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"Prime Video’s The Rings of Power explores the Second Age of Middle-earth, which is set millennia before the movies, and follows the story of Sauron’s initial rise to power, the creation of Mordor, and the forging of the great rings… And according to Kate Hawley, the costume designer for Rings of Power, a big part of her job was to find a way to honor what has come before in the world of Middle-earth while charting a new path—one that has never actually been represented onscreen before.
As for the Second Age covered in The Rings of Power, Tolkien never specifically set any of his books during that time period, though he made frequent references to the events that took place during it.
“I think we approached [everything] in a very organic way to relate more to the First and Second Age feeling that we were wanting to create. It has a sort of rawer quality to it,” she says.
“You look at the elves and Valinor and the vanity and everywhere you read there’s talk of jewelry and discussion about it. He talks about elves being born on shores of pearl and he doesn’t necessarily mean that in a literal way, but he’s always talking about ways to reflect the light and those qualities. There’s jewelry everywhere woven into clothes.”
Asked to avoid “a huge amount of prosthetics” when coming up with their ideas for what Second Age dwarves should look like, Hawley and her design team decided to emphasize “character more than anything.”
I see Rings of Power the same way as I do the Star Wars sequel trilogy in that it has some good parts, but it is ultimately mediocre and I’ll likely never watch it a second time. Outside of dwarves, I found it to be rather underwhelming. With that said, I can appreciate the effort many out into it although I found it to be ultimately rather meh.
What? The metamorphosis of the stranger, the plight of the Orcs, the vengeful anger of the elves? And the bad juju that is on its way? l,