Wheel of Time
Enter
at your peril. Herein lies the disjoined and disorganized thoughts of a man
facing the early onset of cognitive decline. A pity; I did so love writing and
stories in my youth, and it’s sad to feel all that slipping away from me. I try
to put a smile on it, though, why push yourself to do things that just make you
miserable? Life is depressing enough as it is. Enjoy the slide from creator to
consumer (and let’s face it, you were never much of a talent to begin with, so
no great loss), such as by posting random thoughts on an unloved and unread
page of an almost extinct medium. Play on while the Titanic sinks, sort of
energy.
Which
surely puts us in just the right frame of mind to talk about the Wheel of Time
series.
I
began but never finished the series, back around 1998-2000 I reckon, making it
as far as about book six or seven of the (eventual) 14-book series*, though the
last didn’t come out until 2013.
*Think
there were only nine or so books at the time I gave up.
This
of course makes me the ideal target audience for Amazon Prime’s Wheel of Time
series, which ALSO seems to have only a vague recollection of the story, and
ALSO gave up not even halfway through.
Why
watch it now? Well, boredom and the above-mentioned giving up on creative
aspirations in favor of mindless consumerism, to be honest. I’d just finished
bingeing Vox Machina and the Mighty Nein (which I may write about if sufficiently
bored) and wanted something in the fantasy bunch-of-people-do-an-adventure
genre. And I’ll be fucked if I ever watch the Rings of Power. Tried half an
episode and it had Galadriel going to the Arctic to beat up a troll and…look,
that may be many things, but it sure as shit ain’t Tolkien.
So.
The Wheel of Time.
Let’s
try to organize these scattershot synapse pings into something approaching
order shall we.
The
Writing
Since
I have only the faintest of dim recollections of the plot of the original
novels, I can’t really comment on its faithfulness, other that to say I’m
fairly sure it isn’t very. I was not especially impressed with the scripts, as
they seem to struggle to identify where the drama or excitement in the story
is. Episodes expend too much of their runtime on mechanical,
move-the-plot-forward convos or extraneous filler, leaving the odd bits of
potentially moving dialogue or action kind of teetering on their own without
support. For example: “We were never equals,” a woman coldly declares to her
bodyguard, only to reveal later she meant she considers him her better, but we
never see this dramatized, or why she feels that way, and their relationship
doesn’t change, so it just rings hollow. “Ok, good to know, thanks for sharing,
now let’s move on,” sort of thing.
In
the writer’s defense I think the books were also fairly plodding, and got even
moreso as the series went on, which is in large part why I gave up reading
them. It does mean you’re kind of left with a series that doesn’t really stand
out in any way. It doesn’t have the brutality or wit of Game of Thrones, the
balletic-but-brutal violence of the Witcher series, the mythic grandeur of Lord
of the Rings (it aims for it, to be sure, but the scaffolding isn’t there to
support its ambitions), or the campy fun of any of the Dungeons and Dragons
content (Vox, Nein, or the Chris Pine movie).
The
one good choice they made, if I’m not grossly misrepresenting the original
novels, is to foreground one of the antagonists, named Lanfear, who has the
whole jilted, jealous lover thing going vis a vis the hero-protagonist, Rand.
It’s not especially original as character motivations go, I’ll grant you, but
it’s the one place the show found something that feels like a genuine emotion,
and squeezes some actual feeling out of these characters. Though my feelings on
this matter may be tainted by the fact that Lanfear is played as a slightly
goth, domineering older woman, with lots of black eyeliner, and whose hobbies
include whispering vaguely threatening things right in people’s ears. I’m
utterly charmed, can you tell. Would have fallen to the dark side in seconds,
sorry folks, all prophecies cancelled, your own fault, if you’d wanted the
Light to win you should have made its herald a vampy dominatrix instead of
Rosamund Pike.
The
Acting
Let’s
talk about wokeness. Oh boy, you say, oh golly, oh gee, at last, someone
willing to talk about woke. Such a rarity these days. I know, I KNOW.
So.
The Wheel of Time.
For
one thing, it’s hella multicultural. Egwene is played by Madeleine Madden, who
I think is partly Australian aboriginal, Nynaeve by Zoe Robins, who is part
Nigerian, Perrin by Marcus Rutherford, who is black, Lan by Daniel Henney, who
is half Korean, Min by Kae Alexander, part Japanese, Alanna Sedai by Priyanka
Bose, an Indian actress, and so on. And let me tell you—it works. The Wheel of
Time is supposed to be set 3,000 years after an apocalyptic confrontation with your
stock Big Bad Evil Dark One Lord of Darkness Senor Nasty Sir Naughty And So On,
so the population being cosmopolitan doesn’t phase me in the slightest, and
Wheel of Time is a kind of generic nonspecific fantasy setting filled with made
up names for countries like “Andor” and “Shienar” and so why the fuck not.
Also,
half the women are lesbians (mildly joking, think they changed maybe 3 women to
being gay), but to be honest with you that no longer feels especially “woke” to
me, but rather like fetish fulfillment for straight dudes under the guise of
being progressive. The show’s thruple, with two guys and a gal, is more fun and
at least has the virtue of novelty, even if they do kill off the gay guy and
leave them as a fairly standard hetero couple by season 3.
The
only other thing I’ll say about the acting is it made me realize how hard it is
to portray people using magic in a way that isn’t objectively silly in live
action. Rosamund Pike twists and contorts and waves her hands about while the
CGI guy in charge of sparkly lines works overtime, and sigh…it’s ridiculous. The
CGI stuff itself looks hella cool, but the acting is just not selling the
scene. It’s interpretive dance. You can’t really sell the action that way.
Which is a pity, as the story very much revolves around magic, with the whole
plot centering around the fact that the Big Bad has cursed all men who can do
magic so that they’ll inevitably go crazy, but only a man can stop the Big Bad
from returning to our world. So yeah, the body contorting hand-wavy magic is in
every episode.
The
Other Stuff
Imma
talk about Lord of the Rings for a sec, for as one writer mentioned it’s like
Mount Fuji in Hokusai prints: when talking about modern fantasy Mount Fuji is
either always in the picture, and if it isn’t, it’s only because you are
currently standing on Mount Fuji. So. Lord of the Rings, but specifically the
movies. Now folks like to gush over Viggo and his broken toe or Sir Ian and his
stentorian delivery, but if you ask me, the big reason the movies were a hit is
because they fucking NAILED the production design angle. They roped in Alan Lee
and John Howe, established Tolkien artists, they studied what real armor looks
like and how it really works, they got a real blacksmith to make real chainmail
armor, they went above and beyond to get the look and feel right.
And
god, does Wheel of Time suffer by comparison. The actual, physical interior
sets look small and cheap. Scenes look and feel flat and shallow. The costumes
look, well, like costumes, not clothing. Rand goes around with a popped collar for
the entirety of season 2 for um reasons. There really isn’t enough being done
to sell the verisimilitude here.
And
you know what?
I
kind of liked the show. Most of that is probably the aforementioned goth mommy
vamping like crazy (her outfits being the one point where the production design
team got it SPOT ON) but also because it just felt like a bunch of folks who
are just, you know, trying their best, okay? It feels earnest, I guess.
Not quite the passion project that Lord of the Rings clearly was for pretty
much the entire New Zealand film industry, but Pike aside here’s a bunch of
lesser known actors giving it a college try. And mostly, it works fine. It
doesn’t quite ignite or inspire, but I would’ve stuck with this through to the
end.
Which
is more than I can say for the books.
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