The First Look At Amazon's $1 Billion Dollar Lord of the Rings Series Is...Not Great

Set thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the series begins during a time of relative peace and covers all of the major events from the Second Age of Middle-earth: the forging of the Rings of Power, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the story of the island kingdom of Númenor, and the last alliance between Elves and Men.

If you ask me, The Lord of the Rings is the best movie trilogy ever made. It got me into the Tolkien universe, and I ended up reading all the related books, getting every toy my mom would allow and binge playing every video game they made. Specifically the RTK game and Battle for Middle Earth I and II. 

I LOVE this shit and have been bummed out that we haven't gotten any movement from the franchise other than the dissapointing hobbit movies. When they first announced that not only was Amazon making a brand new series based on the second age, but that they were going to pump nearly a billion dollars into it over 5 seasons? I went into a full nerdgasm. There is only one thing that made me hesitant about it, and that's Amazon's previous attempt at a fantasy series, 'The Wheel of Time'. 

I never read these books before, but those who have preached how it was Game of Thrones before Game of Thrones. A fantasy epic close to or on par with the Lord of the Rings. Similarly to this Lord of the Rings series, Amazon pumped a shit ton of money into it. The result was very….meh. It felt like a YA(Young Adult) series that was trying to be an adult one, and none of it really landed with me. I know a lot of people felt the same way, and that fans of the books were not pleased with the direction and creative decisions. 

Knowing that, seeing these images gets me a little scared. This is the most expensive series in TV history, but these costumes just look kinda goofy. Very YA in the same sense that Wheel of Time was. And again, they have basically infinite money. I can tell you for a fact that they aren't paying this unknown cast the big bucks. They're lucky if Amazon is giving them one more bathroom break than they give their warehouse workers. So maybe use some of that budget to make sure you get the best of the best to replicate the feel of the original trilogy since that obviously worked. 

My excitement level for this has hit a roadblock.