Prime's 'Lord of the Rings': An ambitious risk worth taking?

 Back in the early 2000s, when movies were blockbusters and we went to see them in all their glory in theaters, "Lord of the Rings" was the blockbuster to rule them all. Arriving just two months after Sept. 11, its generous spirit, abundant optimism and Hobbit-like sense of wonder helped assuage a wounded world, if only briefly. 

 But New Zealand-born director Peter Jackson also had a singular advantage with this triumph: Those eponymous J.R.R. Tolkien books themselves. He crammed all six of them, or 1,178 pages, into nearly 12 hours of film. That classic trilogy would eventually win 17 Oscars and now stands as the most successful book adaptation in cinematic history. 

    What, then, will Prime Video's "The Lord of the Rings:The Rings of Power" bring to the party? What could it possibly?

Well, for starters, there's the generous backing of the world's third largest company. "Rings of Power'' may be the most ambitious TV series ever made, and easily the most expensive, perhaps exceeding the $1 billion production price tag when it wraps in five years or so. For special effects, the series has tapped the same company Jackson once launched to create all those indelible scenes for his own "LOTR" films. Howard Shore, "Saturday Night Live's" first music director, who went on to win three Oscars for his "LOTR" score, has written the opening theme. 

In fact, "Rings of Power'' would appear to have almost everything except for those books. This vast sprawl will be based on just 150 (or so) pages that have appeared at the end of "The Lord of Rings" since its publication in 1954. While most casual readers have scarcely bothered to even scan the so-called "Appendices," devoted fans have long scoured them for the back story to the main one. Short on plot, they're instead full of facts and figures about the long-ago kingdoms of Middle-earth and those heroes and heroines who — to paraphrase Cate Blanchett's Galadriel, Lady of the woods of Lothlórien, at the outset of "The Fellowship of the Ring'' — have long since "faded into myth."

 The rest of Tolkien's famed "Legendarium'' is off limits to the show. That comprises dozens of other books which could have filled out stories and screen time. And to make this all a little more daunting, "Rings of Power'' will cover only the Second Age of Middle-earth. That stretched thousands of years in Tolkien's imagination, but spans just a few pages in those Appendices. This means that the producers of "Power" — TV neophytes J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, who were childhood friends growing up together in Virginia — now officially have the hardest job in Hollywood.

Predictably or inevitably, fans are concerned and a few outraged. In the weeks and months leading up to the series' launch, online trolls have attacked it based on a few trailers and teases. As usual with trolls, their complaints range from the frivolous to the offensive, with some blasting the production's casting of actors of color in various roles. That's a common troll complaint, wearily familiar to the producers of Marvel and "Star Wars" movies, but especially repugnant here. Tolkien, after all, celebrated our common humanity, although did once write of trolls (which Payne has pointed out) as "creatures of dull and lumpish nature [with] no more language than beasts.” 

Those serious fans, however, may have a point. McKay and Payne have been forced to create new characters and storylines. Chronologies have been jumbled and timelines compressed so that elves (who are immortal) and humans can share storylines. They've even turned peacenik Galadriel (played in the series by Welsh actress Morfydd Clark) into a warrior queen.

Little of this would be familiar to Tolkien or to those millions who have carried the torch these past 68 years. To them, the precious canon hasn't merely been renovated but is about to be demolished. 

As an example of the disquiet (by no means isolated), one fan who goes by Rainbow Pete posted on his YouTube channel, Tolkien Untangled, that "my fear is that if this show is really as offensively awful as some people believe, then we might lose something valuable." 

That "something" is the sanctity of a text that has largely withstood the ravages of popular culture, even with Jackson's trilogy, dozens of "LOTR" video games, a couple of animated movies from the '90s, merchandise, board games and who knows what else. Keeping the other barbarians at the gate — that would be Hollywood — has long been the work of the Tolkien Estate, which was the group that restricted "Rings of Power '' to that tiny corner of the "LOTR" kingdom.

Nevertheless, this is all about to change. Along with the arrival of "Rings of Power," a whole new Tolkien-inspired world will open up shortly. In April, the Saul Zaentz Company — which had owned the rights to the movies since 1976 — sold its Middle-earth Enterprises to Swedish-based company Embracer, which ominously declared that it will launch "additional movies based on iconic characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel, Eowyn and other characters from the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien.”

While Tolkien devotees stand to be appalled, could it be that this breaking wave isn't meant for them but rather someone who is accustomed to getting their pop culture delivered by the truckload? A millennial, let's say, who expects a Marvel movie (or two) per year, along with a few other heavily hyped diversions?

    J. Stephen Russell, professor emeritus of English at Hofstra University and founding dean of the university's Honors College, gained a keen insight into the typical Tolkien fan when he taught Tolkien courses. They are, he says "a tough room and I would venture to guess that those sort of hardcore fans may not be happy with any film adaptation, although Jackson's were more faithful than I could ever have imagined. As one of my professors once told me, it's hard not to step on the sacred cow-chips." 

But Russell adds that "the benefits to Amazon here outweigh the risks because if I read this correctly, the series was done in conjunction with the Tolkien Estate which has veto power and it recognized going in that the creative team was going to have to sketch out a lot of the blank space anyway." 

Moreover, "there are audiences that I think would be receptive to a creative reinterpretation of Tolkien. If you do think about this generationally, the younger fans of Tolkien would probably be hungry for something that is more diverse, more nuanced with back stories. The people who think Tolkien can only be read at Oxford in the fall over a pint won't be satisfied, but the right audience with the right level of understanding could be attracted to this." 

Russell's colleague at Hofstra, Lisa DeTora, agrees. DeTora — who teaches women's studies and rhetoric, but is also a specialist in the field of medical writing — says she became one of those hardcore Tolkien fans because she had to earn her "geek creds" before talking to scientists and medical researchers. 

"For me, the way to look at 'Rings of Power' is that Tolkien himself was writing speculative fiction. The whole purpose was to speculate and when he built out a rich world with lots of stray bits, he was trying to flesh out where people were and how they got to that point."

She says that Tolkien's "The Silmarillion" and "all the other works his son eventually published were in effect speculation before he got to writing the definitive books." 

"The Silmarillion" was Tolkien's vast collection of Middle-earth lore written long before he took up "The Hobbit" and "LOTR" in the 1930s; his son, Christopher, who died in 2020 at the age of 94, devoted his life to organizing and publishing the millions of words his father had poured into the creation of Middle-earth.

How would J.R.R. Tolkien — who died in 1973 — feel about all those movies, games, merch, and now, the Most Expensive TV series ever made and one of the world's biggest companies making it? 

Christopher offered a clue in 2012. In an interview with French newspaper Le Monde, he said that his father has been "devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time.” 

"The commercialization," he mournfully concluded, "has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing.”