Don’t hate-watch the Amazon abomination. Don’t indulge whatever curiosity you might have about precisely how bad it happens to be. Don’t think that you’ll score points with anyone by cleverly pointing out its copious problems that even a half-wit could have anticipated. Just stand back, ignore it, and leave it to burn.
Turkey is not the word. No turkey, however bloated and stupid, could ever be big enough to convey the mesmerising awfulness of Amazon’s billion dollar Tolkien epic.
This is a disaster dragon – plucked, spatchcocked, with a tankerload of Paxo stuffed up its fundament, roasted and served with soggy sprouts.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power (Amazon Prime) is so staggeringly bad, it’s hilarious. Everything about it is ill-judged to a spectacular extreme.
The cliche-laden script, the dire acting, the leaden pace, the sheer inconsistency and confusion as it lurches between styles – where do we start?
One disconnected style follows wildly after another. A static scene in which elves journey by ship is conceived as a PreRaphaelite painting – each actor stock still in silver armour, swords clasped to their chests, long hair rippling, eyes fixed on the horizon in pious awe. Inspired by a flock of birds, they lift their voices in a heavenly choir.
There’s a lot of this quasi-religious imagery. The first episode begins with a cod Bible reading: ‘There was a time when the world was so young, there had not been a sunrise, but even then there was light.’
Popular culture invents blether like this to replace real religion. It’s scientology for the superhero movie era.
‘Year gave way to year, century gave way to century,’ the narrator continues, and already this reviewer was giving way to laughter. Soon, every fresh clunker provoked such hoots that I had to keep pausing to gather my composure.
It will be beneficial for the world to observe, yet again, what inevitably happens when SJWs are permitted to acquire the rights to well-loved intellectual property.
“If this show fails, say insiders, executives could be forced to shut down Amazon Studios.“
Let it fail. Let it fail in such a proverbial manner that it will replace Heaven’s Gate as an industry byword for complete and utter catastrophe.