House of the Dragon v. The Rings of Power

Unfortunately, during latest months I didn't have the time and neither the mood to watch any movie worth writing about. Somehow though, I got to spend my hours before going to sleep with the two prequels mentioned in the title for "Game of Thrones", respectively for "Lord of the Rings", and even though I don't usually write about tv stuff, I said it might be a a good subject for an entry (+ I don't want to let the blog die for good yet). Besides that, being released at about the same time, the two series seemed comparable, therefore, the idea to put them one near the other, although I don't really have the same opinion at the end of the first season.

"House of the Dragon" has a soap-opera-like development bringing dragons as the unique element of fantasy, while "The Rings of Power" is a pure fantasy, or at least that's what it wants to be. This is where my negative bias ends for the first one, and the positive one stops for the second. The new soap (unsurprisingly after the original GoT) is wrapped in a very smart screenwriting, which somehow masks the typical lengths where nothing of much imporance happens, crowning that with an extremely efficient "refresh" in the second part of the season by jumping over some years in the action timeline, telling you basically: look, we didn't try to squeeze out some useless episodes to fill up the season, exactly when this seemed to be what's coming. On the other side, with all the fantasy elements LotR tries to add to its checklist, and despite limiting the first season to just 8 episodes, the script is horribly "economical" in the narrative development. Practically, if you extract some key elements out of three episodes or so (1,6,8) it's most probably enough to jump directly to the second season, whenever that might be released. The rest of it feels like empty filling bringing on top of it a bunch of cliche in the writing, which might be normal for a production, but it's not so normal to be so obvious. You can have some cliche in a script, but you need to alternate that with some more natural dialogue. Here what you get are lengthy sequences, spanning minutes of lines, which lead you to the "classic" question - who's talking like that for real? The lack of experience of the two lead writers is obvious - which you can confirm by a quick check on IMDb and find out that's basically the first production in their carreer.

If the narrative is "the root of all evil", more limited in GoT, and more obvious in LotR, unfortunately the balance between the two is completely messed by the rest of the production elements. If GoT benefits of an exceptional production design for a tv series, LotR is far far away to live up to some titles in the online press referring it at some point as "the most expensive series ever". The comparison is almost moot. You can only look at the CGI in LotR, which is either sloppy or absent, leading to hilarious scenes in terms of amplitude, such as the battle for Southlands between men and orcs limited to something like a handful of people in a small village with a few houses, somewho lucky enough to be found by the reinforcements arrived from across the sea, having a perfect sync to find exactly that place on the Middle-Earth map and land perfectly on time to change the fate of the battle (as I said the script is the "root of all evil"). To pick something ample enough for comparing, you can pick for instance the coronation scene in GoT's 9th episode, where I don't how much is the part of extras and how much is CGI, leaving the dragon aside, but in any case the whole sequence is impecable, not ignoring apparently trivial details such as the size of the place where the action takes place. Besides that, if we got to this, it's one of the two scenes in GoT that creates a powerful emotional impact on the viewer through all it brings along, including the actors and the score. The second scene is the one of the king's entrance in episode 8. Both scenes are very carefully built and could very well stand as a subject of a more complex analysis in something like New York Times' "Anatomy of a Scene". In LotR we don't really have something on par with that, maybe the ending of episode 6, where we basically watch the creation of Mordor, but even that seemed partly failed to me from the directing perspective, wasting some of its potential. To compare yourself (more-or-less), with a strong spoiler alert, I included in the end a capture with what transpired on YouTube from all the above mentioned (although I don't know if it will last long).

Some other parts where GoT shines and LotR struggles are the casting and the soundtrack. You can see again here, what's probably the experience of HBO's casting crew. Generally, I don't like expressing opinions about actors because this is subjective, but here the overall difference is obvious. With some exceptions, in LotR we have quite a lot of "flat acting". It's true that again... it the script offers you one cliche after the other, you probably need to struggle to make a believable impression. Concerning the sountrack, even the piece on the main title by Ramin Djawadi recycled from the original GoT has a stronger impact than what Howard Shore did for LotR, apparently brought in especially for that. Besides this, I think that Bear McCreary who has the credit for scoring the episodes content is a good composer, but even in "The Walking Dead" it took something like five seasons to release a pice that fits so well with a scene to stick to your head and make you search it after. For the moment here is completely "forgettable".

I must say that I'm not at all a fan of prequels - it always seemed to me the perfect example to find an opportunity to squeeze the last drop out of an used subject. In a sequel, at least you get a new ending that you wait to discover. In a prequel, you pretty much know the ending, which from my perspective reduces quite a bit the potential of the narrative to catch your attention. Besides that, I somehow had low expectations from "House of the Dragon" after the messed up ending in the original GoT, and I had somehow higher expectations from "The Rings of Power" after the previous experience with an excellent Amazon adaptation for "The Man in the High Castle". This probably contributed at least a bit to a completely reverted effect in my opinion after watching the first season of the two... In any case, my feeling is that LotR doesn't have much chance to grow unless the radically change the production team, and for GoT I think it's hard to keep the current level without getting affected by similar narrative issues, but we'll see.