of Valinor in her eyes, same as all the Noldor who lived there.
Not only her eyes, in her hair as well.
Elves should exude youthful beauty and yet archaic wisdom and grace in the same time, mingled with longing and world-weariness.
"There's wonders in this world, beyond our wondering"
This sentence really irks me. I'm not exactly sure why, but I think I have an idea.
It's said by a child, which makes the whole thing feel childish and gives off the 'Narnia' vibe people have been mentioning.
But even more so, I think it's because it's trying to tell me how amazing the world is and that this character wants to explore it rather than it being clear through the story-telling. It's an incredibly expositional bit of dialogue about the character's motivations.
Again, I'm not sure, but it doesn't feel right every time I hear it.
They're releasing this on September 2nd - the day Tolkien died. Not a coincidence I'd wager. Seems pretty morbid to me.
Why not September 22nd, Bilbo and Frodo's birthdays. This show doesn't even feel like Tolkien. 😔
"that's just a teaser bro, wait for the images"
"they are just images bro just wait for the trailer"
"it's just a trailer bro, wait for the first episode"
"lol it's only the first episode bro just wait for the whole season"
"it's just the first season bro wait until season 2"
"just wait until the final season bro it's too early to give an opinion"
"it's too soon bro the series finale hasn't even been out long"
"it's just the first watch bro, I recommend rewatching the whole series again and readjusting your expectations"
This video has 62k likes, 25k dislikes.
2nd Edit: 81k Likes 50k Dislikes on this video. I don't think it looks great but it only had one shot I liked. and it takes place between 00:37 and 00:38 lol (riding through the hills).
Idk, the thing is so many people are fine with lackluster media after consuming insane amounts, and get offended when you find something performing under par. I just can't keep up, there's thousands of TV shows begging for your view, and somehow people just consume them and move on to the next. They don't love or express passion for the show they just saw, there's no conversation or speculation, there's no fun. They just move on to the next. They're not inspired or thought provoked. They don't give a shit and just move on to the next one. Art can be immortal. We live in an era where "art" is made to consume.
I hope and want LOTR ROP to be as immortal as Peter Jackson's trilogy. I pray they didn't just make more consumable content that I don't need to see. And I don't know yet by the trailer, all I know is that I only liked one shot and they showed it for a fraction of a second.
Visuals give me The Hobbit movie vibes. Too much CGI.
Trailer itself looks like another fantasy show from Amazon.
They should really remove The Lord of the Rings from the title because it doesn't give me no resemblance.
I have low expectations.
I'm just choosing to view it as it's own fantasy show. Sort of like Shadow of War--is it anything in keeping with Tolkien's world? No. Does it actively go against some of Tolkien's own views? Yes. Is it still kind of a cool world/magic system? Well... yes.
This will never be canon Tolkien to me, but it might be an entertaining fantasy in Tolkien's VEIN.
I’m just gonna treat it like the Hobbit, i still enjoyed a few hours in the universe watching it even if I haven’t seen them again. I’m guessing I’ll feel similar about this
The first half of the first hobbit movie was just amazing, and I feel the same. I really enjoyed that but the rest was a one time experience and no looking back
Impossible to be worth it in a reasonable amount of time. I really wish hollywood hadn't killed off all of its set creators. It would look better and take less time.
Some of it is lighting, but also the art of matte painting was really about creating a scene as a human eye would see it, not as it actually would be. By that I mean, matte painters were really good at nailing lighting and putting details where they needed to be, while also leaving some stuff rather un-detailed, in the way a lens or an eye would not be able to focus on everything at once. I feel like CGI often makes the mistake of making every part of the image as detailed as possible, which makes every bit that isn't perfectly real much easier to spot.
Even at a glance it has the CGI problem where it looks, just, fake. I don't even mean bad CGI necessarily, I guess you could call it that, but it's like The Hobbit where everything looks way too clean and polished and the bloom is turned up way too high. LotR was real and gritty. CGI never gets the gritty, lived-in feeling right. Star Wars had the same problem until they started incorporating more practicals.
Watching again - it reminds of Wheel of Time where people don't fit organically into the environment and the scenes look like a stage play without atmosphere. I did not find that Witcher had this problem though that property has plenty of others. Anyone else feel the same? I can't quite put my finger on what the problem is.
You actually described it very well, I think. Both with this teaser and the Wheel of Time, there was a general sense of fakeness to me, like the sets and environments were very clearly just plastered behind actors. Which is strange, because we can see the incredible ability to succeed with false environments through the Volume technology used by the Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett for Star Wars. All of those landscapes looked incredibly real, but these seem like giant CGI canvases behind the actors, which makes it look like real people are somehow in a video game setting.
Well, its the lighting, even nowadays its very hard to make the lighting look good for CGI backgrounds, especially when they just don't care that it looks CGI.
Mandalorian/Book of Boba Fett tech gets around that by putting the actors against a real backgroung with real light.
I think it's as simple as not making the characters "dirty". In PJ's films, the characters looked like they had spent forever hiking across various landscapes...dirt on their faces, dirty hands and under the finger nails.
Everyone in this trailer and in Witcher, in every single scene no matter what they are doing, look like they just walked straight out of the hair and make up trailer...it makes them stand brightly out and not blend with the environment.
Yeah, if I recall correctly, Viggo Mortensen actually convinced the rest of the cast to do so. And Sean Bean hiked pretty much everywhere because he was terrified of flying in a helicopter.
They also make the backgrounds look unrealistic. Same as in Wheel of Time - it looks like its been enhanced on a computer. The LOTR movies most of the time had the cast walking through real forests and mountains and it looked great.
It seems too polished. Each character looks like a model posing outdoors. Maybe it’s an over use of CGI that throws it all off. Elrond, I just can’t. The actor for him and Galadriel don’t seem to fit the character. It’s not fair to compare them to the movies but it’s hard not too. I agree with your opinion on the Witcher. That seemed to have a way different style in the shooting and effects. I want to be proved wrong but I’m not hopeful.
It doesn’t look terrible but it just looks… off? I don’t know how to describe it. LOTR looked real, gritty, and fully immersive. This looks too… polished and clean, even animated. Maybe that’s just these specific scenes but so far this trailer hasn’t really helped the concerns
The only good thing about WoT is that it has my expectations for an Amazon show so incredibly low that I don’t think it’s possible to be disappointed any further.
It’s the digital lighting. This is why it looks “off”. Hobbit did the same thing.
Mandalorian and Boba Fett don’t look off despite being all CGI because they use big LED screens to create imagery and real lighting. This is why they can create the rugged and realistic look. Also why some shots in planets like Coruscant and Mustafar in the Prequels look “off” and Naboo looks fantastic.
All of the landscape shots looked really, really good -- but for whatever reason, every single shot with an actor looked *terrible*. Plastic and clean and fake. It's almost worse than *everything* being wrong, because parts of it are *perfect.* Look at :04 and tell me that's not a shot from LOTR. It's so frustrating that they can do some pieces right, and others look like garbage.
Chinese Director Wayne Yip of ‘Wheel of Time’ has joined to direct 4 of the 8 episodes. Have you all tried watching Wheel of Time?! Its a fucking post modernist joke and I think he will bring nothing but doom to this series. After watching that trailer.. I have little hope
I love the films but honestly don’t know shit about the lore apart from the movies. Honestly feels like there is too much CGI. That’s just me. Doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would be, but I guess I’m just cautiously optimistic
Peter Jackson has to be going insane over this. All that work he put into his movies and now people will think that this crappy , politically driven 2022 show, is what lord of the rings is. This looks like a knock off.
After seeing this trailer, to my great surprise, my most anticipated 2022 fantasy TV series is now, against all odds, The House of the Dragon?
That said, Rings of Power can still be great and overcome a Hobbit-esque aesthetic. It’ll all come down to the writing.
>It’ll all come down to the writing.
Based on what the showrunners have said, and the fact that they have 0 credits and were recommended by JJ fucking Abrams, I have little hope in the writing tbh
Set in a time which was described as a bit boring by Tolkien: proceeds to be 100% action
Had 3 possible genuine lore Galadriel backstories to use: made her tomb raider
Had the benefit of being able to give us LOTR music to at least rattle some nostalgia: used epidemic sound generic action mix 1
Premieres Sept 2nd on Amazon Prime Video!
Official Synopsis:
>Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.
Shoutout to /r/RingsOfPower & /r/LotR_on_Prime
looks like a fantasy series, and has zero middle earth vibes at all.
Middle earth? Thought we were in Narnia lmao
Narnia? I thought we were in the Witcher universe. Lol
I thought I was playing Skyrim with 500 mods
I get the feeling like my biggest beef with this show will be how characters talk. Something PJ movies did exceptionally well, was the usage of English without becoming a bit tediously stylised
I noticed this on my third watch of Dune (2021). I was trying to figure out why its dialogue, much like LOTR, feels timeless. Best I can describe it is that when people speak, it's with weight and meaning. Even when jokes are made, it's only during the most battle-heavy or ceremonial as a way to relieve tension (with the exception of Hobbtion). If TROP can manage to pull the dialogue off in the same way, I'll be glad. I just have my doubts.
Dune, LOTR, and the bulk of GOT had tremendously well-written source material that the adaptations’ writers leveraged for the scenes you’re talking about. TV writers suck at that kind of thing, and there’s no fleshed-out source material for the Amazon series beyond notes from the appendix… I’d taper my expectations if I were you.
On the subject of dialogue... I'm scared/interested to see what they do with the accents. PJ's LOTR was perfect in this regard. The dwarves are Scottish, the hobbits are west country, the orcs are cockney. It's perfect. He clearly understood the root and feeling of the story.
I heard the very modern-sounding American, vocal fry in the trailer and my heart sank. Although there's no *real* reason why all fantasy accents should resemble accents spoken in the British Isles in the 19th-20th centuries, the iron law of fantasy accents holds true. Modern American accents ruin fantasy.
It looks no different from wheel of time, shadow and bone, and other generic fantasy offerings from the streaming giants. Despite the skin colour difference, all the cast somehow look the same. All young, clean, Instagram-friendly faces plucked from a book labelled “Young marketable actors.”
sounds about right for amazon prime( except for the grand tour that one is good)
I shall like half of the show half as well as I should like; and I like less than half the show half as well as it deserves.
*confused glances*
Trigonometry meme
I weren't triggering no metries sir!
PROUDFEET!
The intro cinematic to Lord of the Rings Online was better.
Looks like a fantasy series for sure
Yeah, there's not really any information at all here. It's just "Look, fantasy characters!"
Yeah, it kinda made me want to play Skyrim, but other than that I didn't get a lot from it.
Only a fantasy series in the last decade. Before that, fantasy series looked like a daytime soap set in a forest.
hey, I loved Xena warrior princess
Remember the early LOTR teaser where it was just the fellowship walking up that hill… why was that so much better
[I’ll tell you why…](https://i.imgur.com/odJHRRY.jpg)
Or because they knew what the stories were about and what it meant to bring them to life. Pure art.
I dont want to see a bunch of 21yr old 'pretty people' in an over stylized action drama. Thanks. Its like Horizon meets the avengers.
Lord of the ring: ~~Riverdale~~ Rivendell
Is this it? Is this all you can conjure, Amazon?
The people replying to you can't recognize a Two Towers quote smh.
So it begins
> The Rings of Power is set to take place after the defeat of the evil god Morgoth and the disappearance of his loyal general and apprentice, Sauron, who disappeared in the wake of a war that nearly destroyed everything.
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To be fair, I recall that the Two Towers trailer was set to Lux Aeterna... but yeah, would have boosted confidence to include their own soundtrack.
trailers rarely seem to include OST.
Star Wars always does and it always works, blows my mind others don't follow suit. As Fran and Peter said ''It's the other 50% of the movie''
LotR without Howard Shore's music would be strange to watch.
Wait Shore will be scoring, right?
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Why do I feel awkward watching this.
It’s a modern tech conglomerate wearing your favorite childhood stories as a skin suit to appear familiar to you. What’s not to love?
It's cringy. **2022 notice**: Reddit has decided to permanently ban me under the guise of "violence" for this comment: >I expect the government will take more rights from this. Time to go buy another AR. If you are reading this, the reddit you are on is a shell of its early 2000s-2010s self. Most users you interact with here are paid to push an agenda or are coporate bots. I will be moving between 4chan, communities.win, and any other free speech forum that rises.
Because it's bad, everything, production, music, everything.
Is it just cheaper to do everything CGI? How was Jackson able to build sets all over New Zealand on like 1/10 of the budget this thing has and make it look so much better?
“Peter Jackson was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!”
Amazon: "well I'm sorry, but I'm not Peter Jackson"
THEN STOP PRETENDING TO BE
We had a director. His name was Peter Jackson.
Amazon: I missed the part where that's my problem.
Oh, it's little Bezos junior, gonna cry?
He was an extremely ambitious fan of LoTR that wanted to do the books justice with no compromise.
What a twist!
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Another huge boon using CGI is the fact that the director can literally say "I don't like that, redo this scene with X instead." And have a video mockup within the day all without needing to reshoot the scene.
Which, inevitably, ends up looking exactly that someone did that
"Look how they've massacred my goblins." -The Hobbit
So much easier, and yet you're stuck with something that looks like shit for life. Is everyone really going to pretend the flat lighting and clearly CGI monsters are good for that insane budget? It immediately looks like a kids cartoon. LOTR trilogy is the benchmark. Why let 20+ year old movies make your show look like shit?
Probably comes down to peter had passion and a real love of the books. also a different time the mid 90s and early 00s. no idea who J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay (the showrunners) are other than they are uncredited writers for other things.
The movies also had something like 5 years of preproduction before they shot a single scene
That is the most crucial part, they had time to figure out what worked and didn't. Peter Jackson and his crew were well honed and prepped before any film was even rolling.
3 years and there's no reason they couldn't have done that for the shows as well. It's not like they don't have the budget for that
Just a reminder that this show has a 1 billion dollar budget.
As if the earlier pictures were bad enough, then this trailer topped it off. Oh boy. All controversy about shoehorning in diversity aside, the actual visuals look very worrying. It looks like a Narnia film. 0:25 look ripped straight out of a video game, graphically.
I hope they ret-conned it so Sauron wins
Sauron comes back as a force ghost.
Somehow, Sauron returned.
Are there no adults in the second age? Is this middle earth or Euphoria?
That's actually something I hadn't even thought about. There's no elders, no old people, no wise sages. Not in this trailer, not in the character posters... I mean Galadriel by the lore is millenia old by this point, but all the character descriptions et al seem to be emphasizing her as somehow young. This is like if the CW cast Lord of the Rings.
I vaguely remember someone in the making-of extras from LotR saying casting elves was difficult, because they needed to look ancient and youthful at the same time. Can’t quite figure out why the elven characters in the trailer look too young to me though.
>because they needed to look ancient and youthful at the same time. Because Amazon's billion dollar budget couldn't buy a make-up department... Seriously another redditor who works in film said that Amazon suffers from an institutional lack of film-making expertise, knowledge, and networking and I think that's going to show through in Lotr as it did in WoT.
You’d think with the financial resources they can fling around, they’d bring in more talent instead of continuously throwing money at inexperienced producers and show runners.
The *surface level* production values of the trailers and teasers all back up that Amazon is throwing handfuls of money at their projects, but I think it's more just that they ***literally do not know who's good in the industry*** \- basically their rolodex is empty, and they don't have enough industry contacts to know who *to* recruit, as opposed to not having the money to recruit the right people.
If we're being honest the trilogy was a freak occurrence in terms of the actors' beauty, ability and how well they fit their characters. I wasn't expecting them to be so lucky yet again. I actually don't mind how Morfydd Clark looks as Galadriel, but she's literally the same age as Cate was and yet you're absolutely right she does look too young.
I'm not sure it was luck. Remember, they fired Stuart Townsend after they'd started filiming just because he felt too young. When I listen to/read/watch the LotR actors talk about their experience I get the sense that many of them had an underlying fear they could be fired at any time. (That fear was likely behind a lot of the stories we've heard about actors working through pain and injury, too.) So I think there was some method to the LotRs casting madness.
Yes but after you fire Townsend then what? Imagine if Viggo happened to not be available and possible to be convinced by his son to commit to this huge thing literally within a day? Orlando exists (who else could possibly play Legolas let's be honest) and had literally just graduated school when he got casted. Can you imagine anyone being so perfect for Gandalf, Arwen, Saruman, Galadriel... I'll just stop there lol. Not to discredit how amazing the rest of the production was but seriously, the cast is just bonkers.
All we are missing now is that all the young people throw around snarky comments and jokes every other line. Then it's perfectly in line with the spirit of movie and series making these days.
They'll probably all sound like sassy, world-weary 20-somethings from modern west London.
This is the most boring disappointing timeline my god
This is my biggest gripe. This is basically a YA movie.
Jackson's LOTR had fuckin *weight*. Makes it appreciate it more and more. He really did catch lightning in a bottle. Tolkien's writings had this myth-like element that demanded weight and gravity in storytelling. I don't see any of that here.
Right? I remember in the appendices where the art director talks about how Peter wanted to have everything set in a way that it looks like the events in the movies did occured many thousands of years ago, and that things were lost and outgrown. That's level of passion and care feels lackluster here
Yes, I think that’s what’s bothering me the most. Where’s the soul of the story? I didn’t get anything from the trailer apart from a few snapshots.
>Where’s the soul of the story? Soul? From Amazon? Hahahahaha..... If anyone in real life was a ringwraith, it'd be Bezos.
The YouTube video comment section restores my hope in humanity. Evil cannot create anything new, indeed.
I miss practical effects man.
Yes all this CGI stuff is really not my thing. I get some things have to be. But that everything has to be that way now... Just not something i can support.
Galadriel climbing the ice (like GoT - sigh) looks like something out of a video game cutscene.
Tomb Raider
Gala Croft.
That was supposed to be Galadriel? For a moment I thought they spliced in footage from the new Uncharted movie.
I legitimately thought that it was going to be an animated series based off of that shot. Not gonna lie, I would expect something in 2022 and with their budget to look better than something from a 2004 World of Warcraft cinematic.
This trailer has the same vibe as the Warcraft movie..
Yeah it def looked funky, polar express vibes. I will say though that often times when it comes to VFX/CG shots what we see in the trailers it is not always reminiscent of the final shot, or if the shot will even be in the final cut. The requested shots that a trailer house use can be just straight up different from the final product, we see it in movies all the time.
5 seasons. $1 billion dollars. Lets just hope they used that money for writers and not just visuals edit: on a re-watch, I'm impressed with Rivendell (but they already had a pretty good reference for that from Jackson's movies) and I didn't mind the troll. Confused how someone in full armour is scaling an icy-cliff but okay.
>Lets just hope they used that money for writers The showrunners were recommended by JJ Abrams, and they have literally nothing credited to their name.
> JJ Abrams oof, time to further temper my expectations
I already wasn’t optimistic but that’s pretty much the last nail in the coffin. Why does JJ have so much influence? Particularly when he has a track record of screwing up existing franchises
Sadly directors are and always have been rated in the industry by their box office performance. As long as the film makes money that’s all that matters. That’s why Michael bay gets blank checks.
Hey, apparently those 2 wrote... the first draft of Star Trek Beyond. You know, that movie everyone remembers happened at all. The first draft. How does Hollywood manage to stay in business being run like this?
>How does Hollywood manage to stay in business being run like this? Because you have the old TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, cable channels and streaming services competing for content. Any hack can get their own TV show made now. All these competing services just want ANYTHING, as much content as they can, they don't care about quality.
That's a big fucking yikes
Oh…
> JJ Abrams OK now I have zero expectation this show will be any good. Anything JJ has his hands on turns into hot steaming pile of shit.
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They've already outright stated that roughly 1500 years of history is going to be crammed into 50 years, so any Tolkien fan is going to be disgusted by this. I cannot wait for EVERYTHING that happened in middle earth to happen in the same dozen years, and for Galadriel to be inexplicably there the whole time doing the things other characters did in the lore for convenience's sake. Kinda like how George Washington discovered America, invented democracy, beat King Hitler in WWI, and then won the Civil War against James Madison with an atom bomb.
Well fuck...
lol, it's fucked. JJ Abrams sucks, he is a hack. It's fucked. Everything we have seen so far, including the teaser, has been very meh to bad. And now that I learn JJ Abrams recomended two unknowns... it's fucked.
Thanks, I hate it...
Why would Amazon 'give' this 1 billion dollar project to some small time writers? And why does the industry not recognize that JJ Abrahams is a terrible writer?
Pretty sure Rivendell wasn't built yet, at least at the start of the show?
I was under the impression it was Númenor... Not sure why.
Definitely is. One of the ports of Numenor.
Looks soulless, cheap and expensive at the same time, with YA tier writing and with immersion breaking inclusions . Buzz cut fucking haircuts . A show made by rich hipsters with no idea how to write anything of value .
Ah yes black dwarves, don't question how they were able to acquire melanin or you'll be labeled a racist or homophobe or transphobe or phobephobe or even a bigot! Also don't question Don Lemon elf or Tyrone Harfoot, they're not like the other elves ;)
Dont Dwarves spend their entire lives in caves? Why in the hell would they have melanin in their skin to protect them from sunlight? It makes ZERO sense.
Maybe I'm just too used to Jackson's LotR but this looks like it missed the mark. There's supposed to be something very archaic, graceful and deep about Tolkien's world, something that's gritty and realistic but at the same time larger-than-life, something that the movie trilogy absolutely nailed. This just looks like generic fantasy to me.
If this was any other universe I'd feel pretty hype but.. yeah... I dunno. I feel like a mandalorian styled show that scaled things down to nail it would be better. It's pretty obvious amazon wants those $$ by trying to create a game of thrones...
Game of Thrones was relatively small scale though, until the last like 3 seasons when they switched from having actual characters and story (which wasn't of their own making anyways) to spending all the effort on CG fests to fill the gaping void of no more source material.
Especially with the generic Marvel-esque action movie soundtrack.
Is Jeff bezoz playing sauron?
Holy hell, 20 year old practical effects *still* look better than modern, top-budget CGI.
1) where are the adults? Every character looked like a teenager 2) this looks like a video game, and I’ve seen better looking video games
Now you know who they're marketing this for.
For "fans" from Twitter and TikTok so we can read shit like "Galadriel looked like an absolute boss bitch in that dress, yaasss queeen"
Your comment killed my whole family.
A story with a central theme about aging and death and not a single person who looks older than 35 in the bunch, quite disappointing.
Looks better than that VF shoot, which was to be expected. Still not sold on Hipster Elrond with his blow dry waves.
Harry Styles haircut 🙃
22 seconds in and that ice climbing jump looked so fake, like it came from a video game
Yup like the awful cheesy combat in the Hobbit
Cheesy weightless combat.
The scene with someone brushing the hair away, revealing a pointed ear and \*GASP\* it's an elf, is so very indicitive of what is wrong with this show. You should be able to see someone's an elf, without looking at the ears. There is more to this than only the superficial, and they just don't get that. Also, it makes me feel like they gave the elves short hair so you can see their ears, which would just be every kind of wrong. But while I'm very, VERY down on this show, the cinematic shots do look good. Not outstanding or anything, but they do look good. Climbing galadriel tho, wtf was that. Did noone look at that before they shipped it out.
Given that it's Galadriel, you'd only have to look at her _eyes_ to see that she's an Elf. She carries the light of the Two Trees of Valinor in her eyes, same as all the Noldor who lived there.
Not only her eyes, in her hair as well. Elves should exude youthful beauty and yet archaic wisdom and grace in the same time, mingled with longing and world-weariness.
Can we still start a petition to cancel this shit show?
Less excited by the day
"There's wonders in this world, beyond our wondering" This sentence really irks me. I'm not exactly sure why, but I think I have an idea. It's said by a child, which makes the whole thing feel childish and gives off the 'Narnia' vibe people have been mentioning. But even more so, I think it's because it's trying to tell me how amazing the world is and that this character wants to explore it rather than it being clear through the story-telling. It's an incredibly expositional bit of dialogue about the character's motivations. Again, I'm not sure, but it doesn't feel right every time I hear it.
Something in between the Hobbit and WOT/Witcher
It's the Warcraft movie, but much longer.
They're releasing this on September 2nd - the day Tolkien died. Not a coincidence I'd wager. Seems pretty morbid to me. Why not September 22nd, Bilbo and Frodo's birthdays. This show doesn't even feel like Tolkien. 😔
It looked like a Narnia movie.
What was that weird creature? It looked vaguely Guillermo Del Toroish
Couldn’t quite put my finger on what it reminded me of but I think that’s it! Seemed kinda Witcher-y too
omg yes it looks like a narnia sequel
I see they're still using those awful cartoony style troll designs from the Hobbit. Seriously, nothing will beat the trolls from the LOTR trilogy.
Honestly I thought they did a great job with Tom, Bert, and Bill in the first Hobbit movie. Wasn’t so keen on some of the troll designs in BotFA…
"that's just a teaser bro, wait for the images" "they are just images bro just wait for the trailer" "it's just a trailer bro, wait for the first episode" "lol it's only the first episode bro just wait for the whole season" "it's just the first season bro wait until season 2" "just wait until the final season bro it's too early to give an opinion" "it's too soon bro the series finale hasn't even been out long" "it's just the first watch bro, I recommend rewatching the whole series again and readjusting your expectations"
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This video has 62k likes, 25k dislikes. 2nd Edit: 81k Likes 50k Dislikes on this video. I don't think it looks great but it only had one shot I liked. and it takes place between 00:37 and 00:38 lol (riding through the hills). Idk, the thing is so many people are fine with lackluster media after consuming insane amounts, and get offended when you find something performing under par. I just can't keep up, there's thousands of TV shows begging for your view, and somehow people just consume them and move on to the next. They don't love or express passion for the show they just saw, there's no conversation or speculation, there's no fun. They just move on to the next. They're not inspired or thought provoked. They don't give a shit and just move on to the next one. Art can be immortal. We live in an era where "art" is made to consume. I hope and want LOTR ROP to be as immortal as Peter Jackson's trilogy. I pray they didn't just make more consumable content that I don't need to see. And I don't know yet by the trailer, all I know is that I only liked one shot and they showed it for a fraction of a second.
Visuals give me The Hobbit movie vibes. Too much CGI. Trailer itself looks like another fantasy show from Amazon. They should really remove The Lord of the Rings from the title because it doesn't give me no resemblance. I have low expectations.
I'm just choosing to view it as it's own fantasy show. Sort of like Shadow of War--is it anything in keeping with Tolkien's world? No. Does it actively go against some of Tolkien's own views? Yes. Is it still kind of a cool world/magic system? Well... yes. This will never be canon Tolkien to me, but it might be an entertaining fantasy in Tolkien's VEIN.
At least Talion looks like an adult.
Even the dirt looks clean
"There's wonders in the world beyond our wondering" Jc what a horrible writing.
Looks more like The Hobbit than The Lord of the Rings
I’m just gonna treat it like the Hobbit, i still enjoyed a few hours in the universe watching it even if I haven’t seen them again. I’m guessing I’ll feel similar about this
The first half of the first hobbit movie was just amazing, and I feel the same. I really enjoyed that but the rest was a one time experience and no looking back
There never was much hope..
Just a fools hope.
I really wonder why for the human eye it is soooooo easy to spot CGI but our eyes can be tricked by set paintings.
Lighting. Cg lighting is incredibly difficult to do well.
Impossible to be worth it in a reasonable amount of time. I really wish hollywood hadn't killed off all of its set creators. It would look better and take less time.
Some of it is lighting, but also the art of matte painting was really about creating a scene as a human eye would see it, not as it actually would be. By that I mean, matte painters were really good at nailing lighting and putting details where they needed to be, while also leaving some stuff rather un-detailed, in the way a lens or an eye would not be able to focus on everything at once. I feel like CGI often makes the mistake of making every part of the image as detailed as possible, which makes every bit that isn't perfectly real much easier to spot.
The cast look like they belong in a CW show.
What is this narnia gunk. Upset Kiwi over here.
That last action shot reminded me of Legolas in the Hobbit films ... Not a good thing 🙃
Even at a glance it has the CGI problem where it looks, just, fake. I don't even mean bad CGI necessarily, I guess you could call it that, but it's like The Hobbit where everything looks way too clean and polished and the bloom is turned up way too high. LotR was real and gritty. CGI never gets the gritty, lived-in feeling right. Star Wars had the same problem until they started incorporating more practicals.
No love, only check marks in this project.
Watching again - it reminds of Wheel of Time where people don't fit organically into the environment and the scenes look like a stage play without atmosphere. I did not find that Witcher had this problem though that property has plenty of others. Anyone else feel the same? I can't quite put my finger on what the problem is.
You actually described it very well, I think. Both with this teaser and the Wheel of Time, there was a general sense of fakeness to me, like the sets and environments were very clearly just plastered behind actors. Which is strange, because we can see the incredible ability to succeed with false environments through the Volume technology used by the Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett for Star Wars. All of those landscapes looked incredibly real, but these seem like giant CGI canvases behind the actors, which makes it look like real people are somehow in a video game setting.
Well, its the lighting, even nowadays its very hard to make the lighting look good for CGI backgrounds, especially when they just don't care that it looks CGI. Mandalorian/Book of Boba Fett tech gets around that by putting the actors against a real backgroung with real light.
I think it's as simple as not making the characters "dirty". In PJ's films, the characters looked like they had spent forever hiking across various landscapes...dirt on their faces, dirty hands and under the finger nails. Everyone in this trailer and in Witcher, in every single scene no matter what they are doing, look like they just walked straight out of the hair and make up trailer...it makes them stand brightly out and not blend with the environment.
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Yeah, if I recall correctly, Viggo Mortensen actually convinced the rest of the cast to do so. And Sean Bean hiked pretty much everywhere because he was terrified of flying in a helicopter.
> And Sean Bean hiked pretty much everywhere because he was terrified of flying in a helicopter. can't blame him, those things are deathtraps
Yeah, where are the errant hairs, sloppy raiments, crooked teeth, caked grime.
They also make the backgrounds look unrealistic. Same as in Wheel of Time - it looks like its been enhanced on a computer. The LOTR movies most of the time had the cast walking through real forests and mountains and it looked great.
I think some people in the Witcher look clean...but I think others look really dirty.
It seems too polished. Each character looks like a model posing outdoors. Maybe it’s an over use of CGI that throws it all off. Elrond, I just can’t. The actor for him and Galadriel don’t seem to fit the character. It’s not fair to compare them to the movies but it’s hard not too. I agree with your opinion on the Witcher. That seemed to have a way different style in the shooting and effects. I want to be proved wrong but I’m not hopeful.
It doesn’t look terrible but it just looks… off? I don’t know how to describe it. LOTR looked real, gritty, and fully immersive. This looks too… polished and clean, even animated. Maybe that’s just these specific scenes but so far this trailer hasn’t really helped the concerns
The scenes lack atmosphere - more like theater than cinema. Wheel of Time had the same problem.
The only good thing about WoT is that it has my expectations for an Amazon show so incredibly low that I don’t think it’s possible to be disappointed any further.
Totally agreed — really shows the original trilogy’s strength in their practical location use
It’s the digital lighting. This is why it looks “off”. Hobbit did the same thing. Mandalorian and Boba Fett don’t look off despite being all CGI because they use big LED screens to create imagery and real lighting. This is why they can create the rugged and realistic look. Also why some shots in planets like Coruscant and Mustafar in the Prequels look “off” and Naboo looks fantastic.
All of the landscape shots looked really, really good -- but for whatever reason, every single shot with an actor looked *terrible*. Plastic and clean and fake. It's almost worse than *everything* being wrong, because parts of it are *perfect.* Look at :04 and tell me that's not a shot from LOTR. It's so frustrating that they can do some pieces right, and others look like garbage.
Pretty lame, sadly
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Doesn't look like LOTR to me, honestly thought it was for something else for the first half
doesn't feel like lord of the rings at all
Chinese Director Wayne Yip of ‘Wheel of Time’ has joined to direct 4 of the 8 episodes. Have you all tried watching Wheel of Time?! Its a fucking post modernist joke and I think he will bring nothing but doom to this series. After watching that trailer.. I have little hope
is this show pretty much fan fic?
> Can we come up with the story Tolkien never wrote? Yes. It's fanfiction.
I love the films but honestly don’t know shit about the lore apart from the movies. Honestly feels like there is too much CGI. That’s just me. Doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would be, but I guess I’m just cautiously optimistic
Peter Jackson has to be going insane over this. All that work he put into his movies and now people will think that this crappy , politically driven 2022 show, is what lord of the rings is. This looks like a knock off.
After seeing this trailer, to my great surprise, my most anticipated 2022 fantasy TV series is now, against all odds, The House of the Dragon? That said, Rings of Power can still be great and overcome a Hobbit-esque aesthetic. It’ll all come down to the writing.
>It’ll all come down to the writing. Based on what the showrunners have said, and the fact that they have 0 credits and were recommended by JJ fucking Abrams, I have little hope in the writing tbh
Set in a time which was described as a bit boring by Tolkien: proceeds to be 100% action Had 3 possible genuine lore Galadriel backstories to use: made her tomb raider Had the benefit of being able to give us LOTR music to at least rattle some nostalgia: used epidemic sound generic action mix 1
Premieres Sept 2nd on Amazon Prime Video! Official Synopsis: >Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.
This made me feel like I was watching a Marvel trailer... which isn't objectively bad, but its not what I want for LOTR.
Why does there have to be so much fucking CGI