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LOTR: The Rings of Power Has More Action Than Any Other Show
The showrunners for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power say the fantasy series has more action than any other television project. Peter Jackson's beloved adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings can be largely credited for making the fantasy genre what it is today. On top of spawning The Hobbit film trilogy adaptations and influencing shows like HBO’s Game of Thrones, Amazon is now producing a Lord of the Rings television series to expand Tolkien's beloved Middle-earth.
The Rings of Power will be set thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. While Jackson’s movies take place in the Third Age of Middle-earth, the prequel series will take place in the Second Age before the defeat of Sauron, which is shown in the opening minutes of The Fellowship of the Ring. A lot happened before, during, and after the One Ring’s conception. However, the show’s setting won’t keep it from being compared to Jackson’s work in terms of world-building, narrative, and set-pieces — from the iconic Battle of Helms Deep in The Two Towers to the final battle at Black Gate in The Return of the King.
In a recent interview with Empire, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay compared the action scenes in Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy to theirs in The Rings of Power. While praising the universally lauded sequence that is Helm’s Deep, the showrunners’ talked about doing something different that still feels like Middle-earth, but is unique to The Rings of Power’s episodic structure. Read what they had to say below:
Quote:
"The show has a lot of action in it -- more so than any television or streaming show that we've seen. Every episode has set pieces, creatures, battles and white-knuckle fights to the death. But instead of having 10,000 Orcs fighting 10,000 men, what's it like to have one Orc in your face, in your kitchen? What's it like trying to kill an Orc when you've never killed an Orc before?"
McKay and Payne went on to stress that The Rings of Power doesn’t try to compete with Jackson's trilogy, or anything else for that matter, as it is “unlike anything [they’ve] seen before.” Given The Rings of Power' budget, the series is shaping up to be one of the most expensive shows of all time, with season 1 alone costing an estimated $462 million. That kind of price tag, combined with the creators' comments, indicates that Amazon is capitalizing on the Game of Thrones-sparked fantasy craze by doubling down on a more mature version of the IP that arguably started it all. What's more, a huge budget means more money can be spent toward these 'never before seen' action sequences. While Game of Thrones had some of the biggest action set-pieces ever produced for television, it seems that The Rings of Power may beat it out for that record.
McKay and Payne certainly did their research when creating The Rings of Power, reading The Silmarillion and "The Appendices" of The Return of the King to inspire the show's plot. The series will star Morfydd Clark as a younger version of the elven queen Galadriel, who was the Commander of the Northern Armies during the Second Age — a time when elves fought and died with men. If McKay and Payne’s comments are any indication, Galadriel's battle scenes may be at the forefront of this unprecedented action when The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power drops on Prime Video on September 2.
