Screams in the void, armies on the march, little figures in waistcoats wandering through a gloomy wasteland. Either the gloves really came out in the Tory leadership contest or it’s the first real trailer for Amazon’s £1 billion Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power.
Fortunately, the answer is the latter. The other good news is that, after some mind-boggling teaser snippets, the first detailed look at the Amazon blockbuster, due out September 2, suggests it will be more than just a cynical exercise in giving in to fans of Tolkien’s novels and from Peter Jackson’s film trilogy. This looks like a real TV series, with richly drawn characters, versatile plots and production values to average miracle tent-pole resemble a Channel 5 soap.
Even by the standards of a global mega-corporation, Amazon has been super-secret about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – which has been adapted from its attachments to the Lord of the Rings and will detail events leading up to the forging of the eponymous magic rings that would deal 50 shades of damage in Middle-earth.
There’s not much of it Lenny Henry in the new trailer. He plays a Harfoot – a race of “proto-hobbits” who migrate across Middle Earth to their future home of the Shire. However, we are reintroduced to elf wizard Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), who warns her half-elven comrade Elrond (Robert Aramayo) that evil forces are on the rise.
That’s a reference to Sauron, who starts out as an accomplice to the original supervillain Morgoth – sort of Darth Vader to Morgoth’s Emperor Palpatine. He is thrown into the abyss with Morgoth at the end of the First Age, believing he was vanquished forever. In the Rings of Power, he has returned.