"Small creatures shout epithets at each other as the literal Eye of Sauron bathes them in orange light, as it circles fifteen feet above, analysing their shopping habits." Hahaha I love it

“Eat the multi-billion dollar corporate slop and pretend its social justice, you weirdos. Thanks for making the world an embarrassing nightmare everyone.” -Jay Bauman

Rings of power has proven that I was wrong to think all those mediocre fantasy shows I watch would have been greatly improved by a bigger budget.

If Rob Zombie remade Barry Lyndon it would have an artistic vision. That vision might be horrible, but it would still be better than a mindless corporate product masquerading as something important.

"It's just shit to stop you from being hungry for a bit" so describes all of these big studio franchises. It's fast food filmmaking. Consume, toss the wrapper, never think about it again. It's of little to no value to us.

The only thing that really irked me, which isn't important at all, is that all the humans who live in small agrarian communities have such a mix of accents, when in reality they would all sound the same. It's like writers don't know how homogenous small agrarian societies are. But that's just a world building nitpick. Not that Tolkien cared about that at all.

When amazon makes a thing, no matter what it is, the automatic response for me is apathy. I don't care about the product, I don't care about the marketing, and I certainly don't care about the manufactured controversy.

I think this is the first time someone has mentioned the Anti-Irish cliques. Fantastic.

Most understand the arc they're trying to do with Galadriel. But she's a couple thousand years old here, has lifetimes of experience in the world, is the leader of armies, understands diplomacy, and certainly how to get along with people. Instead, they've applied the arc of a person with no social experience, who is forced out into the real world after living a sheltered life, starts out frigid, arrogant, and abrasive, but warms up to become a more well rounded person by the end. That's not the arc of a thousands years old Galadriel, that's a plot from a screenwriting 101 prompts book, and not a stretch given the two lead writers have no credits at all, only a "Star Trek Beyond (uncredited)", before given the helm of the most expensive show of all time.

Legolas baby fills up ten diapers in one go, and Gimli baby goes like "That still only counts as one!"

I think the real problem of this show, and I suppose this applies to a lot of mainstream media at the movement, is there’s a real adherence to technical coherence and basically nothing for the emotional craft of storytelling. Stories aren’t, despite what writing schools tell you, formulae. They’re words that takes you somewhere else. If you’re writing to check boxes you’ll never create anything worth a damn.

What i've noticed about this show is that no matter what, the people I work with will tell me that they didn't like it but they went in with an open mind and watched all of it to get a true perspective. I don't know why people act like they need to watch these banal products

Maybe this is an over simplistic view, but if Tolkien laid a lot of the ground work for modern fantasy. Would stripping the iconic story lines and characters not just leave you with a completely generic fantasy story?

"its just shit for you to stop being hungry for a bit" how did you manage to describe my life so accurately with one throwaway sentence

My take is that a lot of people looted the production for all they could. The "controversy" was deliberately created as cover for embezzlement.

“Cynical” is probably the best way to describe it. No one asked for it. It was meant to make money, and it wanted to buy insurance by including meaningless diversity, but still managing to fall into unintentional racism as you pointed out.

Thanks Georgie for noticing my new haircut, our parasocial relationship is reaching new highs

I did get a haircut, Georg, yesterday in fact. Thank you, you're one of the few people who noticed.

Thank you for calling out the "Oh bless the bog brained Murphies" racism. As an Englishman. Just waiting fir the Harfoots to rock up in Gondor offering to tarmac driveways and look after Denathors car.

The Oirish accents really bothered me. I appreciate you mentioning it. As you said it isn't malicious, it's just written by people with no historical knowledge. I was disappointed by Lenny Henry going along with it though.

I cannot get over the fact that the whole reason Galadriel thinks something is happening is some random symbol she saw. She probably saw hundreds of enemy banners and markings during war, but that one in an abandoned fortress is supposed to mean something. It could have been done 2 thousand years ago or maybe is some random scribble, she doesn't know that. Then, 2 chapters later, she ask some old librerian man about it. Luckily for Galadriel, it seems this decrepit man just saw the symbol yesterday and brings a book with it. Not just that, but he solves the "mystery" too, as the book shows the map that looks like the symbol. It's so... dumb. It's the kind of dumb story videogames use when they don't care about the story and just want to get the player into the action quickly. Which is fine in that case, but not for this. I remember that catch phrase that Galadriel said in the trailer "You haven't seen what I have seen". And what have she seen? Nothing. Some mark.

I am sad that Elrond and Durin had no drinking game at their reunion. It seariously looked like it for a second... at least from my perspective =) Anyway, thank you George for a nice voice of reason.

I think the big problem is the diversity being used as a selling point making it feel completly insincere. Since the beginning its been marketed as "the diverse lotr" to the point that become its whole identity.

The distilled, refined, cynical exasperation here is strangely refreshing in a way. Just, "Screw it, it's all pointless garbage, and no one actually cares about anything." Very "Vanity of vanity, all is vanity."

The nice thing about Rings is Power being so lore-light is that questions about how reasonable the racial diversity of certain Middle Earth cultures in context just don't really have any impact because of how much other half assed world building there is which has more of an impact on things.

We can always rely on Georg to bring a sensible, and level headed view on things.

I genuinely got a haircut yesterday.

Thanks for highlighting the Paddywhackery GRS, it has flown under the radar with almost every other critic. Sitting here in Dublin and my jaw dropped when Lenny Henry opened his mouth. The accents are just wild - especially when you consider that these Horefoots will go from itinerant Irish ditch-dwellers to respectable Middle-English gentry if we are to believe that Rings of Power is a direct prequel to the Jackson movies/events of the LotR books. I haven't checked the casting for these proto-Hobbits, but my wife has a good working knowledge of who's who in Irish acting and she hasn't spotted a single Irish/Gaelic actor in the mix. Cringe. I'm enjoying the show to some extent, but I'm not sitting here with a frayed and annotated copy of the Simmarillion (read it years ago) so IDK, maybe it's terrible by the standards of that tome but as high fantasy on the TV it works fine, pacing aside.

I actually did get my haircut today, yes. Thanks for asking George

This show really needs a dance number. And a scene in which everyone is standing around saying “where’s Poochy?” over and over. Also there needs to be more hats. Funny ones, with silly things hanging off them.

bro i literally just got back from a haircut. STOP WATCHING ME GET OUT OF MY HEAD

So far it seems like live action cut scenes used to liven up a history documentary. Not horrible, but 2D and campy. I'm waiting to get hooked by any of the characters or the story. But I'm still watching because all of this WILL BE ON THE MIDTERMS! With so much of the LOTR to work with, I really think they should have started with a smaller story. Trying to fashion an epic from the notes about the origin of the rings is a hell of a task, and I'm not sure they're up to it.

Rob Zombie’s 'Barry Lyndon'. The first movie ever shot completley under black light and neon.

You certainly touched on a number of valid factors in the dispute, for me personally, I don't like that they waited for Christopher Tolkien (Tolkien son) To die, before throwing out all his nay saying and objections and steamrolling ahead with a poorly thought out, ulteriorly motivated consumer product. I'm a book worm, I love reading the tales, as intended, I don't mind loose adaptations, (LotR trilogy) but I do despise the half baked whale poaching (The Hobbit Trilogy). Amazon, have pushed the publicity and the political narratives enough for alarm bells to ring in my conscious, if others enjoy it, good, I'm glad they could find joy, but not me, no thanks.

The most fun I've had is reading Neil Gaiman's twitter feed as he has to repeatedly say that he in fact did not write the pages this show is based on.

I just found it funny that among the offensive Irish gypsy inserts there wasn't a single one who actually looked Irish

A Power Rings version of Muppet Babies is great. thanks for the laughs.

Stuart Heritage wrote a brilliant piece in the Guardian this week about this very topic, in reference to the Little Mermaid remake on Disney+. Ultimately, we’re all losers when these “woke v racist” arguments spring up over pieces of media that, really, purely exist for rapid commercial gain and, even if they’re fine to watch, nobody should really have a strong opinion on. That graphic at the beginning of the disparity between 5 and 1-star ratings says it all. It looks about 3 stars from the visuals and dialogue, but now we’re all obliged to have a deep-set opinion on it because some racists yelled about it and then well-meaning repliers vigorously defended its existence as if it’s a ground-breaking piece of art. It’s tiring, especially when there are so many better things out right now that we could be watching and raving about (i.e. Bad Sisters, The Suspect, The Boys, Call My Agent etc.) And one more thing…Georg Rinder? 😂

Others hate Rings of Power because they don't like Black Elves I hate Rings of Power because I despise Amazon and Mr Bezos We are not the same.

In my humble opinion, when I watched the first two episodes I thought that the biggest problem with the Rings of Power was that looked cheap and expensive at the same time. Great visuals cinematography and nice music and in the same time the costumes looked cheap, the dialogs was so bad almost cringe and the casting reminds me of soap operas. Not for 0/10 like internet troll said but more like 7/10. BUT, after I watched the fourth episode I can't continue, that is a shitshow especially after the scene "They Took Our Jobs" South Park - Numenor Edition I cringed so hard. This tv show is more like a parody with a high budget now than an epic fantasy. To be honest I facepalm with RoP more times than when I was watching Star Trek Picard, difficult record to beat but they did it!

From this video alone I get the impression that horses must be expensive to film. Has there been a single livestock shot in the whole thing? It looks like it's suffering from the same thing star wars prequels did where it's just people standing there talking about things that aren't even interesting.

Can't say I've been enticed to watch this show. The Hobbit kind of beat the interest in these stories out of me. Could have been great if they'd made one movie. Terribly dull split into three. I suppose I'll give these a go later after more episodes are available. Maybe.

I did get a haircut, thanks!

So, we all good with Ryan Gosling playing Black Panther now?

They could have saved a quarter billion dollars on naming rights (and a ton of casting grief) and just made this a high fantasy prequel to "Bright". But then again this is Jeff Bezos, who probably spends $250M on haircuts each week.

People of all ethnicities and cultures have always been welcome to enjoy Tolkien's works. Lazy tokenism and casual interpretations of source material are not so welcome.

i literally just cut my hair at home today and fell asleep and woke up to this - cheers; it DOES look fab

Thanks for mentioning the accents. Funny how you would never have an elf with a heavy Scottish accent. It has to be the dwarfs who are short tempered, drink a lot and seen as stingy... Same with the Irish stereotypes. The elves are portrayed as elegant, articulate and dignified, so they must be from London LOL

Woke or not, the show's greatest sin is just being mediocre. Amazon dumped a billion dollars into this turd and this is the best they can do?

6:40 I've rarely seen such little chemistry between 2 actors before period and they are supposed to be our interracial intercolor love story. They better start cracking some fireworks on the screen quickly you quickly

These 8 minutes and 16 seconds were the only Rings of Power discourse I needed. Thanks Georg.

(7:35) ♪ "Um... I find you very attractive..." ♫ 😉 That was a genuine "spit take" laugh for me, Georg! 😜 Thanks! 😀

I get suspicious of people's motives when all their criticism of a bad show revolves around its diverse casting but all the many, many actual reasons why it's a dumpster fire are ignored.

IMO people are pushing back against all of the massive corporation's who want to own every intellectual property. Those corporation's are never happy with the built-in audience for the IP. Nope, they always change things. The changes are made so that the IP will appeal to every human being alive. Unfortunately that is not possible and the changes normally drive away the core audience and lead's to negative word of mouth that scares away everyone else.

This is why I subscribed all those years ago. Great to see you again georg.

If they managed to get Hip-tang as a sponsor,..this would all get better. they’ve always financed some of my favorite media.

Adaptation! Such a brilliant film 👍😫

This show completely fails to answer, or even acknowledge, the most important question of our times: how is babby formed

As a huge Tolkien fan that discovered him through the Peter Jackson films, I'm really disappointed and wish they didn't even bother. Especially since they didn't actually have access to the source material. 😞

Ayyyy, great to see the Adaptation shout-out! I'm glad you enjoyed it. Given the subject of your recent video on source material it seemed like you were primed to jive with its vibe

You’re such a wordsmith George. Great vid. Love listening to articulate people talking x

I loved LOTR. The movies. Love the extended editions. Had the DVD sets with the hours and hours of extra features that I watched several times…. All that to say, I can’t be bothered to watch this new stuff. Couldn’t care less.

As an Irish man, thank you for pointing this out. It's so fucking cringe.

Well, I didn't get a haircut yet, but I am tomorrow. You know your audience so well. It's like we've been friends for years.

Consume product and get excited for next product.

Astute and well articulated. Nice job Georg.

"Watch this for bit and then get back to f%$King work!" Georg you genius! oh how i've missed your humour/ views on films and tv content! Great video!

"Why is race still so important to some people" is a good question. Another good question is "Who is race still so important to". I don't think it's the Tolkien fans rocking the boat here.

I remember being young and oh-so-very-exited about Hollywood adapting Stephen King's Dark Tower. Then they anounced Idris Elba as the Gunslinger and the outrage came. I wasn't angry but more like perplexed: Why? what was the point of such an arbitrary change? If anything it was intriguing. But then I went to imdb and looked not for the director, but the producer: Akiva Goldsman. Yeah, the guy behind Batman & Robin. He convinced some exects they could ride the Y.A. fantasy/dystopian sagas wave with this, and King is never shy to let anyone use his name for a reasonable amount of bucks. I lost interest Inmediately, and forgot about it until it quickly and quietly slip trough the theaters to the t0rr3nt portals. I barely remember 2 or 3 thing about the movie, I even felt bad about Idris Elba, picturing his agent in the phone saying something like THIS IS IT, THIS IS THE BIG ONE! IS THE LEAD ROLE OF A MULTI SEQUEL FRANCHISE! YOU CAN'T LET THIS PASS!

The "Rings" in The Lord of the Rings ARE the rings of power. It's like calling the Star Wars "Star Wars: War of the Stars"

I never thought of their accents once, woah. Thanks for pointing that out. Dang.

I am enjoying the Rings of Power series so far. Yet, I know the Tolkien mythology very well. I have read not only the popular Tolkien books but also most of his History of Middle Earth volumes, the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales. - Why do I like this ROP TV show which has made several changes? 1. I understand the rights issues with the material. The Tolkien estate controls the Silmarillion, the Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle-Earth books. Amazon does not have rights to that. Amazon’s ROP show can say very little about the First Age which involves a huge story. We are coming into the middle of Tolkien’s ancient mythology and Amazon can do nothing about that. 2. Amazon only has the rights to the Lord of the Rings Appendix which focuses on the Second Age often in outline form. 3. Amazon can use the Appendix material but not those other vast background materials owned by the Tolkien estate. 4. So, Amazon only has a skeleton of the Second Age story from the Appendix and can’t rely on more complete writings from Tolkien. - To flesh the Appendix out, Amazon had to create new material. That is why there is new story material for Galadriel, Durin, Numenor, the wood elves and so on. 5. What I like a lot about the series includes; - The music is excellent. Some of it written by Howard Shore (the composer from the Tolkien movies) and the rest of the ROP music is in his style. - I also like that the ROP series was photographed in New Zealand so the background is consistent with the LOTR films. - The production design, costumes, sets look very good. - The actors are competent in their roles. * Overall the ROP series captures the grand themes of Tolkien’s world at this time in the story when it was believed that evil was vanquished and yet it would rise again. 6. Finally, I do not care that much of the cast is integrated. Tolkien’s original goal was to create a mythology for England. However, the fame of his stories has spread to nations around the world. The Tolkien myths are a treasure open to many different people. Minor characters in the cast can reflect that.

Love your work, mate. You're definitely one of my all time KZfaq favourites. I don't think you can say that the original source material was "whitewashed" though. Given that whitewashing is taking a character or person originally of colour and replacing them with a white person, that just doesn't make sense, as most of the characters in LotR are explicitly characterised as being white. Either way, love your stuff, and feel lucky we have you! P.S. this show is dire.

Lawd dem rangz

I think a big thing you didn't mention is how Amazon and their marketing department set up the perimeters of the ensuing controversy by being as fan baiting as possible.

This show exists for one reason only: Jeff Bezos wanted his own Game of Thrones. Having re-watched Georg's video on Elon Musk, there seems to be some cognitive dissonance at work in this one...

I'll tell you exactley whats going on. The studios love pulling this shit. They all want to buy the rights to a popular brand name, rush out the door a new product to maximize return on investment, and they all realize the same thing real quick, you cant repeat history, you cant capture lighting in a bottle twice and they know this (and if they dont, they are morons) so what do they do, instead of working hard to tell a story the fans are screaming they want to hear, and tell it well, they decide to change things they know will piss some people off, have others applaude on a surface level, put it in their product so it stands out, causes a bit of controversy (thus getting alot of free press and social media coverage) put it out there, have people react to it, cherry pick the good reactions, shame the bad ones, label them all sexists and racists and all that, and then the thing fades away, never have made them as much money as they hoped, and then years later some one else comes along and picks up the property and tries to just get it back on track! We went down this road with almost every major franchise from ghostbusters, to star trek and star wars, and now with lord of the rings!

I would watch the hell out of Lord of the Rings Babies

"analysing their shopping habits" 😂 you killed me!

'Get Rob Zombie to remake Barry Lindon, starring his wife Sherri Moon Zombie' , now now, don't give Mr Cummings any ideas worse than the ones he's already got.

I think people are mad at the hypocrisy in the casting. It’s all very tiring. People definitely enjoy arguing just for the sake of it.

Yup, the Irish proto hobbits is one of the things that bugged me a bit. The colour blind casting is meh. I'm quite sure Amazon expected all the furore and were glad for it. Planned it, in fact.

Thank god, a nuanced take on the show.

I actually did get a haircut, thank you for noticing

If ethnicity isn't important make all the elves Chinese and all the dwarves latino. Of course lineage and heritage is important to portraying the lore, you wouldn't insert Europeans into African mythology if you wanted to be immersed in the authors world. For some reason it's fashionable to take stories that are European focused and make it "accessible" there is no push to do this in other continents

did you mean to say melatonin in place of melanin as a bit or was it a typo

are we slowly watching george lose his mind? btw is his movie out yet?

Jesus, your videos keep getting funnier each time

Like almost all big companies, Amazon tried to cast as wide a net as possible to get an increased audience. I think it's great to see more diverse groups being represented in arts and media, as long as it's done with sincerity and not as a checkmark for focus groups. I haven't seen the Amazon LOTR series, but I'm up to date with the new GoT and I can confidently state that the series is dogshit compared to the original, and it has nothing to do with skin color.

Most fantasy stuff now, it's about as exciting as a new season of Law & Order. It doesn't deserve the hate or the excitement it generates. You said it perfectly, a proxy battleground. The show itself is pretty mediocre and everyone knows it.

0:13 I did just get a haircut thank you for noticing George 😂

Just doesnt seem like they thought very hard about any element of it, which is a shame since the professor did, and surprising since they spent an ungodly amount of money on it :p

As usual, internet opinion on this is torn between "oh no! Black people!" and "oh, you don't like it? You bigot!" Main refrain of the online world.

You pretty much hit the nail on the head for me. I had a particularly hard time going in, though, because for the last couple of years I dove DEEP into the legendarium. (We call that "Goin' Hard JRRT". 😜) But I did my best to keep an open mind. I knew it wasn't going to be "serious" Middle-earth shenanigans, since they were obviously making up a LOT of what ended up in screen. So, yeah, it's...well...meh. It's fine. OK generic fantasy. It's hard to ignore the fact they spent so much money, though. Sometimes it's pretty to look at, but 100s of (pinky to corner of mouth) meee-llions of dollars fine? Mmmm... I don't know about that. Again, it's...(sigh) just OK. It's fine. But they made such a big deal about it that it's hard NOT to judge it harshly. I don't know, man. Can't ya just make a well written fantasy story that's light on "magic" (there really isn't that much "sparkley magic" relative to the amount of story in the legendarium), but entertaining and moving? Like, the one scene that actually got to me was when Durin and Elrond were riding up a lift and the subject they were arguing about was how time is perceived differently for elves and dwarves (mortals). It's a bloody elevator ride and (at least to me) it was gripping emotionally. I don't know, man. The rest is fine. It's FINE. 😉🤪

shall we collectively agree to simply stop using twitter as a way to gage sentiment on everything?

Georg is bringing out the flavor like lembas bread .

The manufactured and disingenuous 'culture war' media narrative around this series has quashed any interest I may have had in watching this. I don't know if I could stomach the leprechaun shit either, so I'll probably just give it a miss.

I don't have a horse in this race, as I'm not an uber fan of the books/series, or anything he wrote. But you could see this coming from a mile away. The opening press coverage when the Amazon series was announced prominently mentioned all the progressive buzzwords like diversity, inclusion, and equity. When producers/writers say things like "we're going to decolonize Tolkien", you get the controversy you deserve. All that aside, you'd think a billion dollars would result in better quality CGI. Yikes

Durin's scottish dad in real life: "You married a WHAT?!?"

Personally I cant wait for the Shaft remake with Ryan Renolds.