"The Rings of Power", a promising return to Middle-earth

• The first two episodes of The

  Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

  will be available this Friday on Amazon Prime Video.

• The challenge for showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay?

  They must at the same time remain faithful to the spirit of Tolkien while innovating.

• Our undisclosed review.

Money well spent?

Amazon is playing big by unveiling this Friday the first two episodes of

series, the most expensive series in television history with a budget of no less than 715 million dollars!

A series on which weigh enormous expectations of the public, which must live up to the beloved novels of JRR Tolkien and which invites inevitable comparisons with the trilogy

by Peter Jackson, one of the cinematographic adaptations most successful both critically and commercially.

A complicated challenge for showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay, who must at the same time remain faithful to the spirit of Tolkien while innovating.

has seen the first two episodes of

, our verdict.

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A visually stunning spectacle

Costumes, sets, special effects, props… Visually, it's breathtaking!

The director of the first two episodes, the Spaniard Juan Antonio Bayona is largely inspired by the design and production of the films of Peter Jackson, itself inspired by the legendary artists of Tolkien, John Howe and Alan Lee.

The budget, massive, bursts the screen.

The production manages to effectively recreate Middle-earth with splendid elven cities, perfectly choreographed battles (and some smaller-scale fights against fantastic monsters that we were less thrilled with) and splendid shots of the magnificent landscapes of New Zealand. .

All set to music by the fantastic score by Bear McCreary, evoking the emblematic theme of Howard Shore.

In short, we do not sulk our pleasure in the face of this grandiose spectacle.

A Galadriel in warrior mode

It begins calmly and poetically, with a very young Galadriel, the queen of the elves played by Cate Blanchett in Jackson's films, sailing on a paper boat in "the immortal lands" of Valinor, and sharing a moment of complicity with her brother. , Finrod.

The show then travels through centuries of history and the Great Wrath War, which saw above all the defeat of Morgoth, the first dark lord.

A terrible conflict in which Galadriel will lose her beloved brother.

Galadriel (Morfydd Clark, who has everything to become a star) is the first major freedom that the series takes from Tolkien's work.

At the start of

, the future queen of the elves appears as a reckless warrior who spends centuries hunting down a Sauron, lurking in the shadows and believed by the majority of elves to be defeated, in order to avenge Finrod.

A quest not in the source material.

An overview of Middle-earth

Flying over the map of Middle-earth, the two episodes take us to different locations and strive to introduce us to the main characters of this vast choral story.

Galadriel crosses paths with her longtime friend, the elf politician Elrond (Robert Aramayo), her king Gil-Galad (Benjamin Walker).

She meets Halbrand (Charles Vickers), a character created especially for the series.

We discover the budding romance between Arondir, a wood elf, and Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), a healer from a human village in the southern lands of Middle-earth where elves and humans struggle to coexist.

Among the Pievelus, the predecessors of the Hobbits, preparations are made for seasonal migration.

Among them, in the middle of the forest, the intrepid Elanor Pievelu (Markella Kavenagh) and her friend Poppy (Megan Richards), will discover a mysterious man whose origin promises to be one of the great enigmas. from the Serie.

We have to wait for the second episode to make an incursion into the kingdom of the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm, and also into comedy.

We will have to wait for the third episode to discover the characters linked to Númenór, the mythical island just out of the water.

If JD Payne and Patrick McKay manage not to lose the spectator in these two episodes of exposition, to make us love certain characters from the outset, and to vary the genres, even if for the moment, we do not see what is the core, the real challenge of the series, we finally let ourselves be carried away by this family blockbuster which bets on the marvelous, the epic, the majestic elves and the good nature of the Dwarves and the Pievelus.

The Rings of Power therefore sign a promising return to Middle-earth.

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