[HN Gopher] 'The Rings of Power' Has Inexplicably Terrible Writing
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'The Rings of Power' Has Inexplicably Terrible Writing
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 12 points
Date : 2022-09-18 21:23 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| smoldesu wrote:
| This is something I was blown away by too; for a 750 million
| dollar show, there sure are a lot of scenes where nothing
| happens.
|
| By far, my favorite example is the scene where Elrond challenges
| a mountain dwarf to a rock-splitting competition. As viewers
| (even ones unfamiliar with LOTR), we know the outcome of this
| contest. The only thing they need to show us are these two
| characters after the competition, breaking down their
| relationships as begrudging friends. Instead, we spend more than
| a minute-and-a-half watching a rock splitting montage. Completely
| pointless from a storyboarding and writing perspective,
| especially considering that the outcome doesn't circumvent our
| expectations.
|
| My second favorite example is even dumber; the third episode has
| another pointless 90-second scene of Galadriel riding a horse and
| smiling in slow-motion. I'm not joking, the entire scene looks
| like one of those HDR demo shots you'd see on a TV at Best Buy.
|
| The show is genuinely difficult to watch, but don't take my word
| for it. Watch the first episode for yourself and take a shot
| every time you audibly sigh, you'll never want to watch an Amazon
| original again.
|
| Edit: links to both scenes below
|
| - Elrond & Durin: https://youtu.be/KT6ldSEVHCU
|
| - Galadriel Riding: https://youtu.be/4ZqMRAb3zKk
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > there sure are a lot of scenes where nothing happens.
|
| "Look, we spent a lot of money on this filming and you will
| damn well sit through them!"
|
| (see also Thor: Love and Thunder for another thing that needed
| a stronger edit but presumably didn't for the same reason.)
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It's not a movie, it's a TV show that will have a run time of
| ~40 hours.
|
| The scenes where no story development happen also serve a
| purpose: allowing the viewer to not be drowned in over-
| information.
|
| The show is easy to follow because of that reason, even for
| someone who hasn't watched anything LOTR related before.
|
| All the comments about the development being too slow or some
| scenes being just for spectacle are nonsensical. The ones
| mentioning the budget as if it had been allocated to the first
| 4 episodes are even worse.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > It's not a movie, it's a TV show that will have a run time
| of ~40 hours.
|
| Game of Thrones is 70+ hours start-to-finish, that wasn't an
| excuse to slow the pacing down or write impotent dialogue. It
| knows how to direct characters, and the showrunners
| understand that 60 seconds of horse riding doesn't make good
| television. Allegory is used sparingly, and the world is
| fleshed out through it's characters rather than CGI
| environments. It leads to a story that can be followed by
| bookworms and football dads alike.
|
| The Rings of Power doesn't build it's world in the same way.
| Instead we're whisked away to exotic locations that most
| viewers are unfamiliar with, and the following scenes do
| nothing to really characterize the world these characters
| inhabit. It's like the writing team and art directors never
| met to share notes. I'd argue that this lack of cohesion
| makes it decidedly harder to follow than other contemporary
| fantasy shows.
|
| > The ones mentioning the budget as if it had been allocated
| to the first 4 episodes are even worse.
|
| Okay, I'll be generous then. Why can't $125 million dollars
| buy better writers?
| fullsend wrote:
| The executives and producers. There's a fascinating leaked email
| thread from Marvel where a couple random execs are hyping up each
| other's terrible ideas, saying they could kill off characters and
| reboot Iron Man and other self-indulgent nonsense. Then Kevin
| Feige, all hail and hallowed be his name, joins the thread with a
| simple sentence - "We don't need to reboot, we can make infinite
| stories in these universes." With a stroke of the keyboard he
| stopped that garbage in its tracks.
|
| There's also a great speech by Kevin Smith where he describes
| being hired to write Superman and he goes to the producer's house
| to read the script. The guy is coked out, ranting about how there
| needs to be action every 10 pages in the script or the audience
| will get bored. He's talking about spiders and says the main
| villain should be one. Then Smith says Superman's kryptonian
| name, "Kel'al" or whatever, and the guy is like, who?
|
| That's the people making these calls sometimes. Most companies do
| not have a Kevin Feige.
|
| Amazon especially is going to be an overly cautious and
| bureaucratic behemoth. Inexperienced as a whole despite whoever
| they hired. Meanwhile HBO just bought a Channel 5 documentary
| produced by Tim and Eric and A24 with total creative freedom.
| Risky. That's the difference between shills and artists.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| The Pitch Meeting channel has saved me so much money since covid
| started.
| bbstats wrote:
| I think it works for the most part. Also it's $750MM for 5
| seasons...
| p0nce wrote:
| Agreed. This show is incredibly good.
| NomDePlum wrote:
| I'm enjoying it too.
|
| I read all of Tolkien's books I could get my hands on as a
| teenager. That was decades ago but for whatever reason the show
| so far has reminded me of the books far more than LOTR and
| Hobbit movies ever did.
| oifjsidjf wrote:
| 750M$ dollars and the best they can come up with is Teenage Ninja
| Mutant Turtles cringe fight scene choreography.
|
| Also those "sad dramatic slow motion death scenes" of those elf
| character dying were peak stupidity: we don't even care about
| them since they had 30 seconds of screen time and you give us
| slow motion sad dramatic scenes as if Frodo himself would deserve
| on his hypotethical death...
| [deleted]
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