It feels like so many people get upset when books get adapted to movies or TV. Page to screen often incites a lot of hostility from overly passionate fanbases, but the trend of revisiting old film IPs such as Star Wars or Indiana Jones as created more controversies among fans. When I was younger I would get caught up in these arguments. Now I can’t be bothered to care. New additions don’t destroy the existing works; both can exist at the same time. These days I am more concerned about what a new adaptation can add to the existing media and if that extra is worth my time. The Lord of the Rings is my ur-example of this since it is an important story to me and it has multiple adaptations of varying quality.
I remember reading my dad’s copies of The Lord of the Rings when I was eleven or twelve and Middle Earth has had a hold on me every since. No matter what the Tolkien Estate does with the property rights in the future, nobody can “ruin” the books. They can ruin their new productions, but the books will always be available.
My first jump into non-book Tolkien material was MUME – Multi Users in Middle Earth. This is the game that taught me to type. An old, text-based online RPG, MUME hit me at the exact right time back in seventh and eighth grade. It made Middle Earth feel like the huge land that Tolkien expressed. You could spend weeks simply bumming around the Shire or visiting the dwarves in the Blue Mountains. In it’s heyday, hundreds of players would be logged in at once. The more advanced players would play as orcs and trolls and Black Numenoreans looking to kill us free folk of the West. To middle-school me, there was a palpable sense of danger out east past Bree and Rivendell. Either you’d get hunted down by a better player or just killed by a random hostile NPC. Combat was tough and death was extremely costly. MUME made me feel like I was in Middle Earth.
The original Peter Jackson films are some of my favorite movies of all time. I was lucky enough to see them re-released in local theaters two years ago and they still felt as epic as ever. The music gets me excited and I will almost always be willing to watch them. Unfortunately his The Hobbit trilogy does not do the same for me. Sure they weren’t great movies, but I think the real problem is that they don’t bring more to the table than Jackon’s original trilogy. If I want to watch a good-looking live-action film set in Middle Earth, why would I watch The Hobbit when the original films are so great? I like the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit. I think it’s great partly because it is animated. The animation aspect adds more to the Tolkien universe than Jackson’s version.
Coming up on Amazon’s Rings of Power, does it bring enough to make it worth watching over Jackson’s original trilogy? Both are big budget spectaculars that look great. The showrunners are making some good choices with the setting. The Mines of Moria have always been fascinating since the books were written. Getting to see a gorgeous view of them during the peak of the dwarvish civilization has been a treat. The friendship of Legolas and Gimli was wonderful in the original story. The friendship of Elrond and Durin is adding to that legacy by exploring the difficulties immortal beings would have relating to mere mortals. Watching the elves act so haughtily at the height of their power is a stark contrast to the restrained and waning Elvish civilization of The Lord of the Rings. So far Rings of Power is making its mark by showing us the wider world and helping recontextualize the existing material. It doesn’t hurt that Amazon poured dump trucks of money into the project and Rings of Power looks straight up amazing.
I guess the purists might have some complaints with the way Amazon has altered timelines and characters, but I don’t want a pitch-perfect adaptation of the texts. I want the showrunners to lean into the strengths of the medium to produce a better product. The more faithful the adaptation, the more I will ask why I should watch it when I can read the original.
The Keasy Depot 