The battle for Eregion’s front garden could do with a few more extras. Here’s our The Rings Of Power season 2 episode 7 review.
Sauron walking calmly onto the flaming battlements of Eregion’s walls; Elrond chopping orcs to bits with a dancer’s grace; Celebrimbor enjoying a morning coffee on an enchanted balcony while the world burns. This is the stuff that legend should be made of. After six episodes of build-up, the pieces are in place for season two’s final battle at the elven city’s gates. Finally, a chance for the team to really splash the cash on some good old-fashioned action.
Throughout its run, the show has struggled to escape from Peter Jackson’s shadow. His Lord Of The Rings trilogy set what might just be an unattainable bar, not just for fantasy cinema, but blockbuster filmmaking as a whole. A huge part of what makes the original films so thrilling is their physicality combined with burgeoning CGI – look closely, and every swing of a sword looks exactly like you’d expect from the man who directed Brain Dead.
The Rings Of Power does not look like the creators made Brain Dead. The Rings Of Power, crucially, does not look like the creators were ever in the same room as the actors at all. The glossy look of the series so far worked well when it was set primarily in enchantingly lit elven cities. Now that those same elven cities are under siege from Adar’s ravening horde of orcs and our heroes are supposedly fighting for their lives, the complete lack of darkness in the show just looks fake.
This is a problem, because this should really be where season two’s many plotlines come home to emotionally roost. Sauron, having successfully taken over the defence of Eregion, is trapped between the orc army at his door and the elves rushing to defeat them – all of whom want him dead (or at least turned back into a pile of goo). Elrond, having inexplicably disappeared for a while, is in Khazad-dûm to ask Prince Durin for a bit of military help, while Durin Senior continues his ill-advised quest for gold (for the purposes of the plot, assume Khazad-dûm and Eregion are connected by a magic door that allows key characters to instantly hop between the two whenever they feel like it). Galadriel, still Adar’s prisoner, is also there.
The stage is set, then, for some good swashbuckling action, but for all the money Amazon have thrown at the show, it’s here that the TV budget (or, more likely, the application of it) cuts The Rings Of Power off at the knees. The battlefield – a great, dried-river expanse in front of Eregion’s gates – looks embarrassingly empty. Where Jackson’s trilogy pioneered the use of crowd simulation software to bring its huge clashes to life, Rings happily shows off a few-dozen extras clashing over a Volume-lit soundstage. At times, it looks frankly unfinished.
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The close-up fighting doesn’t look much better, curiously weightless and lacking any of the physicality that could make some otherwise pretty good choreography sing, while the show insists on repeating moments from the most famous battles of Jackson’s trilogy (“lone archer has to stop lone figure from reaching the walls” and “reinforcements will come save us at dawn”, to name a couple). Worse still, it’s genuinely unclear whether the repetition is an intentional reference or if the script has just run out of ideas for a fantasy battle set piece.
A show like this is much more than its action, though. If The Rings Of Power had a bit more emotional or narrative heft behind it, the let-down of the clash might be easier to swallow. But despite a couple of interesting moments (Charles Edwards’ Celebrimbor gets plenty to do this episode, and is a highlight), as the season comes to a close the slightly meandering plot really does feel like it’s on its last legs.
By now, the show is well-versed in smaller-scale, unapologetically fantastical waffling. In that regard, it seems to have reached the peak of its accomplishment a few episodes ago. What this instalment makes clear is that it should leave the epic spectacle for the big screen – The Rings Of Power clearly can’t handle it.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power is streaming on Prime Video now.
