The Rings of Power Has ChatGPT Syndrome | USA News and Politics
Season two of Amazon’s mega-funded The Rings of Power isn’t good. Season one wasn’t good, either, and despite having two years to correct the problems, the show continues to feel like the furthest thing from what J. R. R. Tolkien would have wanted. I can hear Tolkien thundering from across the pond, punching up through the earth to try to stop the abuse.
The writers for this show made a lot of mistakes. There are too many characters, and the writers haven’t given us much reason to care about any of them, let alone feel invested in any of the narrative threads.
The Dialogue Issue
For me, though, the show’s central flaw is the dialogue. It was the main issue in the first season, and it continues to be so in the second as well. When characters speak, it often feels contrived and overly serious, with mixed metaphors and clichés that would drive Tolkien, the linguist who had the genius to invent his own languages, absolutely mad.
Here are some of the worst offenders:
Galadriel, talking with fellow elf Elrond about how Halbrand (really Sauron in disguise) deceived her from seeing his true form, says, “He played me like a harp, but the melody was not of my choosing.” The line is long-winded, using 14 words where three would suffice: “I was deceived!”
Another line, which the Elf high king Gil-Galad speaks, “Like an ember that has been too long removed from a fire, our people must return to their home.”
Essentially, though, the writers of this show don’t seem to be letting the meaning of the language guide the dialogue. In Tolkien’s novels, characters aren’t always so internally conflicted as they are in The Rings of Power.
Modernizing Characters
Maybe these internal struggles like Galadriel’s are an attempt to modernize the characters and make them more relatable. In any case, what’s lost amid the heavy-handed dialogue and characters’ constant moral agony is the original flavor of Middle-earth.
The dialogue in The Rings of Power is akin to the creations of AI language systems like ChatGPT. Similarly, the writers of The Rings of Power choose dialogue that sounds serious, deep, and grand, but with no substance undergirding the words, they sound trivial and frankly ridiculous.
The Rings of Power is trying to replicate the grandeur of Tolkien’s world, but the writers’ focus is on creating a dramatic effect, not the moral and imaginative foundation that made Middle-earth come alive in the first place.
Reading Tolkien’s book and its appendices, which is surely what the author intended anyway, is still an option.
