Tolkien’s musicality preserved on Amazon Prime Video

Hard label to be the most expensive series in history at a billion dollars and to come twenty years after the perfect trilogy of the Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson. The step was very high for the fad of Jeff Bezos, The Rings of Power. The possibility of stumbling, like Frodo and Sam on the sides of the mountain of destiny, promised to be massive. The first trailers, with kitsch country sequences, were not reassuring. Yet the miracle seems to be within reach. It’s hard not to come out fascinated and exhilarated by the first two episodes of the saga that Amazon Prime Video showed to the press and which will be put online this Friday. The music, the magic of Tolkien is intact. The wealth of Middle-earth multiplied.

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The Rings of Power goes back two millennia to the time when Sauron emerges as a formidable antagonist and traces the manufacture of the rings entrusted to men, elves and dwarves to which belongs the evil ring that Frodo will have to destroy. In other words, the series has the ambition to tell over five seasons the prologue which opened the film The Fellowship of the Ring.

A very Arya Stark Galadriel

To embark on this odyssey of several centuries, the series opens with two familiar and rejuvenated faces of the Lord of the Rings : the elves Galadriel and Elrond. The future lady of Lothlorien, formerly embodied by Cate Blanchett, does not yet have the wisdom, elegance and sibylline nature that we know of her. In the guise of the Welsh Morfydd Clark (Grantchester), she is a warrior in armor, with sword and bow, a stubborn young woman who seeks to find the missing trace of Sauron and these orcs who killed his brother.

Driven by revenge, this glacier and blizzard brave Galadriel endures Ulysses-like tribulations reminiscent of those of Arya Stark in Game Of Thrones (shipwreck included). This stubbornness puts her at odds with the elven monarchs of Middle-earth. Elrond is the advisor to one of them. The ruler of Rivendell (Robert Aramayo) is a mischievous and sassy yet ally and confidant of Galadriel. Already more curious and open than his peers since he dares to associate with the hated dwarves of the Kingdom of Kazadum. And for the moment purveyor with the ancestors of the hobbits and sympathetic comic moments.

Twenty-two recurring characters

In choosing the form of the prologue, rookie showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay wanted to piece together Tolkien’s scattered oceans of ideas and texts and compressed their temporality. What normally lasts for centuries boils down to a decade or two here, to keep the same cast – no less than 22 recurring roles.

In The Silmarillon and appendices, the novelist sketched a history of the myths and civilizations of Middle-earth. The Lord of the Rings could not have existed without Frodo’s quest. The Rings of Power wonders how these rings, which it is impossible to resist, could transform the peoples who yielded to its sirens. “Tolkien leaves a lot of doors open, the series pushes them and makes its choices explicit”, salute Robert Aramayo.

The elves of Rings are much more belligerent and smug with each other than those of the Lord. They are quick to draw their weapons and their grudges, sure of their quest for beauty and their superiority. Like archaeologists, with remarkable meticulousness, they reconstruct a patchwork of cultures and traditions. As in Game Of Thrones, the regions scroll by (a bit quickly). And it’s not over since the next six episodes will notably introduce Numenor, Tolkien’s Atlantis and its divided royal family which descends from Elrond’s brother.

Special effects to widen the field

The grandiose landscapes of New Zealand are a natural setting that gives life to the magnificent Elven cities as well as the rudimentary human villages, the deep mines or the forest which shelters the Hairy Feet, ancestors of Hobbits still migrating, avoiding everything contact with men. Waterfalls, mountains are not the result of special effects, only used to enlarge the field.

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As in Game Of Thrones and House of the Dragon, understanding family trees and alliances is not easy and requires diagrams and patience. Very elvish and introductory, the pilot does not make it possible to grasp the stakes and looks like a headless trombinoscope. The fear, the tension arrive in the next episode. Sauron’s presence, much more than an eye here, is tangible there. Its ravages are appalling. Amazon Prime Video does well to unveil them in one block.

Between Shakespearian and Biblical narrative

The instantly charming characters are hairy-footed teens Nori and Poppy who go to heal a fallen man from a meteorite. With them, as with the dwarf monarchs Durin and his wife Desi, these worlds come to life, from hobbies to cooking to fields. This is less the case with the elven characters, an initial awkward common thread. Too arrogant a la Galadriel, too stoic a la Arondir. The attempt to create a forbidden romance between this serviceman and a human healer falls a bit flat. We just preferred them as fearless comrades.

Between Shakespearian and biblical narrative, The Rings of Power manages to draw this vertiginous Middle-earth with more elegance than the characters who inhabit it. But such a gigantic puzzle and such an immersive experience require time to be fully mastered and oiled. These two episodes harbor ambitions and potential to enchant a new generation, as Peter Jackson’s trilogy did. The links between the two sagas also seem more intertwined than announced and the return of familiar mentors cannot be ruled out.