Monthly Archives: January 2025

Perfunctory Epic: The Rings of Power, Season 2 (Amazon Prime)

Posted on by under Books, TV

DISCLAIMER: Here be spoilers.

Like most nerds of my generation – lapsed or otherwise and to varying degrees of commitment and intensity – I cling hard to the pure memories of my earliest viewings of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

While the books weren’t childhood favourites – I was knee-deep in Marvel comics up until my early teens – I did bone up on them while the films were still in the early stages of pre-production, goaded on by another close friend who would move back to Canada with his family before we would get a chance to see them in the Maltese cinemas together.

But there were other friends who would’ve filled the gap in the meantime, some of whom I was, by this point, playing Dungeons and Dragons with.

So in my mind, this period now forms a mash-up of time where a store of fantasy imagery was taking root in my ‘mind palace’, which would serve as a source of comfort and self-identification for years to come… in many ways it still serves that function to this very day, albeit in somewhat altered form.

I’m thinking about all of this after finally having caught up with the second season of The Rings of Power – Amazon Prime’s bid to secure their own Game of Thrones franchise by pre-committing to five seasons of the thing and even launching a reserve long-form adaptation in the form of The Wheel of Time should this one go bust.

Charlie Vickers as Sauron and Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor

This cynicism seeps through the operation and, unfortunately, I feel it’s particularly evident in this second season, which toggles in a perfunctory fashion from one of the many sub-plots to another, the only real connective tissue being the long-game machinations of Sauron (Charlie Vickers): here a svelte Machiavellian figure whose Season One disguise as sea-faring lone wolf ‘Halbrand’ pulled the wool under the eyes of none other than Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) herself.

(In Halbrand-mode, he could’ve easily fronted one of those neo-Britpop acts… there’s something disarming in the image of Galadriel bopping to Kasabian.)

The thing is, I was quite chill about The Rings of Power when it first appeared. Unlike many others, apparently, I was willing to give Season One a chance, with its slow burn and trickle of ‘new’ characters and fill-in-the-blanks exercises riffing on the sketches of lore the showrunners and their writers had to work with.

It felt, at the very least, the start of something that could grow into an organic story with its own heartbeat… and Galadriel-as-fundamentalist struck me as a bold-enough narrative choice which, I suspected, would yield some interesting detours further down the pike.

But, hand on heart, I can’t quite say that the second season is exactly rewarding my investment on this front. Where we previously had a gorgeously photographed and put together spark of potential, now we have that, only with the potential snuffed out in favour of a flattening and overstretched story that is really just a set of fan-fictiony vignettes ticking off boxes, all scattered across disparate geographical locations on Tolkien’s famously vast and detailed map of Middle Earth.

It’s yet another reminder of how the magic we associate with fantasy literature in particular – that thrill of immersion all too often written off as simply ‘escapist’ – has very little to do with by-the-numbers tropes and settings and everything to with an innate poetry that speaks to a wider yearning.

The yearning for a world which is more mysterious and more alive, where traveling means discovery, danger and difference and where transcendence can be mapped out and understood but never replicated in rote human terms.

But replication is so ingrained in pop culture now. In a sense, it is its only real faith. The belief that for something to work – for something to even be conceived – it needs to have worked before, and on a massive scale.

Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil

You can of course imagine that such an approach doesn’t do too well when attempting the kind of fay whimsy that is very much part of Tolkien’s fictional universe, no matter what the more macho strands of the fandom would have you believe.

It’s why the sequences with not-(yet)Gandalf and his duo of not-Hobbit buddies are the dullest in the show, and why Rory Kinnear’s Tom Bombadil, while certainly a welcome presence on screen after being infamously excised from the Jackson trilogy, feels just like another placeholder mentor figure – a wizard whose only USP is a higher quotient of chill than his counterparts – instead of a baffling and refreshingly unexplained spirit of sylvan inevitability.

Perhaps this is why The Rings of Power is at its best when zooming in on still-human-shaped Sauron and his horrifically ingenious acts of arts-and-crafts based gaslighting. Let’s face it, it’s the all-too-human cruelties on lurid display that helped Game of Thrones nab a healthy swathe of the non-nerd audience, because this is stuff that soap operas are made of and as long as we want power, sex and exist among people who desire the same, the electric charge of it will never cease to appeal.

So it’s clear that the showrunners are confident in their abilities to tighten the noose around poor Celebrimbor(Charles Edwards)’s neck, as Sauron – disguised as the outwardly benign jewellery savant Annatar – makes good on his moniker as the Great Deceiver, and how.

For all that the show is littered with instances of orcs, giant spiders and other gory creatures whose mere presence is meant to trigger our gag reflex, none of them can hold a candle to the gross yet precise – precisely so gross because it’s so precise – way in which Sauron ingratiates himself into Celebrimbor’s workshop (really, the seat of this craftsman-monarch’s very kingdom). I don’t remember feeling this disgusted by a TV character since the John Paul (aka ‘The Prick’) from the first season of Bad Sisters.

Leon Wadham as Kemen

This is just about the only instance of genuine emotional frisson we’re allowed to feel during the season, where we’re allowed to wince and hiss at displays of moral callousness because how else are we gonna react? Same goes Kemen (Leon Wadham), the PG-13 Joffrey of the show: nepo-baby son to the scheming aspirant to the Númenórean throne and the custodian of the most smoothly slappable faces this side of Westernesse. (Thankfully, it’s a face that *does* get slapped once or twice already, though we’re meant to understand that his true comeuppance is yet to come and given how padded out the show is, this’ll be a case of delayed gratification for the Ages).

But there’s an elevated flip-side to all this. Namely, that Celebrimbor’s rise and fall constitutes a decent stab at a Greek-style tragedy. But this is the kind of stuff we’ve internalised a long time ago and now keep regurgitating with ease… and arguably, the real lasting value of Tolkien’s work lies in how he decided to side-step the otherwise ubiquitous Hellenic legacy in favour of the knottier and gnarlier brambles of Beowulf and the Norse Sagas.

Of course, you can never go home. (This is true of the denizens of Eregion in more ways than one, after Sauron’s done with them). Nobody’s asking a new show to try and rekindle the same magic we felt when we first read The Lord of the Rings or watched the Peter Jackson adaptations. (And if they are, they really should reconsider what they expect from their pop culture artifacts.)

My suggestion? Pick up The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany. It’s a good deal shorter than both The Lord of the Rings – slimmer than any of its three books, actually – and you’ll likely work through it even quicker than you would sitting through this latest season of That Second Age Show.

It’s the kind of book that Tom Bombadil would’ve written, because Bombadil understands the world and its denizens better than they understand themselves, and can sing a story that still remains a song.

Camp Defiance: The Importance of Being Earnest (Max Webster, NT London)

Posted on by under Theatre

Our tickets to the National Theatre‘s production of The Importance of Being Earnest happened to coincide with Donald Trump’s inauguration, and while this is the kind of coincidence one may feel smug about because the immediate effects of the atrocity may not be grazing you straight away, I will cling onto its delicious frisson regardless.

It’s not just because ANY revival of ANY Oscar Wilde play by definition stands in opposition to the global resurgence of the right-wing hegemony. It is also because, its ultimate inefficacy as direct political action aside, this particular production – headlined by Sex Education breakout star and current Doctor Who Ncuti Gatwa and directed by Max Webster – is brashly defiant about making the play’s queer subtext into text… and it approaches colourblind casting with an effortlessness that makes non-bigotry look like a delicious joy as well as an ethical obligation.

Sharon D Clarke as Lady Bracknell and Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ as Gwendolen Fairfax. Photo by Marc Brenner

Gatwa may be the main point of attraction in terms of the latter when it comes to audiences not as clued-up to the inner workings of the London theatre scene – and I very much include myself in that comparatively unenlightened category – but it is Sharon D Clarke as Lady Bracknell who emerges as the most memorable revelation.

Anyone even remotely familiar with the play will be tempted to scream ‘d’uh!’. The archly magisterial Augusta’s lines are the most quotable in a play so littered with them they could have emerged from a camp dragon’s mountainside stash – but configuring the character as a stern Jamaican matriarch is the kind of jolt of genius that lends an air of undeniability to a reimagining – one that should silence most skeptics.

Because of course she would be that. D’uh.

Hugh Skinner as Jack Worthing and Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon Moncrieff. Photo by Marc Brenner

THAT is many things, of course… and again, there’s a frisson at play – Bracknell represents the apotheosis of the ruling class in all of its status-obsessed ridiculousness, yes, but Wilde cranking the engine of snobbery up to eleven, then turning it inside-out, is what gives her an air of irresistible camp joy.

It is in that joy that the energy of the play resides, and being allowed into that sandbox where our staid assumptions about this stuff can be left at the door and we can plug into the blown-up version of that Victorian world. In fact maybe it’s not so much of a sandbox as it is a ball-pit or bouncy castle – the brightly coloured production design certainly welcomes the metaphor.

Eliza Scanlen as Cecily Cardew and Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon Moncrieff. Photo by Marc Brenner

So we’re back to colour, and apart from casting – the stage and costumes do scream Bridgerton. But even here, we’re witnessing a triumph at play.

The Netflix smash is an adaptation of the Julia Quinn novels which would certainly have regaled hoards of thrill-seeking bookworms with “something sensational to read on the train”, and whose predecessors Wilde skews in this very play with references to the ‘three-volume novel’.

But it’s no bad thing to piggyback off a mainstream thing that’s done at least some good. And for all its overtures to ‘triviality’ – there is, once again, an electric currency to a production of The Importance of Being Earnest that is wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly out and proud.

Nosferatu (2024) – Feeding with Friends

Posted on by under Films

“It’s a real film, Jack.”

I keep thinking about this quote from Boogie Nights whenever I watch something that isn’t just fodder for streamers or yet another placeholder entry in a long-running series – be it film or TV – and which instead exists in its own moment and on its own terms, with a lived-in texture we’ve trained ourselves to be nostalgic about. The line is uttered from one pornographer to another, as they marvel – with misdirected smugness and surprise – at how a nominally more ambitious project of theirs appears to scale new heights of taste and credibility.

A similar feeling crossed my mind as I sat down to watch Robert Eggers’ much-anticipated remake of Nosferatu. You may be tempted to think that this is because I consider genre cinema in general and horror in particular to be inferior to other forms of cinematic expression, but anyone who knows me would laugh at the mere idea of me taking such a stance.

No, this is more about the way in which Nosferatu feels like a “real film” – more to the point, a tentpole blockbuster of yore – in the same way as George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road felt like a real film.

Something made with excess, and a sense of abandon and sensation (if not sensationalism) at concept stage. But which then proceeds with an evident care and love as it paints itself on the screen. Just because we’ve evolved to understand how film language works doesn’t mean we cannot thrill to witness it being made with the same tools that evoke the true effort behind the magic.

(Better writers than me have delved into the aesthetics and mechanics of how these auteurs do what they do, so I don’t really feel it’s necessary for me to delve into a granular analysis of just how they achieve that spark).

Audiences understand how a story gets from Point A to Point B, and sure – that should be good enough for you to follow the entry of the latest Star Wars or Marvel Cinematic Universe entry. But the engagement you get from those franchises has less to do with your immediate experience of the individual film or TV series in the now and more about how they can reward you with more entries in the future… and who knows? Maybe someday, one of those entries will give you the same thrill you used to get in the early thrill of Phase One, when you were young to its potential, when you believed you were actually experiencing an Event right there and then?

The irony of Nosferatu’s Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) identifying himself as little more than pure appetite, when in fact it’s Eggers’ film that likely to leave us pleasantly full, sated and satisfied, whereas its erstwhile competitors in the mainstream genre sphere peddle the wares of long-form addiction – an exercise of endless deferral that also speaks to something resembling a pyramid scheme.

Parasites, like the truest of vampires.

Here, have another franchise entry. Just sit through this one, and I promise the next one will be even better. I’ll throw in a couple of cameos for free – you recognise that obscure character in the post-credits sequence, don’t you? Good on you – don’t you enjoy that hit? Don’t you want more?

“It’s a real film, Jack,” is also an acknowledgement that maybe, now, these guys could be readying themselves to make something won’t just bump them into a bracket of respectability previously closed off to them; it could also result in the creation of something socially beneficial… a movie that could be enjoyed as a movie and not just masturbation-fodder to scratch a particular itch, an itch which remains because pornography – and individual franchise entries – exist to leave you craving more.

Of course, anyone who’s seen Boogie Nights will know that the line is poised as an ironic act of hubris. The ‘real movie’ in question is a ridiculous pastiche – what we see from the end product are mostly corny lines pitched purely for laughs. But strip away the trappings of 1970s porn industry that informs Paul Thomas Anderson’s film and you’ll find an earnest beating heart which speaks to the vulnerability of that moment of creation.

To this end, another comparison comes to mind – one that cleaves more closely to the six degrees of separation that lead us back to Eggers’ Nosferatu – is Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. Burton treats the ‘worst director of all time’ with the same compassion and empathy that Anderson reserves for the collection of lovable losers and chancers that populate Boogie Nights, and in doing so makes us feel deeply for someone attempting to make art on their own terms.

Luckily for all of us, Eggers is no Ed Wood. But if you’ll pardon a pun more gross and disgusting than anything you’ll see in Nosferatu (full-frontal Orlok included)… we miss the wood for the trees when the end result is all that we focus on.

Particularly when the well-oiled machine of the rival franchises is all about the result – slick and nicely packaged, but also endlessly deferred with the promise of future packages to come.

What is this if not the same animating force behind art generated purely by AI? And wouldn’t both Wood and Eggers – opposites on the spectrum of quality as they are – stand in direct opposition to such a homogenising machine?

***

Now, the texture that enriches the Nosferatu experience is also the kind of thing that would inspire addiction-adjacent rewatches, but I’d argue that this would be more of an act of communion, a revisitation akin to the healthy time spent with a good friend.

And I think this is what’s baked into Eggers’ process – the weirdly wholesome and probably somewhat anachronistic idea that ‘hard work pays off’; that not taking short cuts by doing all the nerdy occult/folklore research and having thousands of live rats on set will actually result in an appreciative response from the crowd you seek to court.

Of course none of these elements would work in isolation, and one of my own fallacies as a burgeoning artist was in fact the belief that churning ahead with the surface-level, craft-based elements will be what will allow me to eventually be taken seriously.

But when the mainstream morphs into an automated machine that can generate something resembling the shell of what you used to love, it is the humans in the mix who will remind you that what you love can still exist, across the same “oceans of time” that Gary Oldman waxed lyrical about in his own take on the vampire Count that served the basis for all the Orloks that followed.