Amazon, a guy whose only other writing credit is "Star Trek Beyond", and a guy with no writing credits at all undoubtedly knew exactly what kind of furor they would stir up with their casting decisions on this show. Predictably, the subject of race has dominated the initial online response to the show's trailer, giving both reactionary and progressive voices plenty of windmills to tilt at.
Is that too cynical? Probably. But Amazon as the voice of progress and equality? Amazon? Pee in a bottle warehouse workers Amazon? Come on. I think fucking not.
From my admittedly distant, half the world away remove, it feels more like someone ticking a box, and that casting a couple of black folks is what passes for racial representation in American pop culture today. In short, an utterly empty gesture with no meaning beyond its own performance.
And thus not really worth debating.
As a result, I don't care either way. The one thing I have long regretted about the success of the movies is how they have nearly drowned out all other representations or visualizations of Tolkien, but frankly no movie or show is going to affect how those stories live in my imagination. My Middle Earth owes more to Angus McBride or John Howe than it does to Peter Jackson.
So black elves, sure, why not. Knock yourself out. A beardless black lady dwarf, okay. Go for it. We've been through this half a dozen times already. The BBC's Troy series, the Witcher, and so on and on and on. The usual people will try to score points by squawking about it, the usual people will try to score points by defending it, years ago this might have been a productive battlefield but however sincere or heartfelt the emotions of the writers of the moment may be, I've been here, I've done this, it just feels like watching people go through the motions.
No, what turns me off from Amazon's effort is how generic it feels. Unlike the Lord of the Rings movies, which had the book to go on, this show is being stitched together from Tolkien's sketchy history of Middle Earth. And when you get a bunch of TV fantasy writers to sit down and write a show, they write the kind of show that TV fantasy writers write. Which is to say, they write the Witcher and The Wheel of Time and Letter for the King and Shannara Chronicles and the last three seasons of Game of Thrones and this looks no different from any of them.
They've turned Galadriel into a warrior princess because of course they have, that is the only way the writers can conceive of portraying a character as powerful. She has an anguished human friend because of course she does, shows these days are full of miserable people wallowing in their misery. There are hobbits because of course there are, every show needs cute comic relief.
To a certain extent that comes with the territory of being the pioneer--all the later imitators have got their shows in first, so Lord of the Rings looks imitative, but at the same time the unique and wonderful thing about the LotR movies was how grounded and historical it looked. Not fantasy at all.
The other obvious rebuttal to complains about loose adaptations is that if you liked the LotR movies you should be fine with writers adapting Tolkien, as the movies changed plenty of things. And indeed, I am rather fond of the movies--the bits that don't reek of cookie-cutter movie plotting 101 oh-no-i-need-a-dramatic-beat-here. Which the LotR movies have plenty of.
What works in the movies:
1. The Balrog and the bridge of Khazad-dum. The balrog in particular is A-1. Jaws like a refinery blast furnace. Superb.
2. The death of Boromir. Indeed I think I prefer Sean Bean to book Boromir--they really found the humanity of the character and brought it to the surface
3. Helm's Deep
4. Smeagol in all his slimy slippery glory
5. The ride of the Rohirrim
6. Eowyn confronts the Witch-King
7. Sam's indefatigable po-ta-toes down to earthiness
What is bloody stupid in the movies:
1. Aragorn grabs a ghost by the neck--a ghost, a being whose single, universal attribute is that its neck is non-grabbable, then slides down a mountain of skulls in pure early Peter Jackson budget horror film hamminess
2. Frodo tells Sam to "go home" at the border of Mordor, something like 3000 miles from home, because he suspects Sam ate a bit of bread
3. Faramir drags Frodo and Sam all the way to Osgiliath, nearly gets them captured, then abruptly lets them go
4. Sam, the most down to earth character imaginable, is asked what they are "fighting for" and instead of saying the most in-character and obvious thing possible ("home") gives some asinine speech about there being good in the world
5. Arwen is sick because of the ring or some shit, I don't know
6. Aragorn goes missing for a bit so he can have a wet dream with a horse
7. Treebeard is utterly unaware that Saruman has been cutting down trees in his own forest and which he is the guardian of (and whose defense is his entire reason for existence) until it is pointed out to him
Guess which of the two lists is entirely made up of things adapted by the writers.
Given Peter Jackson's spotty track record since the trilogy, I tend to ascribe virtually all of the success of the movies to the quality of the production design and the folks at Weta, with some left over for the stellar cast, and virtually none to the writing team. The changes were nonsensical and baffling and precisely what you get when people trained to write scripts write scripts.
I will forever remember an interview in which British medievalist and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey said no modern author in their right mind would write the Council of Elrond chapter as they wouldn't trust their audience to bear with them. There's a lesson there, as I sometimes think there's a lesson in the enduring popularity of that other oddly-written SFF tentpole, Dune, in that what is seen as sensible or "necessary" for the medium is not always so.
To quote no less an authority than my own brother, there are two ways to succeed: do what you do better than anyone else, or do something different from anyone else. The former is almost impossible, so it's a wonder so few people try the latter.
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