In the Flesh: The Rings of Power S1E01: 'Shadows of the Past'

First, an idyll. Elven children frolic in the Zatska-esque meadows of Valinor, the Undying Lands.The distractingly Chadly Finrod (Will Fletcher) relates half a piece of advice to his kid sister Galadriel (Amelie Child Villiers as a young girl, Morfydd Clark as an adult), and then it’s off to the exposition mines to catch a few fleeting glimpses of elves fighting orcs on hideously-lit sound stages, a quick mention of Morgoth, and a look at the shadowy figure of Sauron. There’s nothing much of substance to grab onto by the time the show flings us a few centuries into the future to the now-bereaved Galadriel hunting for any trace of Sauron in the frozen northern reaches of Middle Earth. There’s some bloodless, stakes-less combat slapstick with an ice troll, we glimpse Sauron’s Monster Energy logo-esque sigil of power, and then again we’re uprooted and introduced to a new slate of characters with new motivations. The show sets itself a daunting task with the breadth of the story it wants to tell, and its opening effort is at best a mediocre fumble.

From the jump Amazon’s series, created by J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay and directed in its first two installments by Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom impresario J. A. Bayona, sets itself up repeatedly for comparison to Peter Jackson’s 2000s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. The ice troll creeps like Shelob just out of focus through a pair of early shots. Glimpses of the Elven city of Lindon are clearly meant to evoke the films’ depictions of Rivendell and Lothlorien. Brief shots of raging battle echo the famous prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring in which a last alliance of Men and Elves put paid to Sauron’s ambitions, for a while. Every time it does, you see just how limp and lifeless Payne and McKay’s show really is. There is no weight, no tension, no visual language structuring the action and relationships we’re supposed to be forming attachments to, just medium shots of people in almost unbelievably cheap-looking costumes monologuing like, as my girlfriend put it, they’re all giving commencement addresses to one another.

It’s these people, uniformly smooth-faced and good-looking, who prove perhaps the show’s single greatest weakness. There’s hardly an interesting face among them, and even Morfydd Clark’s steely radiance can’t stretch far enough to pick up all of the resultant dramatic slack. The overall impression is of a sort of generic store brand Lord of the Rings set on the shelf below the real thing, a sanded-down copy with precious little to distinguish it from any of the other would-be Game of Thrones successors that have come since HBO’s breakout hit series made small-screen epic fantasy such a tantalizing prospect for other streaming services and premium channels. If the idea of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with a billion-dollar budget appeals to you as a viewer, I suppose you could do worse than this.