It’s almost worth Tesla troughing billions of taxpayer dollars, just to watch Daddy Elon make Twitter cry.
In the last year or two, Elon Musk has swum against the tide of corporate wokery and gone full Chad. Not surprisingly, given his long-standing disdain for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, he’s sticking the boot into The Rings of Power.
Elon Musk added himself to the chorus of critics hating on Amazon Studios’ lavish new action series, The Rings of Power, loosely based on JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
“Loosely”, as in, ‘not at all’. Apart from pilfering some names from Tolkien’s legendarium, and some visuals from Peter Jackson’s film version, Rings of Power has almost nothing in common with Tolkien’s work. Certainly not in terms of quality.
It cost a reported $1 billion to bring the author’s fantasy realm to life, which has now has become a lightning rod for controversy in an ongoing culture war. Viewers on the left and right of the political spectrum are clashing over whether Jeff Bezos’s $1.3 trillion corporate behemoth cynically gender-swapped and race-swapped Tolkien’s characters to make it more commercially accessible to modern audiences.
That’s not even in dispute. The point of contention is whether or not that’s a bad thing. Guess what side the left takes?
In a post to Twitter, the Tesla CEO burnished his recent credentials as a growing voice on the political right by taking sides with the critics who take issue with the depiction of beloved characters like Galadriel, portrayed as more of a sword-wielding Valkyrie than the wise forest queen from Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning cinematic trilogy.
“Almost every male character so far is a coward, a jerk or both,” he posted to Twitter. “Tolkien is turning in his grave.”
The “Galadriel” of Rings of Power has nothing in common with Tolkien’s character, bar the name. “Guyladriel” is yet another in the string of “stronk wahmen” Mary Sues that Hollywood’s woke hacks mistake for “strong female characters”.
The debate over Amazon’s Rings of Power began in earnest after showrunners and studio executives argued in Vanity Fair they needed to take liberties when adapting Tolkien characters such as Galadriel and Elrond, since his Middle-earth was badly in need of an update to reflect today’s more modern societies.
It wasn’t, of course. The whole point of classic literature is its enduring value, not ticking off boxes in a corporate marketing campaign.
The honest thing for Amazon to do, if they wanted to reflect modern society, would be to create their own, original series. But they simply don’t have the talent or the imagination.
As should be obvious from the hack writing on display in Rings of Power. Finrod’s “ships float because they look up” monologue is just embarrassing. Everywhere, the dialogue slides in and out of pretentious attempts at high fantasy to jarringly incongruent modern usage.
Musk’s motivation cannot be reduced to trashing an Amazon series simply because it was produced by Jeff Bezos, with whom he maintains a long-running feud. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO had foreshadowed his views earlier in the year, after blaming Netflix’s subscriber loss on “woke” politics that made its programming “unwatchable”.
Fortune
Even Netflix has tacitly admitted that he is correct. A recent memo to staff made clear that the company was walking away from pandering to wokery. Whether Netflix came to its senses in time to bring back subscribers remains to be seen.
Amazon appears to have blown a billion dollars, not getting the message: Go woke, go broke.
(I’ll admit that I haven’t watched the first two episodes in their entirety. I couldn’t even make it through the whole of episode one. I promise: I’ll down a few stiff whiskies sometime and force myself to sit through it all, and write a proper review. I’ll watch it, so you don’t have to.)