I didn’t make it past the first twenty minutes.
That’s the full viewing history. I’ve since watched clips, read extensive commentary, and confirmed what those twenty minutes told me: the writers don’t understand Tolkien’s characters, and the result is a show that’s the surface of Middle-earth without any of the substance that made it worth adapting. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings more times than I can count. I know what Middle-earth feels like from the inside. Rings of Power doesn’t feel like it at all.
The rating is -1. The landscapes occasionally get a 7 in isolation. Everything attached to the writing gets less than zero.
What Galadriel Is
In Tolkien’s legendarium, Galadriel is among the most powerful beings in Middle-earth. She’s been alive since before the sun existed. She studied under the Valar themselves. She refused Fëanor, who ranks among the greatest craftsmen in the history of the world, when he demanded her hair. She survived the Helcaraxë crossing, founded and ruled Lothlórien for thousands of years, and wielded Nenya, one of the three Elven Rings of Power.
When Frodo offers her the One Ring, her refusal is among the most important moments in the entire trilogy because the temptation is real. She’s the power to use it. She chooses not to. What makes Galadriel formidable is wisdom, restraint, foresight, and the hard-won understanding that unchecked power destroys everything it touches. She learned that lesson by watching it happen across thousands of years. That’s what makes her a giant among Tolkien’s characters and a towering female character in all of fantasy literature.
Rings of Power turns her into an action hero who single-handedly kills an ice troll in the first episode.
The writers apparently believed that “strong female character” means “woman who fights things better than everyone else in the room.” It doesn’t. That definition is shallower than the character it replaced. The show’s version of Galadriel is less interesting, less complex, and less powerful than the one Tolkien wrote, because the show replaced depth with spectacle and called it an upgrade.
Tolkien’s Galadriel is formidable because of what she chooses not to do. A character defined by restraint requires writers capable of understanding that restraint is a form of strength. Rings of Power’s writers weren’t.
Two Troll Fights: A Study in Contrast
The cave troll sequence in the Mines of Moria is ensemble action done right, and I think it’s the best fight in the whole trilogy.
Every member of the Fellowship contributes according to who they are. Aragorn and Boromir fight with swords because they’re trained warriors, Legolas uses his bow, and Gimli swings his axes. The Hobbits are terrified but brave, throwing rocks and stabbing when they can. When the troll spears Frodo, his companions rally around him. The scene works because every character matters and no single person dominates.
More importantly, the emotional architecture of the scene is doing as much work as the choreography. The audience is watching nine people who have committed to each other being tested for the first time. Boromir’s protective instinct toward the Hobbits foreshadows his later sacrifice. Sam charging a cave troll with a frying pan tells you everything about his character in three seconds. The troll is a real threat, the outcome is uncertain, victory requires coordination and luck, and the cost is real. That uncertainty makes the scene work.
In Rings of Power, Galadriel solos the troll. The other characters become spectators. This breaks the power balance Tolkien maintained across his entire mythology. Trolls are dangerous in Middle-earth. When one goes down easily, every other threat in the story is cheapened. If Galadriel can handle a troll alone without visible effort, what’s supposed to feel dangerous to her? The answer the show provides is nothing, so there are no stakes. Which means there’s no story.
Jackson understood that the Moria troll works because it could win. Rings of Power’s troll exists for show. That’s the difference between drama and decoration.
A Billion Dollars and Worse CGI Than 2001
Reportedly, Rings of Power cost close to a billion dollars.
The CGI is among the worst in any major production of the last decade. Scenes that should feel epic look artificial. Environments that should immerse you instead remind you you’re watching a screen. The troll in the first episode looks less convincing than Jackson’s cave troll from 2001. That was built with a fraction of the budget and two decades less technology.
This matters because Middle-earth depends on immersion above almost everything else. Tolkien spent decades making his world feel lived-in and physically real.
Jackson honored that by blending practical effects, actual New Zealand landscapes, and CGI that served the story instead of substituted for it. The Shire felt like a place you could walk into. Mordor felt like a place that would kill you. The environments were arguments about what these places meant.
Its environments feel like wallpaper. Expensive wallpaper, but wallpaper. The money went somewhere. It didn’t go to the screen in any form that serves the story.
Jackson’s entire trilogy cost roughly $280 million. Rings of Power spent more than three times that and produced something less convincing. The problem is judgment. Money can’t buy what makes Tolkien’s world work on screen. Filmmakers have to earn it by understanding the source material deeply enough to know what you’re trying to create, and the people running this show didn’t have that understanding. No budget makes up for its absence, and watching them try to buy their way around it is maddening.
The Sauron Problem
The Sauron storyline should have been the show’s strongest element. In Tolkien’s Second Age, Sauron disguises himself as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, and deceives the Elven-smiths of Eregion into forging the Rings of Power. It’s a story about manipulation, trust, and catastrophic misjudgment by people who should have known better. The dramatic tension should come from watching intelligent, experienced characters be played by someone smarter and more patient than they are. The tragedy is that Sauron deceives the Elves because he’s that good.
The show rushes through the deception in ways that make the Elves look incompetent instead of tragic.
Being fooled by a masterful liar working over centuries is a very different thing from being fooled because the plot needs it by next episode, and the audience can always tell which one they’re watching. When characters make choices that only make sense because the story requires them, the world stops being real and becomes a mechanism. Sauron deceived Tolkien’s Elves despite their wisdom. The show’s Elves don’t seem to have any.
The Galadriel problem is not a diversity argument
The Galadriel problem gets misread as a complaint about progressive storytelling. It isn’t. The standard is craft.
Murderbot is among the most diverse properties in recent science fiction and it gets a 9. The Expanse‘s cast is among the most diverse in television and the first three seasons get a 9.5. Both work because the characters are written as specific people with specific psychologies, and their identities serve the story instead of substituting for it. Nobody notices the diversity in those shows because the writing is good enough that every character feels real. That’s the standard.
The series fails because what it made Galadriel into is shallower, less complex, and less interesting than what Tolkien wrote. The writers had a towering female character from fantasy literature and swapped her for a fighter who wins fights, and I find it galling that anybody calls that a step forward.
The source material was right there. The Second Age contains the forging of the Rings of Power, the rise and fall of Númenor, Sauron’s long deception of the Elven-smiths, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. Galadriel lived through all of it. A faithful version could have shown her working through political alliances, spotting Sauron’s deception before others did, and wielding influence through wisdom and foresight. I’d have watched every episode of that show. That Galadriel would have been more interesting, more faithful, and powerful in ways that matter.
Instead the writers either didn’t read the source material carefully or didn’t trust it to be strong enough on its own. Either explanation is damning.
Is Rings of Power worth watching?
I didn’t finish it and I’m not going to. Twenty minutes and a serious amount of later research is enough to know what the show is and isn’t.
What it isn’t: a faithful adaptation of Tolkien’s Second Age, a coherent story about power and deception and the costs of hubris, a show that understands why Middle-earth matters or what makes its characters work. What it is: expensive wallpaper stretched over a structure that has Tolkien’s names and locations and none of his understanding. A show that mistakes spectacle for stakes, combat ability for strength of character, and surface diversity for the harder work of writing people who feel real.
Jackson’s trilogy showed that Tolkien’s world, faithfully understood and translated with craft, produces some of the best filmmaking in the history of the genre. Rings of Power shows what happens when the same intellectual property is handed to people who either couldn’t or didn’t read what they were adapting. The contrast is instructive and depressing in equal measure.
For a detailed breakdown of exactly where and why Rings of Power fails as an adaptation, including a scene-by-scene comparison of the two troll fights, see the full analysis at The Writing King.
