Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Lifelong fan of the work of Tolkien and I was incredibly excited for the series....that being said: The series is a pox on Tolkien's legendary work. The story is incredibly poorly written, trope after trope and in a multitude of different egregious ways. The writers are intent to destroy the lore- they ignored and changed the story to fit whatever narrative they felt like instilling into the series. In addition to that blasphemy, what little character development there is seems to be actively working against the character Tolkien has already created. The 'new' characters are bland and lack depth. The first two episodes were dull and boring filled with earth-shattering wisdom such as: "stones sink and ships look forward". The harfoots are terrible and should have never been brought into the story- the second age of middle earth has plenty of interesting stuff going on without making us suffer through that drivvel. The costumes, seem pretty lackluster- nothing that I've seen was very impressive. The visuals, as you can expect when 70 million/episode is spent, are pretty good. New Zealand did most of the work for the show...hard to take away natural splendor. Kahzad-Dum was good, if it were later on in the age I would have expected more 'splendor'. I heard that Numenor was pretty good, so congrats on that. Honestly, I was really excited for this show, and more and more apprehensive as the trailers were released and information dripped out. At this point I can say, with confidence, that I wish you guys had just left it alone and let a better production company work with the material. You don't care about the story, you care about your 'vision' and don't respect the fans or the source material.