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IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

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Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#771

Post by HeavyStorm »

choko wrote: post #679
antisthenes wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6.5 is just about where I would rate this show. It seems like a generic high-production-value fantasy show, not being particularly reliant on source material (and thus not really benefiting from being associated with Tolkien). The acting is pretty average so far, and the storylines are too early to judge, but seem to gravitate to generic 'Good vs Big Great Evil' narrative. The pacing is also fairly slow to accommodat…

The reaction is likely because Tolkien has many hard core fans that did not appreciate the changes made to the lore.

Exactly that - take a look at YouTube and you'll see many channels that were thrashing the series even before release, for that exact reason.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#773

Post by Broken_Hippo »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #510
SunlightEdge wrote: post #442

To be maybe controversial... I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting). A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine…

I think a lot more people are thinking this than saying it because it's taboo to say, "You know, skin chroma quotas are not okay", especially the people who disclaim with things like, "I hate the show not because it's woke, but because of..." We're starting to see more people display courage and stand up to wokeness. It gives me hope.

Hope that you'll no longer need to see diversity in entertainment or that gay folks live among you? Such a strange hope - to insulate yourself from folks that are different.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#774

Post by HeavyStorm »

8note wrote: post #657
soueuls wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with diversity, is that most of the time it's a performance. And it's often done with bad actors, who will spend hours and hours on talk shows, describing how they are proud to be the first X to have played in this role. The result is thus disappointing. And it does not create anything of value. Because unsurprisingly, people are not paying to the the "first black elf". Nobody care. So it's just alie…

Moreso with diversity, it's a diverse set of people playing a non-diverse set of characters. The characters are all written to be white, just with non-white people playing them. They're doing something cool by having the diverse cast, but the writing doesn't adjust to make a story that feels like it has a diverse cast

Dwarfs... Hobbits... Elves... Humans... Maiar...there's diversity. Only it's on a different axis.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#775

Post by vips7L »

thom wrote: post #248
narag wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The first two episodes of The Rings of Power are unbearably boring. But let's wait. Anyway, IMDb ratings are getting totally unreliable to me. I wasted hours of my life that won't come back, watching some show called The Terminal List that scored a solid eight. Carnage of Asimov's Foundation is 7.4 and that... thing, The Wheel of Time 7.1. I wonder if there's a way to see evolution of rating, for me Star Tre…

Yeah, the difference to Foundation is baffling to me. I can only assume people developed strong feelings growing up with the LotR movies, but nobody is particularly engaged with Foundation (and tbh it's not an easy or fun book to try and adapt). Personally I think they would have done better to start with Prelude, which not only sets the scene, but has action, ass-kicking female characters etc. Instead they created s…

Foundation is one of my favorite books and I’m sad at how far off script they’ve already gone in the show. It seems to be missing the whole point.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#776

Post by ethbr0 »

dylan604 wrote: post #693
ethbr0 wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference in several orders of magnitude, to me, in adapting an unknown stage play into a movie (for example) vs adapting Tolkien. In the former, you could argue your own creative vision might be "better" (in the loose sense), given the lack of popular success of the source. In the later, it'd be a fair amount of hubris to assume you can make something more beloved than Tolkien's works.

Hubris the size and shape of someone named Jackson? The BBC for making an animated Hobbit? No written tome is ever going to come out unscathed in a TV/film adaptation. Have you seen the Amazon Jack Ryan series, the Without Remorse movie? Hubris, arragance, etc. You're coming back to words that mean the same thing. Just because it's a work you personally are not familiar does not make it more/less egregious that someo…

It's not a subjective but rather objective evaluation -- millions of more people are aware of Tolkien lore than... something off-Broadway.

That's why Amazon paid $$$$ for the rights.

It's unreasonable to ignore that and claim that taking the same amount of artistic license with Tolkien is the same as taking it with something else.

It is objectively different to adapt a more popular and well-known work.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#777

Post by tremon »

nec4b wrote: post #770
sudosysgen wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rome was a multiethnic empire. I don't see what being Roman or not has to do with ethnicity. The Roman people living there being ethically Berber, that is, African. The name Africa itself probably coming from the Afri Berber tribe. They were both Roman people and also ethnically African. And Berber tribes despite not being from subsaharan Africa did, through thousands of years of contact, have significant ethnic and…

By Roman I meant having Italic roots. It is a bit disingenuous to call them them indigenous or ethnically African. Especially because his father was of Punic origin and not a Berber as you are implying.

A lot of Romans (i.e. inhabitants of Rome) did not have Italic roots. Most inhabitants of Rome came from conquered regions, either as slaves, as wives, or as traders.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#778

Post by SirZimzim »

momento wrote: post #620
SunlightEdge wrote: post #442

To be maybe controversial... I'm still thinking about it, but I do wonder if diverse casting works in European fantasy stories. The problem I have is that it generally pulls me out of the experience/ makes it less immersive. I welcome diverse castings in modern shows (though we don't need every show to follow a template 'diverse' casting). A common counter argument is, well you can suspend your disbelief and imagine…

As a European, I find it absolutely absurd that peoples immersion is “being broken” by seeing non-white people in a fantasy show. When I see a dwarf in a fantasy TV show, I don’t see the colour of the dwarfs skin - I see a dwarf. The fact that people are uncomfortable by brown dwarves is ridiculous. What a strange hill to die on. I am flabbergasted that this is even a topic of such heated debate at the moment. It wou…

It's not about being comfortable it's about plausibility, the cultures depicted in fantasy lore tend to be highly homogeneous and isolated to small geographical areas. If the show was demonstrating something like the Roman Empire it's more plausible, kind of like Game of Thrones.

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#779

Post by Maursault »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #758
Maursault wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, but that still sounds absurdly idyllic and very hard to believe. I would expect it to be the opposite, that there was extreme racism even between different families within the same culture, and mostly only in Europe and not so much in the Middle and Far East. Europeans invented racism, and I would have expected it to have occurred around the fall of the Western Roman Empire. But this is all conjecture.

>Europeans invented racism Perhaps the most absurd assertion I've seen this year, in a year characterized by bizarre assertions.

Though conceptually, racism has existed since the dawn of civilization in pre-recorded history, with dominant peoples discriminating against, stereotyping, repressing and enslaving entire peoples (such as the Egyptian civilization enslaving the Jewish civilization, and including widespread antisemitism from antiquity into the modern era), the concept of race did not enter languages as a specific word until the 15th Century, with the word "race" itself being traced in English to the advent of British imperialism and in Spanish (la raza) to Spanish imperialism.[1] So only in a strictly literal sense did Europeans invent racism, though the English word "racism" itself did not enter language until the late 19th Century or very early 20th Century in America[2] as a reaction to that which had no word yet to describe it, but already existed for centuries in one sense, and for millennia in the wider conceptual sense.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/The-history-of-t... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815...

Re: IMDB deleted all negative user reviews for The Rings of Power

#780

Post by scraptor »

Beltalowda wrote: post #470
coffeeblack wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do these movies make money though? It seems to me that all these large corporations are more concerned with following ESG than with their own customers. What happens if you don’t follow “the message” we saw with Tesla some months ago.

The new Star Wars films made $2 billion, $1.3 billion, and $1 billion in box office alone (this excludes streaming, DVD sales, merchandise, etc.) So yes, they're making money. (I have no opinion on these films btw; I haven't seen them, and only dimly remember the old ones – I never cared much for them.)

Another way of looking at it is that they alienated half their audience in only three movies. They killed one of the most well known franchises for peanuts.
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