HACKER Q&A
📣 diceduckmonk

Is the Rings of Power worth watching?


I remember the production budget of the Amazon Lord of the Rings series being a hot topic here on HN before the show was released.

The user ratings on Amazon's own websites sit at ~3.3/5 depending on what country you're in.

Now that series has been released, curious what peoples' follow up thoughts are on the production and the business context for Amazon, given Amazon's market cap is half what it was last year.


  👤 h2odragon Accepted Answer ✓
https://acoup.blog/2023/01/20/collections-the-nitpicks-of-po...

Bret Devereaux has done several highly entertaining posts about some of the shortcomings he's perceived in the show.


👤 richardjam73
No

Some of the characters and locales are quite nice but I just can't get over the nonsensical things that happen. It is like the writers only considered what looked good for this weeks ratings rather than what made sense in that world. This leads to the whole thing feeling like plastic.

I found the way they used horses very problematic.


👤 syrgian
If you check those ratings you will see that they are bimodal: Either decent, or the lowest rating possible, because the reviewer loathes some specific choice. The most hated choice by far is that the cast is diverse, very contrasted to the original films and the books. Think about how no women talk to each other in the original film trilogy, and how there's a large overlap between evil humans and non-white humans in the books.

Unless you hate the recent push for diversity, you will probably like it. I loved the scenarios and music, and really liked Galadriel's acting. I was only taken aback by the apparent slow pacing (but other people might perceive it differently). 8/10, would recommend. For reference, I'd rate LOTR 9/10 and the Hobbit film trilogy 5/10.


👤 vmoore
A common complaint about the series is that it's dragged out. I don't mind this. I'm one of the few people who have patience for drawn out plots.