Trailer Drop Thursday: The Return of the Rangz
FIRST Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2
I’ve got three trailers for you today and for once I was looking forward to seeing all three. Granted, I was only looking forward to this first one in the same way you look forward to a root canal. You know it’s going to hurt and you just want to get it over with.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was honestly kind of impressive in that it got every… single… thing… wrong. The costuming was so bad it wouldn’t have been used on Xena the Warrior Princess. The sets were in a word, cramped, although another word would be cheap. There was nothing approaching Jackson’s sweeping epic scale, it honestly looked like Xena the Warrior Princess with some CG stapled on. I wrote better than 20,000 words dragging an incomprehensible, and completely disjointed script. I remain convinced that the screenplay was generated by an AI.
And then there was the casting. Some of the diversity silliness was unavoidable because of the mandatory minority quotas required by the countries they were shooting in. Although, I have no doubt at all that they were going to do that anyway. What made the casting truly tedious was that it was possible to have a diverse cast and still respect Tolkien’s lore.
The Numenorians got very preferential treatment because they backed the Valar against Morgoth. They were all tall, fair, and very long-lived, (Numenorians clocked out around their 400th birthday). The Men that fought for Morgoth were all various shades of brown. The thing is the Men of the East had some pretty legitimate gripes with elves before the war and with the Men of Numenor afterward. By the time Ar-Pharazon came along the Numenoreans were seriously into the empire and subjugation business.
This is how you can tell that they didn’t read the Silmarillion. They could have had white Numenorians being like totally mean to the brown Men of the East. The Numenorians had human sacrifices, why not slavery too?
But no, Amazon steadfastly resisted any urges they had to make something good and interesting. Instead, they opted to make generic TV fantasy diverse and inclusive casting. It was fine for Hercules and Xena because you weren’t supposed to take those shows seriously, but high fantasy is all about detailed world-building and you can’t possibly take any version of Middle Earth seriously if it looks like Bridgerton. This above all is why I have serious doubts about Peter Jackson’s new Gollum movie. They will have to make it diverse and inclusive because the studio can’t do business any other way.
Anyway, here’s the new trailer. I fell off my chair laughing when I got to see Sauron’s disguise. There was a rumor that Annatar the Lord of Gifts would be played by Gavi Singh Chera, but that was fanfic casting. It’s the same actor as Sauron, who apparently fools all of Eregion with a heavy metal fright wig and pointy ears. A false mustache and glasses would have shown more effort.
So here’s the trailer. Look at it.
LOOK AT IT!!!!
That. Was. Awful.
And totally expected. Looks like I’ll be clearing my schedule in August to make room for this.
NEXT House of Dragon Season 2
David Zaslav had to have had his finger hovering over the Post button. House of the Dragon, season 2 trailer went live one freaking hour after Rangz II defiled the internet.
I admit I had my doubts about the first season given all the trouble HBO had had with getting another Westeros series started but they knocked it out of the park.
LAST Dune: Prophecy
I’ll be frank, I have no idea if this one will be any good or not. The trailer is the usual collection of smash cuts that tells you nothing. It’s the usual video tone poem.
It has been in development since 2019. It was originally called Dune: The Sisterhood and it was started under the laughably incompetent regime of Woke-ass Ann Sarnoff. Zaslav scrapped the original footage, then had it recast and reshot. Might be good. Might not. I’ll let you know when I see it.
It appears to be taking place right after the Butlerian Jihad.
