HBO’s “House of the Dragon” versus Amazon’s “The Rings of Power”
By Kent R. Kroeger (October 15, 2022)
“The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
Dedicated fans of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium — which includes The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion novels — would call me a normie. Passionate Tolkien fans are, in turn, sometimes called Tolkienists.
There is no shame in being a normie. We are the majority of moviegoers and TV watchers.
We loved Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy movies, but not because of their canonical faithfulness (Who has the time or patience to remember the minutiae found in 1,200 pages of fantasy writing?!). For us, Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien was a storytelling masterpiece, and you don’t need to love Tolkien to appreciate his LOTR movies.
Some of us even loved Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy movies — which were not universally loved by critics or Tolkienists — but, again, irrespective of Jackson’s adherence to the source literature, we enjoyed those movies because they were good (if not great) filmmaking.
