The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Review: Mystical, Opulent, Wondrous - This One Has The Power

Prime Video's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, considered to be the most expensive TV show or web series (at nearly US$1 billion) in history, brings to your smartphone screens for the very first time, the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-Earth's history.

Set thousands of years before the events of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, this epic drama, a prequel, takes viewers back to an era where great powers were forged, kingdoms rose and fell, unlikely heroes were tested by the greatest villains and hope hung by a slender thread. The much more earthy House of the Dragon, which was released two weeks earlier, in fact, pales in direct comparison to this heavenly epic fantasy that mirrors Peter Jackson's incandescent style of story-telling. It's a reverent adaptation that serves up mythical adventures in a fashion we've gotten used to expect from this series.

This epic drama begins in a promising fashion. The two episodes under review are basically a set-up for what is to come further. And they are wondrous, mystical, magical, and absorbing.

LOTR Episode 1

The first episode basically concentrates on getting the audience familiar with Middle Earth's ways and the characters that live, breathe and make things interesting there. The elf Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) who lost her brother to an act of violence believes Sauron is responsible and is entirely focused on pursuing and vanquishing the dreaded evil that her King and other peers believe is dead.

The narrative forges ahead, combining storylines while transitioning from page to screen with all the technical heft at its disposal. Despite being rooted in its source material what we see is something much more than what one could visualise in a page.

LOTR Episode 2

There's much more action in the second episode. The story moves ahead at a brisker pace with numerous parallel plotlines and newer characters getting added along the way. The arrival of the dwarves increases the involvement and the viewer begins to feel more rooted to what ensues on the small screen.

We begin to get the sense that this is a fully realised world where the VFX, technical specifications and scale are mightily impressive and ambitious - something we've never experienced on the small screen or streaming platforms before.

The writing is compelling, the performances so far are unstintingly earnest and the sincerity of effort from showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay is visible in the rhythms and cosmological grandeur on display. Tolkien's detailed prose gets a delectably immersive, magnum opus spectacle to complement it for the screens.

The imagery is definitely out-of-this-world thanks to Oscar Faura's all-encompassing camerawork, enchanting series music by Bear McCreary, stunning production values and design, and inveigling plot threads - so, suffice to say, the director, showrunners, actors and technicians manage to capture the sumptuousness and wonderment that made The Lord of the Rings so very memorable.

Can we really ask for more? It remains to be seen what the six yet-to-be-seen episodes of The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power have in store, but this series is without a doubt, well begun!