Rings of Power Critique

I didn’t make it past the first twenty minutes of Rings of Power. I’ve since watched a pile of clips and read enough commentary to confirm what those twenty minutes told me: the writers don’t understand Tolkien’s characters, and the result is a show that looks like Middle-earth but doesn’t feel like it.

The problems start with the writing, but they don’t end there. The biggest writing choice involves Galadriel.

The Galadriel Problem

In Tolkien’s legendarium, Galadriel is one of the most powerful beings in Middle-earth. She’s been alive since before the sun existed. She studied under every one of the Valar. She refused Fëanor, survived the Helcaraxë crossing, founded and ruled Lothlórien for thousands of years, and wielded Nenya, one of the three Elven Rings. When Frodo offers her the One Ring, her refusal is one of the most important moments in The Lord of the Rings because the temptation is real. She has the power to use it. She chooses not to.

That’s what makes Galadriel formidable. Not sword fighting. Her power is wisdom, restraint, foresight, and the hard-won understanding that unchecked power destroys everything it touches. She learned that lesson across thousands of years of watching it happen.

Rings of Power turns her into an action hero who single-handedly kills an ice troll in the first episode. The writers apparently thought “strong female character” means “woman who fights things.” It doesn’t. Galadriel was already one of the strongest characters Tolkien ever created. If the writers had actually read the books, they could have made an excellent high-powered female character without reducing her to someone who swings a sword better than everyone else in the room.

The problem isn’t that she fights. Elves are capable warriors. The problem is that her fighting eclipses everything else about her character, and in doing so, it makes her less interesting, less complex, and less powerful than the Galadriel Tolkien wrote.

The Troll Fight: A Case Study in Bad Writing

Compare two troll fights. In Fellowship of the Ring, the cave troll sequence in the Mines of Moria is a masterclass in ensemble action. Every member of the Fellowship contributes based on who they are. Aragorn and Boromir fight with swords because they’re trained warriors. Legolas uses his bow because he’s an archer. Gimli fights with axes because he’s a dwarf. The hobbits are terrified but brave, throwing rocks and stabbing when they can. When Frodo gets speared, his companions rally around him. The scene works because every character matters and no single person dominates the fight.

The emotional architecture of the scene matters as much as the choreography. The audience isn’t just watching a fight. They’re watching nine people who have committed to each other being tested. Boromir’s protective instinct toward the hobbits foreshadows his later sacrifice. Sam’s decision to charge a cave troll with a frying pan tells you everything about his character in three seconds. The troll fight works as action, but it also works as character development, and that’s what separates good writing from spectacle.

In Rings of Power, Galadriel essentially solos the troll. The other characters become spectators to her invincibility. This isn’t just a missed opportunity for ensemble storytelling. It breaks the power balance that Tolkien carefully maintained across his entire mythology. In Tolkien’s world, trolls are genuinely dangerous. They’re not minibosses a single elf dispatches to show off. When a troll goes down easily, it cheapens every other threat in the story. If Galadriel can handle a troll alone without breaking a sweat, what’s supposed to feel dangerous to her?

Peter Jackson understood this. His Fellowship troll fight is tense because the outcome is genuinely uncertain. The troll is stronger than any individual member of the group. Victory requires coordination, sacrifice, and luck. That’s what makes the scene land. Rings of Power replaces that tension with spectacle, and spectacle without tension is just expensive noise.

A Billion Dollars and Nothing to Show for It

Rings of Power reportedly cost close to a billion dollars across its production. You’d never know it from the CGI, which is among the worst I’ve seen in a major production. Scenes that should feel epic look artificial. Environments that should immerse you pull you out instead. The troll in the first episode looks less convincing than Jackson’s cave troll from 2001, which was made with a fraction of the budget and two decades less technology.

This matters because Middle-earth depends on immersion. Tolkien spent decades making his world feel lived-in and real. Jackson’s films honored that by blending practical effects, real New Zealand landscapes, and CGI that served the story rather than replaced it. The Shire felt like a place you could walk into. Mordor felt like a place that would kill you. Rings of Power’s environments feel like wallpaper.

Money doesn’t fix bad creative decisions. Jackson’s entire trilogy cost roughly $280 million. Rings of Power spent more than triple that and produced something less convincing. The issue isn’t resources. It’s taste, judgment, and understanding what makes Tolkien’s world work on screen. You can’t buy that. You have to earn it by understanding the source material, and the people running this show clearly didn’t.

What Actually Went Wrong

The troll fight and the Galadriel problem point to the same root cause: the Rings of Power writers confused displays of power with compelling storytelling.

In Tolkien’s work and in Jackson’s films, power is meaningful because it has limits and consequences. Gandalf is one of the most powerful beings in Middle-earth, but he can’t simply blast his way through every problem. Aragorn is the rightful king, but he spends most of the story doubting whether he should claim the throne. Frodo carries the most dangerous object in the world, and it slowly destroys him. Every character’s power comes with a cost, and that cost is what makes the story compelling.

Rings of Power strips away the cost. Characters overcome obstacles without visible struggle. Galadriel is invincible. The show tells you the stakes are high, but nothing on screen demonstrates it. When characters face no real resistance, there’s nothing for the audience to invest in. You’re watching things happen instead of watching characters fight through things that might break them.

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. This is a story about manipulation, trust, and catastrophic misjudgment. The dramatic tension should come from watching intelligent characters get played by someone smarter. Instead, the show rushes through the deception in ways that make the Elves look incompetent rather than tragic. There’s a difference between being fooled by a masterful liar and being fooled because the writers need you to be fooled. The audience can tell which one they’re watching.

This is the same mistake the Critical Drinker identifies in modern franchise filmmaking: prioritizing how powerful a character looks over how interesting they are to watch. A character who can do everything is a character who has no story. The struggle is the story. Remove the struggle and you’re left with a very expensive screensaver.

The Source Material Was Right There

The frustrating part is that Tolkien’s source material already contained everything the writers needed. The Second Age, which Rings of Power is supposed to cover, includes the forging of the Rings of Power, the rise and fall of Númenor, Sauron’s deception of the Elven-smiths, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. These are enormous, dramatic stories with built-in conflict, betrayal, hubris, and catastrophe.

Galadriel lived through all of it. A faithful portrayal could have shown her navigating political alliances, recognizing Sauron’s deception before others did, wielding influence through wisdom and foresight rather than combat. That version of Galadriel would have been more interesting, more faithful to Tolkien, and a genuinely powerful female character whose strength comes from intelligence and experience rather than fight choreography.

Instead, the writers made choices that suggest they either didn’t read the source material carefully or didn’t trust it to be compelling enough on its own. The result is a show that has the surface of Tolkien — the names, the landscapes, the pointed ears — without the substance that made his work endure.

To be clear: this isn’t about diversity or progressive characters. I love the Murderbot series on Apple TV+, and that show is as progressive as science fiction gets. It works because the characters are well-written and their identities serve the story. I’ve watched The Expanse six times through, and its cast is one of the most diverse in science fiction television. As the Critical Drinker put it, it’s diversity done right. Nobody notices the diversity because the writing is so good that every character feels like a real person with real motivations. That’s the standard. Rings of Power fails not because it tried to do something different with Galadriel, but because what it did was shallow and poorly written. See how to build characters that feel real.