But would you accept a Muppets version?
Sadly, I do not know who made this. It was not me. I wish it was.
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How isn’t it down to her bravery or skill? She is literally the only one that managed to hit him. Most everyone else, including her King was groveling on the ground.
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I think it’s just the nature of it being prophesied that diminishes the impact. One could argue that all of her bravery and skill didn’t matter because it was destined to happen anyway. It’s like Indiana Jones having no practical purpose in Raiders because the bad guys would have gotten their faces melted off even if he’d never intervened. In fact, he probably delayed their demise.
In a way it puts an asterisk next to her achievement in the record books. Sure, she did the thing, but there were circumstances that eliminated a lot of the other people who could have done it.
I actually choose to look at it this way: the event came first, then the prophesy. Within this literary universe, the idea is that these are all seriously ancient stories, so it’s quite possible someone who didn’t like the idea of a woman having this power cooked up the prophesy as a way to explain her away, and their story got retold over and over. Fast forward some thousands of years, and who’s to know whether that prophesy predated the event in question?
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“Trotted out”… in actual folktales that have no one specific source? I know Tolkien is in fact one specific person, but I feel like you and I are coming at this from very different angles, here.
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Except Miss Piggy would have gone straight to Barad-Dur and dealt with Sauron, as a star like her does not waste her valuable time on flunkies, henchghouls, time-wraithsters or any other type of underling whatsoever.
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It also seems to me that Tolkien redeems the female as a troublemaker trope here, and has me thinking “Lady of the Lake” energy. Instead of staying in that lake, and dispersing a sword, she’s like:
“Here, give that back to me and let me do it, you guys will take years, and write epics about how it took you so long!”
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After the horrible, unentertaining wreck that was the first season you would have hoped Amazon would have tried to make improvements rather than making the show even worse.
" This isn’t Lord of the Rings in any way shape or form. It’s just Amazon buying the rights to little fragments of it, and jampacking and piecemealing it into a form that apes, badly, hideously, carelessly, Tolkien’s legendarium."
Describes season 1 to a T, and the description carries through to the other dreck coming along and aping, badly, hideously, carelessly, Tolkien’s legendarium. Bah, boo, hiss, and fie.
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Radio Times seems to like it for the most part:
Fan reaction seems more positive this season as well.
Rotten Tomatoes has it with 83% fresh by pro reviewers and 59% by fans. Frankly, I’d probably trust the pro reviewers a little more at the moment as they aren’t the ones who have picked the text to pieces and wouldn’t be happy with anything that was done as a result.
My life is nuts at the moment so I haven’t had time to sit down and watch yet.
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On the one hand they are aware that there is a legendarium, on the other they are complaining that it isn’t Lord of the Rings. Isn’t that the whole point of it?
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If you want to complain about what Amazon can use, blame the Tolkien Estate, not Amazon. The Estate was the one who declared anything outside the appendixes as off limits.
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The “Tolkien Estate” basically died when Christopher did. Now it’s what most “estates” are… a bunch of lawyers trying to generate as much revenue as possible.
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I think they might be misusing “The Lord of the Rings” as an overarching title for the entire universe of stories.
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I’m not complaining. I think in forcing their hand to explore the Second Age they’ve got both more creative freedom and are less trammeled by narrative boundaries because Tolkien himself didn’t develop the Second Age beyond the broad strokes. That leaves a lot of room to work with.
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The problem being that the people trying to fill in the broad strokes seem to have both (A) a depressingly low degree of talent and (B) little to no interest in trying to make their production align with Tolkien’s creation in the ways that would make it appealing and interesting.
Tolkien is a difficult act to follow of course because he was a master who created a masterpiece. Anything coming in on that is going to suffer in comparison so its a tough row to hoe from the start. I don’t envy them the task, but they sort of kneecapped themselves … and in many respects they did it on purpose.
For example … they fired Shippey as a consultant who (after Christopher was gone) is perhaps the world leading expert on Tolkien, his themes, his vision, and his style. It was clear that Shippey was trying to keep the production close to Tolkien’s original texts and that the “showrunners” were chafing over it because they wanted to do their own things.
So they fired the one guy that really could have helped them to make the show something good and … well … the results spoke for themselves and very few people have liked what they heard. The show’s dialog is forced, lame, and comes off very much like untalented people trying hard to imitate what talented people would say without understanding what they’re doing. The plot is a haphazard crazy-quilt of things that for the most part seem almost entirely unrelated to each other where things ‘happen’ just because the plot needs them to. It takes bits of Tolkien ‘stuff’ and crams them in with little understanding of how they fit into the larger world in unsatisfying and often silly ways.
In short, it’s just as the Forbes article says… fragments of Tolkien jampacked piecemeal into a form that apes Tolkien badly, hideously, and carelessly.
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Jackson at least understood the heart of Tolkien. The series is soulless. I see none of the philosophy or worldview Tolkien espoused. Rather incidence done randomly pretending to have a brain.
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I don’t think Forbes is the bastion of media criticism you think it is. Most of their articles make me cringe, and I really don’t trust their “taste” with regards to much of anything, especially TV shows 
The writer of the review started battling with one of the actors on social media, and it was rather ugly.
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My issue is that the books were never intended to be a “shared universe.” They were one man’s very particular creation, inspired by his ideas on myth and language. He wasn’t motivated by profit. If he had been he would have written more of them, made them more “accessible” like The Hobbit, and gotten rich by licensing them out for movies and such during his own lifetime.
Nobody can write Tolkien well enough to stand next to Tolkien, and it’s disrespectful of them to try. I might lionize him a bit. I think he’s the greatest writer the fantasy genre has produced, but he has certainly been the most important author in my life.
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Do you think Tolkien would be proud of the many representations of his work that were taken up by others?
I haven’t read much of his biography or letters, etc, so I have no idea what he might have thought.
Anyone have an idea of what Tolkien himself would have said or thought of these many projects?
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For those reeling from Amazon’s treatment? May I make a suggestion? Try the Extended Cuts of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013). MGM and New Line fu#%ed up reducing 3 hour narratives with LOTR down to 2 and 1/2 hours with The Hobbits. Putting aside one’s feelings of the three, the shorter films violated the tranquil immersion and travelogue grace of 3 hour stints in Middle Earth. 150 minutes combined with the CG and conception meant for del Toro created a disconnect still felt today.
A year after they premiered Peter dropped Extended Versions that fixed most of the problems with Journey and Smaug. The effects remain a distraction. But a majority of the rest is expanded, given context, and actually explained versus skated over. The first two Hobbits are not the same in expanded form. Please give them a try. I watched them again recently and I stand by my opinion. Truthfully the longer Hobbits proved to me 3 hours is the magic number in Tolkien length onscreen. By adding 20-25 minutes to each, the similarity to the LOTR films increases. Though except for Smaug the others still lag a little while less than you expect. Smaug especially at 185 minutes may end up on my Best Ever List. That’s how good I think it is. The drama surrounding Thorin’s father, the expanded myth of the mountain, and added bits everywhere is truly extraordinary. The theatrical is not the same film and those remembering that alone owe it to themselves to see the longer version.
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