Tolkien, Orcs, and Rings of Power

 Rings of Power's sixth episode is called Udûn. It's a location in what will come to be known as Mordor (currently "The Southlands" in Rings of Power - though it looks like Mordor is coming soon). This actually makes Gandalf's calling the Balrog the "Flame of Udûn" kind of odd, as it's not clear that Durin's Bane has any loyalty or relationship to Mordor and Sauron. (Further Tolkien research has informed me that the region of Mordor is actually named after another name for Utumno, the fortress of Morgoth - so really it's closer to "hell," though technically I don't think Tolkien's Legendarium has a true "hell" as another plane of existence).

Rings of Power is an exciting fantasy show, and one I'm enjoying. But I think it's also important to note that it's an interpretation more than an adaptation. I'm not talking about the *gasp* presence of people of color in it (anyone who has a problem with that can go toss themselves into Mount Doom, and good riddance) but instead various conceits that allow the story to be told in which any human character lives long enough to be a character throughout the story.

There are elements I'm a little wary of - mystery-box things like who the "Stranger" is and, while not explicitly encouraged by the show, the natural guessing game of whether any given character is going to turn out to actually be Sauron or will become one of the Ringwraiths. (At the same time, I can't help but indulge in some of that speculation.)

One of the most interesting, but simultaneously canon-... I won't say canon-breaking, but canon-testing at least elements has been the introduction of a character known as Adar. And because his whole deal is a spoiler, let's put a spoiler cut ahead:

SPOILERS AHEAD

Star Trek Discovery's Third Season Changes the Game

 Given that I'm playing catch-up, this is old news to anyone who has been watching Star Trek: Discovery. But the third season features a shake-up of the whole premise of the show that bears looking at.

Naturally, spoilers abound, so beware:

Finally Getting into Star Trek Discovery

 With my roommates out of town and social engagements cancelled, and Los Angeles basically melting to the point where I needed to huddle up in the room with the air conditioner, I've been watching a lot of stuff.

As I've said many times on this blog, I was raised on Star Trek (TNG to be specific). But when a new series, Star Trek Discovery, came out, it was on a streaming platform that I didn't have access to. Recently, I have gotten access to it, but I also heard various disappointing things about the show, so I was a bit wary of trying it out.

Well, in the past 24 hours I've watched almost all of season 1.

It is certainly true that, structurally, this is very different from your typical Star Trek. This feels very much like a modern, serialized story (though admittedly, the season really switches gears I want to say ten episodes in).

My sense is that, judging the show on its own merits, it's pretty good. But it lacks a lot of the hallmarks that we tend to associate with the franchise. For one, there is a very clear main character: Michael Burnham. We don't even see the eponymous starship until episode three - instead, we get a sort of two-part prologue that shows how this model officer became the pariah of the Federation - more or less because she took actions that led to the Klingon/Federation War that the original series is dealing with the aftermath of.

(As a kid who grew up with Worf, I remember being surprised that the Klingons were villains in the original Trek - though of course in Next Gen the culture is clearly decadent and broken).

There are quibbles I have with the show - for one, after her actions, Michael is sentenced to a life term. In past series we've seen the Federation's penal system to be fairly enlightened, and I would think that just about any offense has a possibility of rehabilitation and parole (granted, this is set in the 23rd century, which might not be quite as evolved as the 24th).

The other thing that is rather jarring is the quite profound visual redesign of the Klingons. I'm sure a lot of original series fans were shocked when their look was overhauled in Star Trek III: The Return of Spock. This redesign feels extreme, though, and also strange in how it replaces the famously great hair that Next Gen Klingons have with universal baldness. There is one possible reason for their redesign that might have to do with spoilers for later in the season, but I do kind of wish that they were a little closer to the TNG version.

There are a couple of episodes that introduce fun, episode-specific sci fi concepts to play through - one episode features a time loop (not something that Trek hasn't done before, of course, but this one plays into the growing relationship between two of its central characters). Another introduces a world where all of its life has formed a collective consciousness.

Indeed, I remember when rewatching some of Next Gen that some of the most beloved episodes that were stand-alones would have to be incorporated into an ongoing narrative, and this show very clearly does that.

In a sense, then, it makes this play out like extra-length episodes - its arcs being its episodes.

I think perhaps I have less reason to be frustrated with the series' departure from the typical Star Trek formula because I've started watching in a period where Strange New Worlds and even Lower Decks have given us a much more classic approach.

I will say that I don't really get the desire to keep kicking things back to the 23rd Century. Maybe I'm just a generational chauvinist, but after a combined 21 seasons of 24th Century shows, to me that is, in fact, the "default" Trek time period. Obviously we've got Picard now, as well as Lower Decks, so it's not as if there's no representation there. But I kind of wish that we'd have a forward-looking 24th Century show - Picard seems built around call-backs and nostalgia, and Lower Decks is too (though at least in that case we have new characters as our focus - it's just that Lower Decks is basically built to make an entertaining show out of "hey, we're all giant Star Trek nerds here, right?")

I'll be eager to see how the show develops, and how it concludes the first season - which at the point I'm at has profoundly changed gears and is actually managing to use an element of Star Trek's lore that I've almost always found tedious in a way that I think is actually dramatically interesting.

The Gradual Rise of Respectable Game Adaptations

 When I was around six or seven, the first trailers for the Super Mario Bros. movie came. I was very into Mario despite not actually having played the games. Some time, maybe that year or a year or two later, I was at the defunct camp that my dad's friend and colleague had gotten as a vacation home in Maine where I was able to play his son's Super Nintendo and get my first experience of Super Mario World, which to this day is, to me, the "quintessential" video game.

But I was a little kid born in the 1980s, and as video games as an industry were exploding in popularity and pop culture influence, I was very excited about the film. I never actually saw it (I caught some of it on TV decades later) but the Super Mario Bros. movie is infamous.

Bob Hoskins and Joe Leguizamo (two actors of a caliber far above this project) apparently bonded over how miserable the production was. The producers, it's said, were really interested in making a movie set in a dark and gritty, brutalist metropolis, and so they transformed the bright and colorful Mushroom Kingdom into some kind of weird subterranean dystopia. Bowser, or Koopa (which, to be fair, is what he's called in Japan) was turned into a Donald Trump-type (see, we knew how awful he was back then. The dark alternate present in Back to the Future Part II also makes Biff into his equivalent. Too bad he didn't just remain a footnote in the history of how tacky 80s excess was).

As the first major adaptation of a video game in Western media, the movie really set the tone. The makers of the movie clearly felt no real respect or affection for the franchise, and basically slapped the brand onto their own weird, bad movie idea.

And adaptations of video games that happened since followed a similar pattern. No one was really putting much effort into making these good. Over time, the very concept of adapting a video game story to the screen came to seem like an inherently bad idea.

But things have been changing lately.

It's not a question of budget or the investment of star power - Uncharted was a failure despite the presence of Tom Holland (and Mark Wahlberg, though I'm not sure Wahlberg is a "put asses in the seats" kind of presence) but decades earlier we had Angelina Joli in two Tomb Raider movies.

However, where I've noticed things changing has been in animated series. Netflix's Castlevania series, while excessively gory and violent, still manages to tell a decent story and takes itself seriously enough to get through that story. The bigger example, though, and the one that I think really marks a big change, is Arcane. This series adapts the backstories of a number of League of Legends characters - one of those games where, whatever lore exists in the world, you don't see a ton in the game itself. Arcane has gone beyond the successes of the Castlevania anime and is now winning awards.

The reason for this change I think is pretty clear: In the old days, video games were a pretty exclusively youth-oriented medium. As gamers have grown older - not to mention the fact that some older people have also learned to embrace the medium - the respect and love for the storytelling in games has grown.

Now, you have people who understand the appeal these games have, and have grown up with their stories. Producers can also now expect audiences to take the stories seriously. Part of that, of course, is the maddening obsession with brand recognition that has choked Hollywood of late, but I think it's also a newfound respect for games as an art form. (It's also newfound respect for the fact that the games industry is bigger than Hollywood at this point.)

Having come of age at a time when you sort of hoped that they wouldn't try to make a film adaptation of your favorite games, I think it's kind of exciting to see that they're actually pulling it off now. At least sometimes.

Rings of Power

 Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is up there with the original Star Wars trilogy as being one of my foundational cinematic loves. The timing was great: the summer before I started high school in 2000, I read The Hobbit, and then during my freshman year, I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, mostly in editions that were emblazoned with "Soon to be a Motion Picture Trilogy from New Line Cinema!" The Lord of the Rings movies were a genuine event - and I think the hopeful, heroic tone was particularly resonant given that the first movie came out three months after 9/11 - a time when the idyllic, Pax Americana age of the post-Cold War 1990s was shattered by this act of spectacular violence.

Tolkien's Middle Earth is one of the most richly detailed fantasy worlds - and really codified the notion of a fantasy world in general, moving the genre beyond the gritty sword-and-sorcery of Conan the Barbarian and into this lyrical, mythic mode. I think basically every work of fantasy fiction to come after has had to be in conversation with Tolkien.

Amazon secured the rights to Middle-Earth and has reportedly spent a billion fucking dollars to make this series.

Honestly, in the run-up to its release, I was skeptical. I found myself tired about the re-hashing and franchising of these works. While I was a devoted Game of Thrones fan, the final season left such a bitter taste in my mouth that I found myself profoundly apathetic toward its House of the Dragon, and perhaps tired of the brutal, dark world that felt so refreshingly different when Game of Thrones came out in 2011.

I was similarly skeptical of Rings of Power. The Hobbit movies, which had tried to extract an epic trilogy out of a single book that was lighter and simpler in tone than the Lord of the Rings, felt like a cash-grab. And Amazon's Wheel of Time series was... just... not good. (I've never read the books, and I've heard some people say that the books aren't great either, but the show basically had a couple good actors, some very weak ones, and was a meandering mess.)

I've now watched the first episode of Rings of Power, though, thanks to some good reviews I've spotted. And, well, consider me intrigued.

As usual, Rings of Power has the burden of being a prequel, set within the Second Age, which begins with the defeat of Morgoth and ends with the initial defeat of Sauron (as seen in the prologue of Fellowship of the Ring.) This age, of course, is the one in which Sauron arrives as Ammenar, the gift-giver, teaching how to make his magic rings in a ploy to get everyone to secretly wind up in his thrall.

So, we know what's going to happen. The rings kind of super-charge the races natural tendencies, making dwarves more interested in treasure, humans more interested in power, and elves... maybe more wise and aloof?

But the rings haven't even been created yet at this stage. Instead, we have a few characters we're checking in with and getting to know.

The headlining character is Galadriel. We're introduced to her as a child during the First Age, when the world doesn't even have a sun - instead, two great, sacred trees provide the equivalent of sunlight and moonlight. Galadriel, as a child, already shows ambitions that go beyond her fellow kids - and the kids are actually quite cruel, trying to sink her magic (or, more precisely, delicate elvish-art) paper boat. (I don't know how granular Tolkien's conception of evil was, but maybe their attempts to sink her boat is a sign of Morgoth's influence already in the world). Galadriel has a beloved older brother, Finrod, who dispenses wisdom to her and whom she clearly adores.

But, when Morgoth comes and destroys the great trees, the elves journey from Valinor to Middle-Earth, to battle against him. The war is won, but Sauron takes over as the Dark Lord. Finrod hunts for him, but winds up dying in the pursuit. And so, Galadriel takes on her brother's mission.

Galadriel here is driven almost to the point of obsession - convinced that if she does not hunt down and defeat Sauron, evil will rise again. However, Gil-Galad, the king of the high elves, is convinced that Sauron is gone, and that her obsession will only cause more pain and death. Galadriel comes to an ancient fortress of Morgoth in the frozen north (I'm not sure if this is meant to be Angband or some other citadel of his - I never actually read through the Silmarillion).

Galadriel is recalled to Lindon, the elvish capital (which is near the Grey Havens as seen in the end of Lord of the Rings) and her company is awarded for their valor with a trip back to Valinor, the heavenly continent that Galadriel was born on (and seems to genuinely be another plane of existence).

In her trip to Lindon, we also meet Elrond, a minister and speech-writer for Gil-Galad and obviously someone who is destined to be a very important figure in the future (also, fun fact, his daughter Arwen is Galadriel's granddaughter, so presumably Elrond winds up marrying her daughter at some point). Elrond is on Gil-Galad's side of things, but clearly loves and respects Galadriel and is willing to hear her, even if he remains unconvinced and worried that it's her grief that has clouded her judgment.

Galadriel travels on the ship to Valinor, but as her fellow soldiers are divested of their armor and prepared to enter the brilliant, heavenly light, Galadriel jumps ship, apparently planning to swim back across the ocean (I mean, she's an elf, she can probably do that.)

But the show is not just Galadriel: we're introduced to a couple other focus characters.

First is Norri, Eleanor Harfoot, who is a Hobbit or perhaps some kind of proto-Hobbit, living in a hidden village with her parents and community. We're actually introduced to the Harfoots from the perspective of a couple of humans, who fear them the way one might fear the fair folk. The elder of the village has been seeing strange signs, including these unseasonal travelers, but Eleanor is showing her Baggins-like tendency to get into mild trouble, helping a bunch of kids break into an old abandoned farm where blackberries are growing - though there is the ominous sign of a wolf that has been there, and when we get a look at the beast, it seems clear this is no natural wolf, but more likely a warg.

We also meet Arondir, an elf soldier who is part of a garrison that keeps watch over a human town. The humans have ambivalent feelings about the elves, who come by regularly to check in on anything strange going on. It turns out that the ancestors of these humans threw their lot in with Morgoth, and the elves are something of an occupying army, with an admittedly light touch.

Strange things are going on here, though - to the east, there's a field with blighted grass, and the blight seems to be making people and animals sick. All the while, Arondir is reckoning with his romantic feelings for a local healer named Bronwyn, counseled against falling in love with a human by his fellow elves, who point out that these stories tend to end tragically.

But, given that Gil-Galad has declared the days of war over, believing that the darkness has ultimately been vanquished, Arondir's unit has been recalled. While Arondir goes to investigate the blight, though, he and Bronwyn find that the village has been set ablaze.

With all of this going on, a great shooting star blazes across the heavens, seen by all of the characters we've met with. Where it lands, near the Harfoot village, a seemingly human form rests within the crater, with long grey hair and a beard. I can only assume this is Gandalf, though he wouldn't have gotten that name yet.

Anyway, for a first episode, we've got a lot set up, and I have to admit I'm liking what I see so far. The writing has mostly replicated the stylized, mythic dialogue that the books and movies have, avoiding modernisms and quippiness. The show is also gorgeous - the budget shows (similarly to how it does in Apple's Foundation show). I'm eager to see the production design in new environments - I'm given to understand the second episode features Khazad-Dûm (aka the Mines of Moria).

I'm planning on watching the second episode later today.