I finally finished Rings of Power. I’m not a hardcore LOTR fan - I’ve seen the movies multiple times, read the books including The Hobbit multiple times. Most of the stuff I’ve really liked, although The Hobbit movies were way too stretched out (probably should have just been two movies).
I don’t remember all the lore and mentioned backstories, so I don’t have any real axe to grind about the portrayals of Galadriel, etc.
I sort of enjoyed the series. The story was good and the scenery/cinematography was gorgeous. My biggest gripe was that everything is 30% too drawn out and long. Every episode was an hour and probably should have been edited down to 40 minutes. It felt like each scene was three beats too long with extra camera angles, extra dialog, etc. that should have been trimmed.
This verboseness isn’t exclusive to Rings of Power though. It almost seems to be more prevalent in streaming shows these days where there isn’t a hard time constraint, or even necessarily a clean break or cliff hanger to wrap up each show. I don’t know if that is leading to lazy editing or creators getting too full of themselves, but I feel like most of these shows really need to have a faster pace - either a shorter time frame with the existing story or more stuff needs to happen in the longer time frame. I felt House of the Dragon suffered from the same challenge where the pace got way too slow at times with very little meaningfully happening in some of the episodes.
Its kind of like watching the Director’s Cuts for the LOTR movies. The theatrical 3 hour versions were far more entertaining. Watching the 4 hour director’s cuts versions were often a bit painful and its clear why they were edited down to a still probably too long three hours. I know some hardcore fans love the scene for scene accuracy of the director’s cuts, but they don’t make for better movies.
I was glad that Andor mostly dodged this slow pace with its 12 episodes. There were a couple of slower episodes (Aldhani mission story arc) but for the most part things moved well without too much unnecessary dialog and side tangents.
