The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

The sweep and scope are in place. ... The Lord of the Rings had a single, simple plot: get the ring in the fire! There’s less of that here. The scene-setting keeps being interrupted by action sequences.

The dialogue’s often clunky, with cod mysticisms. Tolkien purists will probably be equally aggrieved by the insertion of invented characters and storylines. But showrunners JD Payne and Patrick Mackay have taken a mass of material, originally presented as a chronicle with little in the way of dialogue or character development, and forged a compelling, coherent narrative that fills a mouth-watering gap.

Amazon's formidable loot -- enough of an investment to become an inextricable part of the coverage -- has been brought to bear in the service of relatively uninspired storytelling, deficient in narrative urgency.

Let’s hope the whole enterprise gets better as the story reaches the middle acts and makes its turn towards the finish. Because I have to say, “Rings of Power” does not overwhelm, dazzle or sprint out of the gate.

Instead of reinventing Tolkien’s lore, they reinscribe it in a story that reverently and expensively draws on ones viewers will have heard many times before. The end result could be timeless or tired. But in its earliest episodes, Rings of Power tantalizes without challenging.

“The Rings of Power” is neither a disaster nor a triumph, merely television of a visibly expensive, fitfully inspired sort. It looks good, has a few charismatic performances that sell the characters and is all in all watchable, if something less than compelling — predictable even in the suspenseful parts, occasionally exciting and sometimes sort of boring.

Viewers hungry for Middle-Earth Anything could be satisfied, and I guess you could argue Rings of Power is no worse than all the other expensively empty genre adventures (Altered Carbon, anyone?) that have proliferated through the streaming era. But this series is a special catastrophe of ruined potential, sacrificing a glorious universe's limitless possibilities at the altar of tried-and-true blockbuster desperation.