The first trailer for Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings show has been released, and while it’s basically just revealing the show’s title – The Rings Of Power, if you’ve been living under an elven cloak – there’s far more to it than meets the eye.
I’m going to start with the more obvious things and move onto the more subtle references that the trailer makes, with some major spoilers for the plot of the show if you haven’t read The Silmarillion or The Lord of the Rings Appendices and Unfinished Tales. Firstly, we need to talk about the title itself.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a little bit on the boring side for a title, but we have to remember that this isn’t for us, the biggest Tolkien fans out there. This is to draw in the casual fans, for whom something like ‘The Second Age’ would be too vague. For that reason alone, it needs a connection to The Lord of the Rings – presumably hence the prefix – and for that reason it works fine. However, for the bigger fans, it tells us exactly what the show will focus on. We had a good idea of this already, but unless the show does an American Horror Story-esque title suffix change each season, we’ll follow Annatar (that’s Sauron when he was sexy), Celebrimbor, and potentially the recipients of the eponymous rings of power. With the AHS route we’d see Elrond in a gimp suit though, so we’re in for a treat either way.
Of course, the show title bears resemblance to a chapter of The Silmarillion, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age. Does this mean we’ll delve into the Third Age a little? It’s not impossible, as most of the Tolkien content in the show comes from the Unfinished Tales and anything taken from The Silmarillion had to be okayed by the Tolkien estate on a case-by-case basis. But with the Two Trees in the initial poster too, it would be quite a stretch to cover all three Ages of Middle-earth in one show. Like butter scraped over too much bread.
The series can’t miss the fall of Numenor, a key event of the Second Age, and one that Sauron (this time in the guise of Zigûr the Wizard) was at the centre of. This, from Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings, is pretty strongly hinted at in the short title sequence we saw yesterday. Again, major spoilers from here on out.
As the narrator says the famous words “Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,” water rushes over the screen, cooling the molten gold that is being forged into the title of our show. This foreshadows Eru’s actions of flooding Númenor and creating Middle-earth’s own version of Atlantis. You’ll also notice that the water continues to flood as the narrator continues saying, “One for the Dark Lord,” referencing Sauron’s apparent demise in Númenor. However, after that it gets even more exciting, as the camera angle changes completely, and the solidified gold rises up like mountains as the narrator says, “on his dark throne.” Anyone familiar with this passage will know that the poem continues with “In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” The rising mountains on screen represent Sauron’s spirit fleeing to Mordor (which was pronounced perfectly, by the way) to regroup and rebuild.
The narrator herself is another interesting tidbit – we assume that this is Morfydd Clark speaking as Galadriel, but it hasn’t been confirmed. I’ve written before about why another Galadriel monologue would be the perfect way to open the series to get casual fans up to speed – and why her hair is of utmost importance for the series – and this trailer shows why. It’s something that every Tolkien fan, no matter how casual, is aware of, and it builds trust with the audience. It’s Amazon acknowledging what has come before and welcoming us into a new era of Middle-earth.
The music, too, is great. We don’t know if this specific teaser has been scored by Howard Shore, but he’s on board for the show and is one part of the Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens film trilogy that practically all fans enjoy. The beginning of the teaser has an especially exciting swell that feels straight out of the Lord of the Rings films, and the middle section goes darker and quieter, likely a motif for Sauron. It’s since been described to me as music that would accompany a Batman car chase and I can’t get that out of my head, but my initial thoughts were more aligned to the Saruman and Isengard ‘bow owowwww, bom bom bommmm’ theme from The Lord of the Rings – which is some of my favourite music in the trilogy.
However, the most important thing about the trailer is the fact that it’s all practical effects – this was actual gold being poured into an actual mould! Apparently they did it in multiple languages, too, although I can’t find any non-English versions at the time of writing. For something that looks a lot like CGI, the fact it is practical effects makes me more hopeful than any of the other details that the creators put in the teaser.
As a fan of the Lord of the Rings films by Jackson and Boyens, the reliance on practical effects over digital is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons why the trilogy stands so far ahead of the later Hobbit trilogy. It’s weird that these new practical effects look so much like digital ones in the teaser, but it gives me some hope that the $500 million Amazon is spending per series is being used well.
Whether this teaser ends up being the Thrones-esque opening for each episode of The Rings of Power or not, it gives me hope. There’s attention to detail, there’s layers of subtle references for fans, and there’s enough openness to not gatekeep newcomers to the world of Tolkien. But most of all, they forged the teaser out of gold, they embodied Sauron and Celebrimbor themselves, and they made a commitment to practical effects – and that could make or break the series.
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