The First Teaser For 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' Was Not Much To Look At

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.

They dropped the first look images earlier this week and to the honest, they weren't what I expected considering the MASSIVE production budget. The costumes were pretty lame, the characters looked pretty YA and it. was just missing that X-factor LOTR had. Most importantly they finally had a dwarven woman shown on screen and SHE DIDN'T HAVE A BEARD. Literally the only thing, THE ONLY THING truly defining about dwarven women in the Tolkien universe is that they have beards and they took that from us. BUMMER. 

This trailer was basically more of the same. Nothing looked particularly impressive which is kind of a bummer. They seem to be taking more of a cue from The Hobbit, which had a crazy out of whack CGI:Practical ratio, than the greatest trilogy of all time LOTR. To be honest, that is exactly what I was afraid of for this series. It turning into a CGI mess that bastardizes the source material in order to look shiny and new, just like The Wheel of Time. 

Look, it's just a teaser. The full trailer will give us a lot more to work with. But between the photoshoot and now this teaser, my expectations have been tempered a LOT. Sacrificing practical shots and effects for CGI world building is such a massive mistake for this franchise and I just can't get behind it. Like I said in the last blog about this, I will still be rooting for this series to be great no matter what. We need more LOTR content and there is a nearly endless world to work with. Someone buy the LOTR gaming rights and make more games!