LOTR: Rings of Power
To approach Rings of Power is to accept, first and without anesthetic, that one is not watching The Lord of the Rings, nor even a faithful prelude to it, but rather an ambitious, well-funded act of literary trespass-fan fiction in ceremonial robes. It is divorced from its source material with the serene confidence of someone who has skimmed the appendix and declared mastery. Yet fan fiction, as such, is not a crime. One recalls that entire civilizations have been built on less legitimate inheritances. The mere act of deviation does not doom a work; it only frees it from the burden of reverence.
And so we proceed.
Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel is a perplexing concoction -- less the ethereal sorceress of legend and more an aggrieved drill sergeant perpetually auditioning for a grievance. The dialogue does her no favors. Each line lands with the thud of something that mistook solemnity for profundity. It is not entirely her fault; when handed prose that sounds as though it were composed by committee, even the most talented performer may resemble a participant in a community theater production of cosmic destiny.
Robert Aramayo’s Elrond, meanwhile, is played with a kind of affable goofiness -- pleasant enough, but more Shire adjacent than Rivendell regal. One suspects he wandered in from a casting call for a particularly thoughtful hobbit and stayed. There are worse crimes than charm, but one does not instinctively tremble before this future Lord of Imladris.
Then there is Sophia Nomvete, who gives an energetic and heartfelt performance as a character who likely never occurred to Tolkien, nor plausibly could have. And yet she commits to it. In a production defined by its liberties, she is among the few who appear to understand the assignment: if we are inventing, let us invent boldly.
Markella Kavenagh seems to drift through scenes as though mildly sedated by the very mysticism the show strains to evoke. Her expressions suggest she has glimpsed the runtime of future seasons and is bracing herself.
Charles Edwards’s Celebrimbor carries the air of a man better suited to the windswept plains of Rohan than the immortal smithies of Eregion -- but this is fan fiction, and if we are to recast elves as faintly distracted artisans, so be it. Charlie Vickers, paradoxically, would pass more readily as an elf than as what he is eventually revealed to be. Such ironies are the small pleasures available to the attentive viewer.
Joseph Mawle, brooding magnificently, seems misassigned -- one imagines him thriving in something like Hellboy rather than pacing the corridors of Middle-earth-adjacent invention. Ismael Cruz Córdova, for his part, delivers a committed performance as an elf who could not possibly exist in Tolkien’s carefully constructed universe -- yet within this parallel cosmos, he does admirable work.
Daniel Weyman manages the small miracle of rendering a character as enigmatic as a single-color Rubik’s cube faintly compelling. It is no small task to imbue opacity with intrigue, and he nearly succeeds.
The remainder of the cast is regrettably forgettable -- not incompetent, merely swallowed whole by the production’s scale and indecision. The writers, meanwhile, appear curiously uninterested in the interior lives of the characters whose names they so eagerly borrow. There is an unmistakable sense that the names are talismans, invoked for their recognizability rather than understood for their meaning.
The show is plainly engineered to court a particular audience -- though one cannot help but notice that enthusiasm seems more theoretical than manifest. It is not the worst specimen of fan fiction ever committed to screen. Indeed, at moments, it glimmers -- production design, music, and spectacle occasionally conspire to remind us where the money went. Still, one wonders whether the treasury of Númenor might have been better conserved.
Watch it or don’t. In the end, *Rings of Power* exists as a lavish, earnest, intermittently diverting appendage to a literary monument it neither topples nor truly honors. It stands apart -- expensive, ambitious, and faintly bewildered by its own inheritance.
Ciao. For now.
-Ash
