Amazon's Rings of Power Discussion. Is this Tolkien?

I'm a little surprised by the silence in these groups regarding this series. But I've been mulling it over and need to talk it out. Who's in?

I'm going to try to gather my thoughts about it into a coherent statement but will say that I have NOT watched it for a myriad of reasons and that everything I hear makes it even more likely I never will. And the discussion I would like to have is not about what we think about the show as a show (if it was an original show, which would then be talked about on TVThing not LibraryThing) but more what we think of it as readers and maybe devoted fans of Tolkien the writer and his life work.

Details coming! But feel free to chime in. Maybe with a yea or nay on whether it is Tolkien. If I knew my html better I would do the vote widget thingy.

>1 jveezer:
Here's one attempt at the "vote widget" you mentioned; I suspect the phrasing of the question will be crucial, and I'm not sure this is the best:

>1 jveezer:

I'm interested enough in the series that I'm reading about it (witness: following this thread!), but at the moment not motivated to watch the series itself. Partly that has to do with it being on Amazon: I'm not a Prime subscriber, and intend not to be.

But presumably the series eventually will become available on DVD or other means, and for the moment, I'm not motivated to view that way, either.

My basic rationale: there is Tolkien yet for me to read, and I'd rather pursue those works first. For example, I have The Fall of Gondolin and The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun on my shelves, and there are other titles (edited by Christopher, I acknowledge) I hope to read eventually.

I'm not planning to watch it on the fairly unrefined grounds that the Hobbit movies rather soured me on adapting Tolkien to the screen.

Perhaps I'll reconsider if friends who do watch it sing its praises convincingly enough, but I'm not much of a TV watcher on the best of days, so probably unlikely.

I haven't read beyond the Hobbit and LOTR, so I have no opinion about its relationship to the rest of his oeuvre. I do know the show is bad, with wooden dialogue, uninteresting motivations and ginned-up situations. It "looks good," or so people say, but it's just bad overall.

I’d really like to discuss this whole thing from a literary point of view, and maybe some background will also flesh out where I’m coming from:
(1) I don’t really consume film/TV media; I’m a reader. I did watch Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and enjoyed it somewhat but with big reservations on what was done to the storyline. I made it through 2 of the 3 The Hobbit films before having enough. So you can imagine I was skeptical (but maybe foolishly hopeful) about another attempt at Tolkien. Except that,
(2) I am non-violently anti-Amazon. I believe we vote with our $$ everyday, and I refuse to give mine to Amazon.
(3) I am a Tolkien fan and uber-nerd. I have probably read the books published in his lifetime 40+ times, including the Silmarillion and the appendices of the Lord of the Rings where a lot of the Amazon material should have come from. And I’ve dabbled in a lot of Christopher Tolkien’s output from his father’s works, especially early on.

Despite my nerdiness, my hope was that since the series was going to tackle First and Second Age events that Tolkien didn’t sketch out in much detail, there was plenty of room to create an amazing series that didn’t deviate from Tolkien’s outline but that gave the screen writers plenty to flesh out. But from what I understand from reading reviews, they couldn’t resist major tweaks: to Galadriel’s character and history, to the timeline, to having hobbits where they weren’t, to wizards arriving on meteors, etc.

What puzzles me the most about this is why book to film adaptation/translation would be treated differently than book translation when it comes to a writer’s masterwork. Yes, book translators and publishers abridge works and often let their biases and prejudices influence their translations. But when that is discovered, usually there is an uproar and a new translation called for. There just seems to be a culture of fidelity in the transfer of a writer's book to another language that is missing when going to another media. Imagine a Ulysses translation to German where the translators switched the city from Dublin to Munich and changed Blooms ethnicity. Imagine One Hundred Years of Solitude being screenwritten down to One Hundred Days of Solitude. Huckleberry Finn without the undercurrent of slavery and racism.

I fully believe that many years of popular film programming could have been gleaned from the Tolkien source material without any big tweaks. Just write the dialogue and the stage cues guys, the story is there. I, for one, would be much more accepting of a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies movie if there was a faithful Pride and Prejudice movie out there as well.

So for me, this is not Tolkien, and as someone who loves his work, unwatchable. But, of course, I understand that people unfamiliar with his work might love it for what it is. And that's OK, I guess.

>4 AndreasJ: the Hobbit movies rather soured me
True for me as well.

>5 timspalding: wooden dialogue, uninteresting motivations and ginned-up situations
Not leaving much to be excited about: the "visuals" are frankly the least enticing aspect of a film adaptation. Better: hearing the songs, or conveying the architecture and landscape.

>6 jveezer: major tweaks: to Galadriel’s character and history, to the timeline, to having hobbits where they weren’t, to wizards arriving on meteors
I can be sanguine about such tweaks, when there's a compelling (screenwriterly) reason. If the adaptation doesn't just put a moving visual to the verbatim story, but instead uses the potential (while observing the constraints) of the medium, I can forgive tweaks. When they are done without necessity, I'm much less forgiving.