The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power review - Greg Bruce, Zanna Gillespie's verdicts

Anyone who tells you Lord of the Rings is good is lying. So is anyone who says it's not good. So is anyone who says it's mediocre.

SCORES
Visual appeal: 5
Costliness: 5
Quality: No idea

SHE SAW

If there were a list of reviewers that Amazon and the Tolkien estate would approve to critique this series, I would not be on it. For a start, until just now I've been calling it the Power of the Ring when in fact it's The Rings of Power. Secondly, I had to ask Greg more than once what was happening because in some vital expositional scenes all I heard was "Sauron. My Lord. Elves. Elrond. We must. My lord. Galadriel. First light. Dumbledore," which isn't close to anything that was said. With that disclosed, and only two episodes available to review, I can say with hand on heart that this show looks… expensive.

It's visually stunning. The sets, the costumes and the special effects are at least as good as the movies and beg the question: when will there be a marathon cinema screening of all eight episodes? Thousands of Tolkien fans would undoubtedly show up in full costume with makeshift bedpans ready for eight hours of uninterrupted viewing, and this scale of epic adventure deserves to be seen on the big screen, not on a laptop with an obnoxiously large watermark in the middle reading "Greg Bruce", which made me irrationally angry at my husband for the obstructed view.

It's set in the Second Age but because Amazon only has the television rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit which are set in the Third Age, the writers could only use references to the Second Age from those books to build the story, adding new characters as necessary. This will no doubt open the series up to much scrutiny from Tolkien fundamentalists despite the creators enlisting the help of Tolkien lore experts and even Tolkien's grandson. Do I care about it being faithful? No I don't. People angry about that are probably the same people up in arms about the diverse cast, which feels completely natural and as realistic as any world in which elves and giants exist.

Speaking of giants, I spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out whether the actor playing the giant that Nori (the character I became most invested in) rescues was someone I had dated in my twenties. It wasn't. In fact, he looked nothing like him but as this first season was filmed here, you too will probably spend significant time pointing out locations you recognise and actors you may or may not have dated or seen on Shortland Street. Sadly, Amazon has moved production to the UK for the remaining seasons which will end that fun game, but if you like epic quests, of which multiple have been set up, there's no reason you won't lap up The Lord's Power Rings anyway.

HE SAW

Here's how reviews of television series work. Reviewers are typically sent some episodes, the number of which varies from show to show, but is usually not all of them. Reviewers then give their verdict on the show, based on this incomplete evidence. Some reviewers mention in their reviews that they haven't seen the whole thing, but even when they do, this information seldom appears in the headline or in the quotes selected for promotional purposes by the production company, or on Rotten Tomatoes, or anywhere else a majority of people might see it. To at least a reasonable segment of the public, the headlines and decontextualised quotes represent a reviewer's informed judgement, rather than the grasping guesses of someone who's been forced by an unforthcoming production company/network and a relentlessly hungry media machine to say something about a show based on little more than a taster and a hunch.

In the case of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, reviewers - at least these reviewers - were sent the first two episodes of the eight-episode first season. It's hard to render any sort of meaningful verdict about a show when you've only seen quarter of it, especially when, as in this case, the episodes are not self-contained narratives, but are part of a larger whole - effectively an epic movie cut into hour-long segments. Still, that's all we have and people expect and deserve verdicts, so here we are pretending that we're qualified to render one.

There could be many reasons for not providing critics with the full and final product for review, and not all of these are manipulative, but it doesn't matter: The only meaningful judgement that can be passed on The Lord of The Rings after watching its opening two episodes is on the way it looks. It looks very, very nice, but if you like looking at nice things, the cherry blossoms are out at the moment and they're full of tūī, none of which have shown a predilection for murdering orcs, and they didn't cost US$465 million dollars to make and - at least as far as we know - they're not planning to leave New Zealand next season.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is now streaming on Amazon.