This one I came late to, on
the basis that I’m no Johnny Tolkien fan. More of a Clive Staples kind of
reader, truth be told. Though Clive
Staples Lewis sounds like an unexpected office brawl, come to think.
I was
invited to mock the opening episode of Johnny Tolkien’s Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Flies, Damn Flies, and
Statistics Rings: The Infinity Gauntlet of Bigby Rings of Power
– brought to you by Darth Bezos and Weetabix.
Indeed. I may have made some of that up.
Context. I haven’t read The Hobbit. But I did read The
Lord of the Rings. I’ve read The
Chronicles of Narnia, which has such
a huge spoiler for it as a series that it is a huge spoiler just admitting
there’s a huge spoiler for it. And I won’t spoil it for you. Clive can do that
on his own time. What else? I watched The
Lord of the Rings as animation before I watched the live trilogy of movies.
If I ever tell you I’m a massive fan of The Silmarillion, it’s a coded warning
that I’ve been kidnapped for ransom.
I had to check notes for this next bit.
Apparently, I was once invited to watch a Hobbit
movie. It didn’t matter if I’d missed one. And it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t
see the next one. So I guessed I’d be watching the middle one of the three
padded movies.
Normally, I would never do this. I’m going
out on a stout limb here and stating that I don’t watch the second movie in a
series unless I’ve seen the first. What does this all mean? It means I’ve now
done this terrible deed, this crime against cinema, once, and once was enough.
Also, the movie itself was a crime against
cinema, padded to fuck, and quite the terrible deed. Something about a giant gold
statue of a dwarf melting like a pack of butter and filling a swimming pool for
a dragon to bathe in. There were a few dwarf characters as well, but it wasn’t
worth paying attention to any of that.
So. You will understand that I could never
be a butt-hurt Johnny Tolkien fan, coming in here with my brand of criticism
while cultishly praying to The One True Text. (Yes, The Brand of Criticism is a magical Dungeons & Dragons sword. And that…is a roleplaying fact.) No.
That’s not the angle, here.
By
contrast against the non-fun movie about a Hobbit, the Narnia movies were fun. Far from perfect, true. But there was
enough spirit to see you through to the end. Unless you were Disney, who bowed
out after the second film in the series for reasons of corporate soullessness.
The problem was that Disney needed a lordly
ringly movie spree of its own about a wizarding bunch of English schoolkids
caught up in magical adventures. Far better to stick to the source material
provided by Lewis, than attempt a mish-mash of other franchises for the sake of
a quick buck. Would’ve made more money by not trying to make more money chasing
other franchises and their Balrogian shadows.
After the third one, minus Disney, the
moviemakers were really pinning their hearts to their sleeves in plugging the
idea of a fourth movie about Eustace and Jill. It was not to be, Chéri.
I am no butt-hurt fan of the land of Narnia the book series being ruined for
eternity by Narnia the movie series. No.
Even the harshest fans of the books-to-movies will tell you that Will Poulter
was terrific casting as Eustace. In other matters, matters of story, were there
some bewildering choices for those movies? Yes.
You didn’t have to go to New Zealand to make
Narnia come to life. That was a Tolkien-franchise-based thing. Do I care about
accuracy to the sacred text? I don’t see the talking lion as a big furry golden
Jesus-figure, and you don’t have to either if you don’t want to.
No matter how shitty the adaptation from
book to movie, the book is still there if you want to read it. And that’s
always the harshest lesson to remember. The thing that you liked initially…is
still around. We need reminding of that, from time to time.
I’m looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Dullness. Not merely the worst Indy movie I’ve seen, but one of the
worst movies I’ve seen. But the
trilogy is available to watch. The thing you liked is still here.
Sadly, I must return to the business of
Johnny Tolkien. Too many people turned Tolkien into a business. The movies
based around Smaug the dragon and the giant dwarf statue and Tolkieny
shenanigans…they were padded to fuck, but made their money. Yes. The business
of Tolkien.
Tolkien’s son Christopher was saddened to
see that Peter Jackson’s crew gutted the
book and turned it into an action movie…
He referred to The Lord of the Rings, but he also applied that to the impending
film about Bilbo. Should have been a TV series. It wasn’t. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Trilogy is something I won’t be watching.
Tolkien’s lore deserved a long-form approach. Television. Episodic. Building a
world.
And so, someone somewhere decided they could
do a prequel. There was a TV series. By Amazon. Bezos. Massive fan of Middle
Earth shenanigans. He sat there in a Star
Trek shirt on his dick-shaped spaceship, contemplated Middle Earth, pondered
his orb, and said Make it so.
Cue Game
of Thrones with its introductory map sequence set to jaunty music.
I guess it’s better to have a dick-shaped
spaceship than a spaceship-shaped dick. Depends on the sci-fi franchise. Back
to Tolkien, though we’ll be detouring into a testicle-shaped spaceship eventually.
What are the criticisms of this lamentable
TV project? I am not here to have a go at the acting. So what is worth
criticising? This folly. The format of the show, which we’ll return to.
Criticism?
It
rewrites Tolkien! Big fucking deal. Tolkien rewrote Tolkien, and he was Tolkien for fuck’s sake. Once The Lord of the Rings became a thing, The Hobbit underwent some revision to
bring it into line with the later history. Tolkien’s choice.
Criticism. Events in the history are
compressed for the sake of the TV show.
Big fucking deal. Go back to The Lord of the Rings at the movies and
watch Gandalf ride majestically to the parchment version of the National
Database, in search of evidence on the One True Ring. He might be gone for a
few weeks. We’ll be generous and say a month. There and back again, he doesn’t
spend more than…wait. Read the book. See how long it takes for Gandalf to
reason things out. Seventeen years.
Rewriting Tolkien and compressing events are
hardly criticisms. So where does the TV show go wrong? It’s fucking boring.
Nothing happens in episode one. There are no stakes. Evil is gone and we cannot
find it. Well, fuck all the dwarf prostitutes, hide my lunch, call me hungry,
does Gollum still shit in the woods – and would that make for a more exciting
TV experience? No, no, it wouldn’t.
Generally, my tolerance for a new TV show
reaches the point of crisis after fifteen minutes. I’ll know, within that time,
whether or not I am going to switch off. Rarely, I’ll finish the first episode
in full and then decide the show is not for me. But for the most part your
goodwill, as a writing team, as a production crew, dies in the sixteenth minute
of a show if nothing worthwhile happens in the first quarter-hour.
I won’t name two shows. One I quit after six
minutes. The other I left two minutes in – but I was playing it at double
speed. So I guess I quit in the first minute, two minutes in. Yes, I almost
always watch YouTube videos at double speed, to save time. If I could do that
with all of your empty movies and ponderous TV shows, I fucking would.
Amazon wanted their Game of Thrones experience. Yes, that one ended well. I’d seen the
first series of that show, and stopped reading the books after a while when it
occurred to me that G.R.R. Martin was a step below J.R.R. Tolkien in the sense
that Tolkien was still alive after the conclusion of his large fantasy tale. If
Martin lives to finish writing, I may return to his saga – from the start,
obviously. Or, y’know, maybe fucking not.
The Amazon TV version of Tolkien didn’t move
fast enough at the very beginning. We have Galadriel narrating past events for
us, as happened in the movie version of Tolkien’s world. And that’s the
problem. We need to make this like Tolkien, which means we’ve only vaguely made
it like Peter Jackson’s version of something like Tolkien. We’re in the general
area, right? There’s a map, to guide us.
I believe Amazon spent most of the budget on
Elf Wallpaper™ and Google Middle Earth Maps®. Seriously,
what is it with this fucking map? It shows us we are in another part of the
land, somewhere, and people are not doing
stuff in each location. Okay.
Yes, yes, the beginning. It’s…the opening of
The Lord of the Rings again.
Galadriel narrates the history of evil, which, in this case, is the story of
Morgoth, who – in a fit of anti-social tree rage – cuts down the Christmas
lights on two mighty English Elvish oaks. Or something.
There’s no Christmas in Tolkien. No Santa
Claus. There is a Santa Claus over in Narnia, though. That pissed Tolkien right
off. You can’t have Santa in Narnia, but you can alienate your readers by
placing Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the
Rings.
Why is Tom Bombadil the first to be cut from
adaptations? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the way he treats that One True Ring
as if it doesn’t exist and has no hold over him. No explanation. If you smoked
weed while reading the books, you were into him. And if you were dropping tabs
of LSD like Legolas dropping fools with his bow, then I guess you fucking loved
Tom Bombadil, man. ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE NOT STONED READING THE STORY…not so
much.
Right. Morgoth is evil. He doesn’t like Christmas
trees. They aren’t Christmas trees. Stop that. Even with the fairy lights. So
Morgoth is ushered on and almost instantly ushered back off. His minion,
Sauron, is soon ushered on and off again.
It’s hard to care. The main antagonist in The Lord of the Rings is the One True
Ring, not Sauron. Sauron has a walk-on part at best. He is remote. A pantomime
threat. Where is Sauron? He’s behind you!
The Ring, though. With its whispers, and temptations, promises, and sense of
power. It’s the villain of the piece.
And in a fucking prequel…is absent. Oppenheimer
is having trouble gathering enough fissile material for its construction. So
the story is about Galadriel and her search for evil. She piles helmets up into
a muddy mound, commemorating the deaths of 300 Spartans, and regrets wearing clean
willowy dresses on spattered battlefields.
Don’t worry. She changes into Jeanne d’Arc’s
battle armour soon enough. And we get this ice cliff climb that does nothing.
Start that fucking scene on the icy wastes with the wind blowing and people
falling behind, not on this sub-par Tomb
Raider cliff climbing exercise. She’s looking for evil, but evil isn’t
coming looking for her. Fuck. What’s the point of all this, then? Speed this
up, for fuck’s sake.
We are inter-cutting throughout, going to
the prototype Hobbits and then to the doomed Elf-Mortal romance that borrows
from The Lord of the Rings. Plots
with not much going on in them.
Who
are the antler folk? Doesn’t fucking matter who the fucking antler folk are. Forget
the fucking fucketty antler folk. Apparently, it mattered to Gary Oldman levels of EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!! when watching the
trailer.
But
the trailer isn’t meant to showcase the TV show. It is just meant to promise
you lies, damn flies, and statistics. Statistically, around a third of people
watching actually finished the show.
We’re in the realm of streaming and
data-mining the streams to see who loved the…oh. Just below two-thirds of the
audience fucked off before the end, sparing their eyes, ears, and brains, I
guess.
Too many characters spouting deep meaningful
meaningless words from the ancient scrolls of Live, Laugh, Love. This is the internet bitches, and the fans
turned up to Die, Scowl, Hate. Whole
lotta nothing going on. But that doesn’t even begin to cover it. Back to the
non-story…
So Paladin
GIRL BOSS Jeanne D’Arc LARA CROFT Galadriel and her D&D party go into this winter dungeon, see. They gaslight the
lone inhabitant into being a monster, kill the beastie, and… gain experience
points so they can go up a level. Oh, and Sauron’s been leaving a QR code
around the place, to remind everyone that evil’s
been up in ya business, ya bitches.
I’d have started this episode with the
testicle spaceship landing on a blasted heath. Fire up The Ride of the Valkyries, boys; sounds like Wagner’s back on the
menu.
Galadriel returns home and has to attend a
town council meeting to receive some kind of STAR WARS medal. These town council meetings are always the fucking
same. The rebellious character is on to something, but the elders don’t want
her interfering. So she’s dragged back from the latest scraped knee incident to
be given a final warning about not doing the thing.
At which point, she proceeds to fuck off and
she does the thing she was not meant to be doing – leading to adventure. Except
for that very last part. Her reward at the meeting is to sail to Elf Heaven on
a boat that is so fucking viciously green-screened that I cannot say the
visuals were the best thing about this pilot episode.
No.
The best thing was the end of the pilot episode and the lessening of the burden
on my shattered mind. I no longer had a shred of mocking commentary left in me.
Commentary. You shouldn’t be in a position
to provide live commentary for an opening episode. Or, indeed, for any episode.
You should be swept up in a world and not swept out to sea.
I’d have quit at the CGI snow troll fight if
I hadn’t been asked to watch the whole pilot. Fuuuck. I am angered at the lack of quality in the writing of this
non-episode, and, reminder, folks, I am no Johnny Tolkien fan. Even I was
pissed off at this drivel.
Galadriel’s reward is to sail to a big
golden light. I thought for a second that Barbie
and Oppenheimer had somehow come
together in an imperfect fusion of mash-ups drawing The Lord of the Rings into the same orbit. Sauronheimer: The Barbie Incident.
But no. That would have been a mercy. And
faster-paced. Galadriel sails a stormy sea. On a boat with everyone standing
upright and not swaying. At least on Star
Trek they’d lean to the side when the ship was hit. Elf scientist Mr Spock
confirms this, when he’s not singing about Bilbo.
I think I’d rather just have the green
background, if I’m brutally honest. Look at the amazing background visuals of
the sea! And wince in pain at the truly fucking atrocious foreground nonsense
going on there.
Pros:
it’s a pilot episode I never have to bother with again. Cons: everyone else
listing pros and cons mentions great visuals as a pro. It’s a fucking lie.
Watch and wince in agony at the CGI troll fight and this sheer buffoonery on
the boat. Paging Ralph Bakshi. Ralph
Bakshi to reception.
ANYWAY,
Galadriel is about five seconds from Elf Heaven when she makes the sort of rash
decision that would get you killed under all other circumstances. This absolute
megacorporate soulsucking fuck-muppet of a diluted non-character jumps
overboard so she can swim an ocean in search of evil. Shit like that will get
you killed in Dungeons & Dragons,
real life, and most bleak movies.
But not in Amazon’s version of Middle England
Earth: The Land that Plot Forgot.
What else is there? Racial slurs for Elf characters. Mysterious cow poisoning.
More Sauron QR code nonsense. And waiting for the pre-Hobbit character Dolly
MacGoodGollyMissMolly to run off and have a fucking adventure for fuck’s sake.
Galadriel is not the only diluted
fuck-muppet of a character in the show. And here, we must acknowledge that
there’s a bit of a problem. When you are talking about the rings, three of them
end up with the Elves. And we can quote the opening to the movie, for this bit.
One word will do.
IMMORTAL. Elves are immortal.
I was there,
Gandalf, three thousand years ago, when Tolkien himself signed away the movie
rights.
So how do you deal with immortal characters?
This is what leads to time-compression in the timeline. You can keep throwing
the immortals into the story, but your pre-Hobbits and your other mortal types
will have story segments as long as the life-expectancy of a flailing fly. One
option would be to do a detailed story of mortal characters, with the immortals
restricted to cameos.
Cameos for Galadriel? That would actually
work. Mortal characters across many lands and many years are there to uncover
the clues. Only the immortal Galadriel, Elrond, and Kelly Osbourne can fit the
clues together, over time. Yes, you’d have to keep replenishing the mortal
characters, but you’d do it from batch of episodes to batch of episodes, year
after year.
That’s one way. Incidentally, the very exact
number of eight episodes was a contractual thing. The rights to TV shows longer
than eight episodes live on in the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie.
Something to do with the legal powers of the Witch-king of Angmar, Saul Zaentz.
Operating from beyond the grave, beyond the pale, and beyond belief.
No, Galadriel isn’t the only fuck-muppet of
a diluted character. Yes, part of the problem lies in the immortal qualities of
certain characters. In other words, all the Elf characters in this TV show are
pointless. That’s despite having pointed ears.
Did I mention I preferred the Narnia movies, and that I thought Susan’s
romance with Prince Caspian wasn’t on my bingo card of things that really upset
Hitler?
The
Rings of Power. Or. The Pangs of
Hunger for a story. Oh, and don’t forget a guy fell out of the sky inside a
ball-shaped spaceship disguised as a rock. At which point I declared him the
Last Son of Krypton.
And I just didn’t care. Evil made a cow ill.
How evil is that? Galadriel didn’t go to Elf Heaven. She’d have to work her way
through a Peter Jackson movie trilogy to gain the Golden Ticket admitting her
at long last to that Great Chocolate Factory in the sky.
But, in the meantime, in this TV show, night
swimming. Lots and fucking lots of it. I’m sure I missed out loads of the plot
from this pilot episode. Just as the writers did. Oh, Kelly Osbourne popped in
to offer to build a few rings of power, but the show seemed reluctant to
mention this. I may be pronouncing Celebrimbor
slightly off-key.
At least Sexy
Shelob™ didn’t turn up to turn heads and drain bodies. Even if parts of
this show looked like a computer game.
Someone call the burns unit. We’re admitting
an entire cast and crew.
Is it a criticism to say nothing much
happened in this pilot episode? You can criticise Tolkien for that, too. He
built a fucking world. And used that as the backdrop, the foreground, the side
dishes, and everything else. Plot takes a back seat to majestic travel at times.
Then the Ents appear, and the story REALLY paused for breath. Why would you
expect a TV show set BEFORE the main action to be any differently-paced?
Don’t trust
Bezos, Mr Frodo.
This guy in a loincloth landed on Horsell
Common , much to the dismay of the pre-Hobbits and H.G. Wells. Dolly MacGoodGollyMissMolly
and her chums must face the mystery of discovering whether or not this truly is
Kal-El, Son of Krypton. Or possibly Braniac.
Maybe
he’s Bruce Wayne trying out a funky ejector seat, given that his Batmobile was
sliced in twain by a Balrog named Bane. That would tie in to Galadriel’s
arrival in Gotham City in episode two.
What do these TV shows do for us? Not much.
To quote Michael Moorcock out of context…
They don’t
ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on
what’s best for us.
Moorcock’s criticism of Tolkien’s Middle England
Earth, taken from last century, applies to the town council meeting in this
century’s empty non-adaptation of bits of Tolkien’s wallpaper the writers were
permitted to plunder from the back of that Weetabix packet for a duration of no
more than eight episodes. Contractual obligation achievement unlocked.
When the first thing out of their mouths is WE’VE PLOTTED AHEAD TO COVER FIVE YEARS OF THE SHOW,
you know you’ll struggle to make it through episode one. Let me just watch the
trailer again.
Oof. That trailer music should have served
as warning enough. Everyone in the trailer looks busy getting ready for some
unspecified looming evil. Buy one Morgoth, and have a half-price Sauron whether
you like it or not.
The show has been out for a while, now. It
is difficult to research any of it. When I go to the internet, the internet
seems to be concerned with who Galadriel is dating. Is it the bad boy, Morgoth?
Sauron, rebellious and daring on his motorbike, perhaps. Could it be Kylo Ren
or Sauron-a-like Snoke? Rosemary the telephone operator? What about that
mild-mannered janitor?
Could be.
And the reviews. Holy fucketty fuck. By all
means, change your opinion over time. But some of those reviewers were breaking
Olympic records when it came to doing the backflip over shifting the reviews
around.
If your initial review was about sweeping
majesty and a show not afraid to take its time, I’ve got hot fucking news for
you. The show was eight episodes long. You didn’t have time to climb an ice
cliff, twirl a blade like a drum majorette waving off an ice troll as a joke,
or go on a quest for evil only to find out evil’s gone away for the weekend.
Your reward for your pointless side-quest
shall be…retirement in Elf Heaven. Off you go, now. Remember, we know best. You
are just a youngster, Galadriel. Don’t huff those mushrooms in the forest, now.
Then the head of the town council is off to
a wooden condominium in what will one day become Rivendell, with the rest of
the afternoon spent scouring the Palantir for rumours of Sexy Shelob™. A massive burning eye blinks on there for a second,
but it’s a known Microsoft Update glitch. Nothing to see here.
What haven’t I talked about? Dolly
MacGoodGollyMissMolly, the pre-Hobbit. That isn’t her name. No. Really, she’s Dolly
O’GoodGollyMissMolly. The Hobbits, in case you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, are unfeasibly,
unswervingly, abso-fucking-lutely ENGLISH.
This is not the case in the movies, but
we’re here to talk about the pre-Hobbits from the TV show. The Harfoots. Or the
O’Harfoots. Just call them O’Hare and
be done, bejesus. When is a Hobbit not a Hobbit? When it is a pre-Hobbit, or a…LEPRECHAUN
Harfoot.
So there are these…
…pauses,
sensitively, then gives up…
…travellers, see. Down-to-Earth. Salt of the very soil.
We know that, as they are shorter people. And there’s a lilt to their accents,
begorrah.
Aye. Travellers, in wagons, who speak in a
particular way. And they are scavenging for food. Soon the forces of Sauron
will engineer a food shortage aimed specifically at the Little Folk. With their
chirpy attitudes and their ragged clothes and their muddy faces, they’ll fuck
off to America in search of gold.
You won’t find America in Middle Earth,
silly. Though you will find Amarehk in the works of Michael Moorcock.
Why are they hiding from the antler folk?
FORGET THE FUCKING ANTLER FOLK. We need to boost this plot with something.
These pre-Hobbit travellers don’t live in the Pale. They live beyond it. Could
we throw in a villain?
Dark
Lord Sauron, come on down, the price is right. For Amazon, the financial cost
of being TV hobbyists was far from right. Sauron is wheeled on with all the
subtlety of Darth Vader turning up for a cameo in your Spider-Man movie. Back to the
Future we forgive for that kind of nonsense, but don’t push your luck.
An episode devoted to Morgoth being a
character…would’ve been handled just as badly, I’m sure.
MORGOTH: I’ve left the keys in the ignition
and you really have to use those sandwiches up by the weekend. Other than that,
rock on my #dudebro.
SAURON: (TEENAGE GIGGLING.)
Other problems. A horse died making the
second series of the show. And that is fucking tragic. Whether a show is great
or not, any death associated with it is simply awful.
If you whined about black people being in a
TV show featuring magic fucking rings, I’ve no words for you. Why is there a black man in STAR WARS?! He’s
a Stormtrooper! Yes, he is. And he’s in Tunisia, filming the very first STAR WARS movie. He’s removed his helmet
for an informal photo-shoot, back in the 1970s. So why are you angry at John
Boyega, decades later? Oh.
I don’t believe there’s any way to finish on
a positive note, which is why I kept these last points to the end. Hard to
believe a horse died over this show. I’ve made it this far. Let’s wrap it up in
a bow of barbed wire. I thought I’d type up an exercise in comedy. But you all
know it is tragedy.
They tore out Tolkien’s appendix and
displayed it on TV, so we could watch it slowly decomposing into dust over the
course of eight treacle-slow episodes. Or so I am told. I barely made it
through episode one.
One episode to ditch them all and to TV
history consign them. In the land of Amazon, where the positive reviewers lie.
Then they sit up and gasp as other people hold contrary opinions.
Stop making insipid piss. Yes, it is a
medical condition. The cure for insipid TV is to stop watching. Find something
you like and watch that instead. Sounds like a plan. Luckily, it won’t take
eight episodes of tree-porn to enact. And now we must take our leave of
Tolkien’s appendix, the CGI festival of notes for an actual story, and we must
watch anything else, maybe even everything else, instead.
Gimli
proffers his axe. But I’ll see your axe, Gimli, and raise a remote control.
