Billionaire Elon Musk recently roasted Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power specifically taking issue with how the show portrays male characters.
Musk took to Twitter where he first wrote, “Tolkien is turning in his grave.”
He followed that up writing, “Almost every male character so far is a coward, a jerk or both. Only Galadriel is brave, smart and nice.”
Musk would also respond to a Twitter user sharing a Daily Wire asserting that those criticizing the Rings of Power are racists.
He wrote, “Those who claim any criticism of Rings of Power means you’re racist are outing themselves as closet racists.”
Musk isn’t alone in his criticism of the show. It currently has an abysmal 39% average audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The average rating is 2.4 out of 5 from 20,083 ratings.
The show has a significantly higher user rating on IMDb with a weighted average of 6.8 from 108,024 users. The arithmetic mean is 6.3 with a median of 8.
The scores are wildly polarizing with 34,924 users giving the show a perfect 10 out of 10 and 26,505 users giving it the worst possible score of 1 out of 10.
The demographic data shows that males are giving the show worse reviews compared to females with the average score for male a 6.6 while females are giving it a 7.4.
There isn’t much disparity among age. However, individuals under the age of 18 gave it a 7.3 compared to those 18-29 giving it a 6.9 and the two age groups above 30 both giving the show an average of 6.5.
IMDb, which is an Amazon-owned website, appears to be the diamond in the rough when it comes to Rings of Power reviews albeit even a weighted average score of 6.8 isn’t the shiniest of diamonds.
The Metacritic User Score is an abysmal 2.5 from 2085 ratings. There are 398 positive reviews, 88 mixed reviews, and 1,599 negative reviews.
Not only does Musk’s opinion appear to align with most individuals on these review sites, but it also aligns with die hard The Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien fans.
The One Ring described the series’ first episode saying, “It’s like popping a pimple. There’s something under there somewhere and you got to squeeze hard to get it out, but it’s painful until it finally comes out.”
He would also state, “I don’t think I can find anything that is remotely Tolkien in this. Galadriel is a completely different character. She’s out for revenge; vengeance for her brother. Gil-galad and Elrond apparently are plotting against her in order to get her out of the way. She’s no longer necessary here. Who needs Galadriel? She’s only been hunting Sauron for hundreds of years like get her out of the way.”
The YouTuber then noted, “So what does this show mostly suffer from? Well, I think it suffers from — one major part of writing is that it’s doing a lot of telling and not showing. It has statements that explain the entire story without ever any real conflict. I think the only conflict we got in the whole show was the manufactured snow troll in the beginning, but she takes out the snow troll without any difficult at al whatsoever.”
“The second conflict is actually with the bar fight,” he continued. “The almost bar fight between Arondir and a couple humans down there in Tirharad, but it doesn’t come to anything. There is no conflict.”
YouTuber George the Giant Slayer bluntly stated, “Do you know why so many people are criticizing Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power? Because there’s nothing in it for the fans to point to the screen and go, ‘Wow! Look at that! That’s from the books!’ That’s it. It’s simple there’s no Tolkien in it.”
The amount of negative reviews might be a concern for Amazon given the outlet announced via a press release that the show was the biggest premiere in the history of Prime Video with the show attracting “more than 25 million global viewers on its first day.”
A lot of people might have watched the show, but they were thoroughly unimpressed and did not like it. It’ll be interesting to see if that dissatisfaction turns into people actually tuning out or if they will continue to watch what they seemingly view as a train wreck.
What do you make of Musk’s blunt and brief roast of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power?