Review of The Rings of Power season 2: Lots of improvements, but still not as good as Jackson's LOTR

Review of Season 2 of The Rings of Power: Morphydd Clark as Galadriel

While character development and speed go up in the second season of Rings of Power, the show's drab subplots, writing and acting remain a problem.

Although it wasn't quite the Dune 2 answer, Rings of Power had a Dune dilemma. The JRR Tolkien-based Prime Video series was severely criticized when it debuted in 2022 and was unable to justify its $1 billion budget. The characters were uninteresting, the writing was sloppy, and the pacing was incredibly slow. It required eight episodes to lay up the dense mythology, which was drawn from Tolkien's appendices for his epic high fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. This is similar to Denis Villeneuve's film adaptation of Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi classic, which began with part one. Dune's narrative of "nothing happens" did not exactly win over audiences either.