The idea that ambitious, adult and quality fiction has to be approached from cynicism has an opponent. Well, he has many. They are the inhabitants of Middle-earth from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power that, directed by the Barcelonan J.A. Bayona, they will have to face the resurgence of evil in the fantastic world of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Today, Wednesday, a few lucky people will be able to see the first two chapters at the Filmax cinema in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat after the tickets raffled on Monday by Amazon Prime Video sold out in just five minutes. Starting at dawn from Thursday to Friday, at 3:00 a.m., it will be the turn of the subscribers of the content platform, which has made the riskiest bet in the history of the medium: 465 million invested in the first season alone, 250 millions of which went to take over the rights to the South African-born author.
Lovers of the film version of Peter Jackson do not have to worry because it does not affect the story already told: it is another. Creators John D. Payne and Patrick McKay, who until they were approached to adapt the work were only known to have worked on Star Trek: Beyond despite not being credited as screenwriters, were interested in exploring the stories mentioned by Tolkien (but never fully told) without giving up the epic.
They proposed to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and fan of the literary universe (he even actively participated in the acquisition of the rights), to transfer the action to the Second Age of the fantastic continent. This involved narrating events such as the forging of the rings of power and the one ring of Sauron or the fall of Númenor.
It was an unprecedented challenge due to both the cost of production and the creative limitations. Since Bezos’s company only has the rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogy, but not The Silmarílion or Unfinished Tales, they base the foundation of the series on the anecdotes and appendices of the work.
At the same time, they cannot make any reference to data that only appears in the other books, more prolific in the treatment of the Second Age, nor can they contradict the lore, that is, the history and characteristics of Tolkien’s world. Since the main attraction of the work is the author’s ability to create a universe of geography, history and demographics developed in detail, Payne and McKay have a source material as fertile as it is full of mines.
The eight-episode first season, in fact, was controversial from the moment the first images were leaked, receiving accusations of being a woke work to accommodate the contemporary progressive mentality to Tolkien’s story. The reason? The introduction of racial diversity in Middle-earth of elves, dwarves, men, hobbits and orcs. The creative reasoning is flawless: why shouldn’t there be people with different traits in different races when the universe, though medieval in inspiration, is unmistakably fantastical and dissociated from reality.
One of the other discussions has to do with the portrayal of a character known to readers and viewers: the elf Galadriel, who Cate Blanchett played in the Oscar-winning films, and who here is a warrior in armor and with a sword. Now, with the face of the Welsh Morfydd Clark, she serves as a starting point: she is obsessed with finding Sauron, whom she mistrusts that he is dead and that she cannot restore darkness to the land.
In parallel, Elrond (Robert Aramayo) wants to propose an agreement to the dwarves; the human Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) and the elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova), of forbidden attraction, suspect that a threat is approaching them; and Nori (Markella Kavenagh), a mischievous hobbit, stumbles upon a meteorite when the elders of the community predict trouble ahead.
The locations of this beginning move through a territory already explored cinematographically, New Zealand, although the second season, already in pre-production, has moved to the United Kingdom, where the sets have been sent. When the project received the green light in 2017, the producers could not foresee the arrival of a pandemic at the end of 2019 that would complicate filming: members of the technical team and the cast had to spend two years in the oceanic country without being able to return to their respective land as a result of covid and the policies adopted by the local government.
In this new context, Amazon prefers to place the filming closer to the actors’ homes, as well as being more accessible to the rest of the team and the platform’s managers, taking into account that the series has been planned as a five-story story. seasons with the possibility of spin-offs.
From this Friday, moreover, the public will be able to see The Rings of Power both in Spanish and in Catalan and Galician, including subtitles, with the Basque version scheduled for later. It is part of the new strategy of the business giant to provide some content in the other official languages ??of the State with Galadriel following in the footsteps of The Final List. Two episodes will be available on launch day with the remainder of the season airing weekly.
