One More on the Telly: Page 207 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

One More on the Telly

QuincyAbeyie

Daz wrote:
Quincy Abeyie wrote:
Agree with that. They aged the characters who were kids and would look noticeably older. Take a look at BCS for example, nobody cares that Mike looks older in the prequel.

Except in BCS all of the carry-over actors had aged so it didn't jar. I mean, they can afford to have people flying on cgi dragons but they can't be bothered putting some grey streaks and a wrinkle or two on the adult characters (other than the king)?

Not sure what you mean with BCS. Yes the actors have aged, which takes them in the opposite direction of what they should look like in the prequel.

RocktheCasbah

I guess that only really matters if you were to watch Breaking Bad immediately after Better Call Saul. I can't really remember what Mike looked like at the end of Breaking Bad, so what he looks like in Better Call Saul is not massively relevant.

Of course, the exception to the rule was Aaron Paul's first appearance in Better Call Saul, where not only did he look like a really old man in a young man's garb, (to me anyway) his voice sounded like he'd smoked a million cigarettes since his last appearance as Pinkman - he sounded nothing like how I remember him.

QuincyAbeyie

Yeah, guess it can break the immersion for some. Quite a few said the same thing as you about Pinkman (and Mike, not Saul since Odenkirk is probably in better shape now than when filming BB) but I didn't really think about it while watching.

RocktheCasbah

Oddly maybe, I didn't find Aaron Paul's second appearance as jarring.

On a semi related note, does everybody know that Jonathan Banks, the actor who played Mike, wasn't just Victor Maitland's number one goon in Beverly Hills Cop, but also in Airplane too?

Daz

I'm still on season 5 of BCS so haven't gotten to that part of the storyline yet.

Burnwinter

Gazza M wrote:
Burnwinter wrote:
Think RINGS OF POWER has lost the plot a fair bit. There are a couple of interesting mysteries in the storyline but they're failing at the difficult task of mustering a compelling serial drama that also feels like Tolkien vibe wise.

it is turning into quite a bummer, right? as you say some parts resonate (durin and elrond are probably my favourite parts of the show) but too much of it feels generic, and some of the deviations from the lore don't feel justified.

Take it back, actually. Episode six is a near total departure from anything Tolkien would've conceived, but also cranks up the action and spectacle several notches. Found it really satisfying. It is going to break a few people's brains though.

Gazza M

Burnwinter wrote:
Gazza M wrote:
it is turning into quite a bummer, right? as you say some parts resonate (durin and elrond are probably my favourite parts of the show) but too much of it feels generic, and some of the deviations from the lore don't feel justified.

Take it back, actually. Episode six is a near total departure from anything Tolkien would've conceived, but also cranks up the action and spectacle several notches. Found it really satisfying. It is going to break a few people's brains though.

episode 6 had lots of action, but too much of it was mcguffin driven and hacky. episode 7 was about 20% good stuff, all stemming from the durin/elrond plotline everything else in the show is pretty generic fantasy. were deep enough into the show to start drawing conclusions on whether the lore changes and newly created characters are worthwhile additions to the story, and the answer is probably no

it's also odd how something with this budget still feels so small and cheap at times

Burnwinter

I don't think there are that many lore changes, to be honest … the real problem is trying to match the requirements of a contemporary serial drama (even a fantasy), like motivated, relatable characters, rapid changes of direction in the plot, many competing storylines with the epic material of the Tolkien legendarium.

[spoiler]Take the episode six finale where the sword-slash-key initiates the mechanism that Adar and the orcs have been building through the Southlands all this time. I've seen it described as a "Rube Goldberg device for setting off Mount Doom", which is fair enough, but then … in Tolkien's actual work it just says stuff like "and Sauron fled to the south, and he dwelled in those lands, and a shadow fell upon them" which, you know, leaves a lot of work for the showrunners.[/spoiler]

Anyway, I'm still barracking for it. I like the Maiar subplot (the one with the Stranger and the three weird Fury type trackers), and I have my preferred theory about who might be Sauron. The Moria plotline is boring me.

Gazza M

there is a tonne of lore changes

[spoiler]the fable about the origins of mithril tying it to the simarils, and making it some kind of a cure-all for a mysterious sickness thats befallen the elves. thats now a major plotline and there isnt a hint of that in any of tolkiens writings, and i dont particularly like the change. i had a working theory that sauron had been manipulating gilgalad and celebrimbor off camera, making their fixation with mithril and hastiness to send galadriel back to valinor more believable as a product of sauron whiapering in their ear, but that seems very unlikely given how far into the season we are now. throwing the balrog in the mix also seems like unnecessary fan service, as it shouldnt be involved at this point of the story. theres also a tonne of other jankyness stemming from them mushing thousands of years of events and characters into a few decades. [/spoiler]

but aside from the lore stuff at its core its shoddily written and tropey, with characters behaving daftly in order for the plot to advance. feels very GOT season 8, or like a CW show.

Burnwinter

Right, there are quite a lot of changes, but I don't really agree there are a ton of them that are significant.

[spoiler]I also don't like the mithril plotline, but the main reason I don't is not so much that it's not canon, but that it turns the coming enmity between Dwarves and Elves into a historically, materially grounded conflict where in Tolkien's mythopoesis, it really ought to be more emotionally driven, by jealousy, arrogance, paranoia etc, like a tragedy.[/spoiler]

Tolkien rewrote a lot of this stuff himself (for example he had two or three different versions of the Orc origin story). I don't really worry too much about minor liberties taken with the material. I think the showrunners' objective is a difficult one, and it's to do something that respects the material, feels like a collection of convincing dramatic stories, and delivers us material that lines up with Akallabêth, the poem of the One Ring and some of the other appendices.

Good news for them is unless they fuck it up unbelievably badly, I'll still be watching it almost just to see what they struggle with, what they include and emphasise, and so on. We know they've scaffolded four or five seasons of the show, so I think it's safe to assume they've thought of some fairly clever uses of all the material. Some of what is yet to come will also have to be wildly spectacular.

Gazza M

that's what's spooked me about this first season. the pacing is simultaneously slow and fast, which is one of the worst pacing sins you can commit. I expected something alot more balanced in terms of pacing, given that they have a defined end point with that order of 5 seasons. I went in with tempered expectations and somehow bezos' nightmare factory managed still managed to churn out a disappointment. it's sad that some worker had to shit in a bag so that amazon could afford to crank out dreck like this

Burnwinter

😆

I really don't agree it's that bad, but I do agree with you that it's weird to have a show that massively accelerates in episode six, then cuts the motor almost completely in episode seven as we just saw. I felt like I'd gone from riding a frigate to paddling a canoe.

Mind you, the pacing in LORD OF THE RINGS itself is almost unbearable, I challenge anyone not to speed-read the Frodo and Sam storyline.

The showrunners are trying to get ahead of some of the criticism by promising there's a lot to come in their plans.

After reading around the production history, it does seem pretty clear the Tolkien estate passed on a bunch of pretty terrible options (Netflix apparently wanted to do character-centric spinoff series, one for Aragorn, one for Gandalf etc). The fact they've scaffolded five seasons strikes me as something very positive if they can improve on some of the deficiencies seen so far in the show.

Coombs

The problem is not really the concept, but the writing and directing. It's written by an LCD focus group and really, really poorly directed. It's like every line of dialogue was actually the last line in a long conversation we never get to see, so it falls completely flat. Everything they say is so definitive and has almost no characterization, like a story being read aloud with different actors saying each line. In that sense, it matches Tolkien quite well.

The shot design is predictable and the blocking, in particular, is horribly clichéd. Like when that strappy dress-wearing lady gives a completely unearned speech to her fellow dirty humans standing on a rampart and they all just look at each other saying "watermelon, soda bottle". Come back to her 3 scenes later she's already given up just for the sake of a plot point.

Burnwinter

Coombs wrote:
The shot design is predictable and the blocking, in particular, is horribly clichéd.

This is a big problem. The show really needs its own visual grammar more suited to the Second Age, as opposed to retreading Jackson stuff and otherwise being dreary.

John Howe's concept art that inspired the lore sequence in the Jackson trilogy (Isildur getting the Ring and so on) is far more asymmetric and visually striking than what they've brought into play so far.

They've seemingly got plenty of time to improve on how they're doing it all, but I think the scale has to be a bit grander, more mythical and less everyday, and they should drop the historically referential imagery (eg all the Civil War / Reconstruction stuff they've been doing in the Southlands) if they can.

Burnwinter

I would repeat I think the task of "adapting" (really, interpolating) the extremely sparse lore into anything resembling a television drama and having it still "feel like Tolkien" is ridiculously hard, and that's been understated.

Coombs

Sure, but you could have just as easily made a show about an actual character or three, instead of matching the halting quality of Tolkien's back-of-the-napkin note-taking.

MistaT

Thought the finale of Rings of Power was quite solid

Gazza M

its pacing and plotting has to be tightened into the new season. less macguffinisation and slow-fast pacing. it's a shame they're not filming in NZ next season

RocktheCasbah

Just finished watching The Watcher on Netflix. Lots of fun to be had with Bobby Cannavale & Naomi Watts, based on a true story too. Which will seem mad if you watch it.

Daz

Just finished watching that too. Id listened to the podcast previously so knew a bit about the real life story that I spired it. The show certainly deviated from that a fair bit but it was still a pretty entertaining few hours I thought.

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