I just watched the official trailer for Amazon's The Rings of Power on Youtube, and it was...okay, I guess. The snarky comments were more entertaining than the trailer, but that's the way of it when anything provokes snarky comments. But, what I want to poke at for a moment is the problem of adaptation, because in theory this story should have been unfilmable.
The story in question is the rise of Sauron in the Second Age, which is epic. The problem here is that it is TOO epic. According to the fandom wiki, the Second Age lasts 3,441 years. To put this into perspective, in actual history that would take us from the Bronze Age to today. And now we run into the problem of how to tell the story, because any story is ultimately about people - the characters. And here we have two types: the immortals (Elves) whose lives can be told on a timespan this large, and the mortals (everybody else) whose lives would be a mere flicker of light on this timespan.
We've got a canvas of thousands of years, and only the immortal characters last long enough for the story to play out as written over the span of a television series...so how the hell do you tell this story as a conventional narrative?
The choice the showrunners seem to have made is compression, at least according to the interviews. This has some merits - it puts the events into a timeframe wherein they can be experienced by all of the characters (this approach was used by the show Vikings, which has the characters experience well over a century of history in what appears to be only a couple of decades). The problem is that it loses some of the scope in the process. The story of Sauron in the Second Age is of a slow corrupting of an entire civilization over generations, which doesn't come across when you're trying to maintain the same cast of characters for the entire narrative.
Another possible approach is to use a "snapshot" approach. Basically, telling the story in snapshots that explore a particular point in time, and then move to the next snapshot that happens later (Ed Greenwood and I used this approach in The Eternity Quartet, which I imagine we'll finish one of these days). For The Rings of Power, this would probably have to play out as each season being a snapshot (so, season 2 would take place a few hundred years after season 1, etc.). This has the benefit of retaining the historical scope, but loses the details in-between snapshots. So, the slow corruption of human civilization gets reduced to an infodump.
The ultimate goal of adaptation is to recreate the experience of reading the story in another medium. But, for this story I'm not sure that's a physical possibility. As I said at the beginning, I'd actually classify this as unfilmable. The ambition of the showrunners is undeniable, but they probably would have been better off to just pick one incident in the appendices that only takes place over a few short years, and concentrate on telling it properly.
So, will it be good? Damned if I know. Will it succeed in adapting the material and doing justice to it...I just don't see that happening - the canvas is just too big.
