Amazon’s The Rings of Power is a betrayal of Tolkien’s vision

I had been so looking forward to seeing The Rings of Power. For all the wrong reasons, of course. In the months leading up to its release on Amazon, it had been hailed – largely on the basis of rumours and trailers – as an epic disaster, perhaps the most cherishably dreadful travesty in the history of screen fantasy.

Sadly, in this, as in so many other areas, The Rings of Power is a massive disappointment. For example, if you were hoping to see the world’s least funny comedian Lenny Henry die a death as the Tolkien realm’s first ever black hobbit, you’re going to feel cheated: his acting is perfectly OK and anyway you’re so distracted by his Irish accent you don’t really notice the gratuitous diversity casting.

Also, if you were hoping to see bald gazillionaire Jeff Bezos hoisted by his woke petard on a personal vanity project doomed to failure, I don’t think that’s going to happen either. Like a high-stakes gambler who also happens to own the casino, he’s just going to keep chucking money at it – one billion dollars and counting – until his critics are worn out and the entire world grudgingly accepts that, whether they wanted it or not, The Rings of Power is with us for umpteen seasons and is going to become a thing if only by a process of relentless, grinding attrition.

It’s still pretty rubbish though, for a number of reasons, the first being its glacial pace. In episode two, for example, I sat with growing tedium as one female hobbit creature justified at great length to another female hobbit creature why she had chosen to save the life of a mystery giant who’d crashed to earth in a meteor. None of the speech was necessary; we needed no motivation explaining to us because we could have provided our own. Pure, clumsy padding by a scriptwriter with no sense of direction.

Then there’s the aesthetic. $60 million (£50 million) per episode – quadruple the cost of the episodes in Game of Thrones’s final season – buys an awfully impressive array of dwarfish mining interiors and elven palaces. But it never feels particularly magical or epic, in the way that Peter Jackson’s trilogy did. If you thought Jackson’s take on bucolic innocence of the Shire verged on the twee (especially with all those intrusive Irish pipes, which frankly should never have been allowed near a place based on the English Midlands not rural Cork) wait till you see the sylvan realm of the Harfoots in The Rings of Power. It reminded me hideously of the opening moments of Cats the Musical, where all the various characterful felines emerge comically from their various hidey holes and you’re thinking: 'Groan. I’ve got another two hours of this crap.'

But the worst thing for me, at any rate, is its betrayal of Tolkien’s vision. One reason Lord of the Rings is so compelling is that it’s the synthesis of an Old Norse and Old English professor’s knowledge of myriad ancient legends designed to help tell us who we are and why we’re here. Yes, on one level it’s a charming kiddie-friendly tale about cute creatures who embark on an awfully big adventure and triumph against the odds. But on another level it’s about eternal themes like good versus evil, about nationhood and identity, duty and courage in times of great crisis, and so on.

This politically correct prequel to LOTR (inspired by historical and cultural notes made in books like The Silmarillion) couldn’t give a damn for Tolkien’s profound, heartfelt, wise, Christian world view. One example of this is the way that most of the male characters are a bit wet or useless, while the female ones – notably Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel – are plucky, empowered, often brilliant at swordplay, and so forth. Tolkien would have recognised this decadent inversion as symptomatic of a civilisation in its death throes. He didn’t underwrite his female characters because he was a sexist pig. He did so because he was writing about heroic quests and heroic quests are, and always have been up until recently, and with good reason, undertaken by men.

‘Tolkien Is turning in his grave,’ declared Elon Musk on Twitter. ‘Almost every male character so far is a coward, a jerk or both. Only Galadriel is brave, smart and nice.’