The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Our Review

The most expensive television show ever made, and a strangely gentle epic. Amazon’s Second Age saga — the centuries before The Hobbit, when the rings were forged and Sauron rose — takes Tolkien’s appendices and builds a lavishly appointed mystery box around them. The result looks like a Renaissance painting brought to life (Numenor is a jaw-dropping build) but sometimes writes like a corporate memo.

Season 1’s stranger swings were its best: the Harfoots’ migrant warmth, the Southlands turning into Mordor in real time, and a finale reveal that recontextualizes every scene with a certain mysterious stranger. Season 2 is steadier — Charlie Vickers’ Sauron in full manipulator mode is genuinely chilling, the Durin and Elrond friendship remains the show’s soul, and the Siege of Eregion gives the show its first true battle spectacle. Judged as TV rather than as Tolkien fidelity, it’s a gorgeous, sometimes stiff drama that earns its moments more often than its reputation suggests.

Verdict: Watch it with tempered expectations. It’s not Jackson’s trilogy — nothing is — but Middle-earth at this scale is still worth the journey.