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Shouldn’t We Be Having More Fun in Middle Earth?
The Rings of Power returns — big, expensive, and static as ever.
They have, for instance, forged a clever link between the universe’s precious metal Mithril, the history of the jewels known as the Silmarils (they’re the subject of The Silmarillion, a collection of lore to which Amazon, amusingly, does not have the rights and must only reference vaguely), and the rapacious greed that led to the collapse of the dwarves. The best moments in those films use the small and weird gestures — Pippin goofily knocking over a skull in Moria, or Denethor crunching on a tomato — as avenues into the eldritch or grandly tragic: the arrival of the Balrog, or Gondor’s doomed stand in Osgiliath. And so Amazon’s series invites unfavorable comparison to its darker, dirtier sibling prequel, HBO’s House of the Dragon, which toils under similar constrictions of inevitability but has found ways to make its characters surprising within known history.
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