Polish your sword and pack your own second breakfast, because the adventure finally begins in the teaser trailer for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Prime Video’s highly-anticipated prequel series has been a long time coming. Amazon first announced it in 2017, and they’ve reportedly spent $465 million on the first season alone. Throw in the cost of the rights and the fact that they’ve already committed to a second season, and Rings of Power may be the first billion-dollar series.
The Rings of Power is drawn from J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Silmarillion and set in Middle-earth’s Second Age, thousands of years before Bilbo or Frodo ever met that meddlesome wizard Gandalf. As anyone who’s read Tolkein or seen Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit trilogies will recall, much of the action is driven by one super-powered piece of a jewelry: “One ring to rule them all.” The Rings of Power is concerned with “them all;” the rest of the rings mentioned in Tolkien’s infamous poem:
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
While the teaser trailers shows no hint of the rings themselves, there’s plenty of conflict. Characters hang from cliffs, cling to storm-tossed rafts, watch meteors streak across the sky, and find themselves within the crush of massive battles. Lest you think that only humanoids populate this world, the visuals also include a claustrophobic fight against something big and ugly.
But as the voiceover makes clear, all of these thrills come in service of adventure. “Haven’t you ever wondered?” a voice asks. “What else is out there? There’s wonders in this world beyond our wandering. I can feel it.”
Those words seem to come from one of the harfoots, a race that would later evolve into hobbits. According to last week’s first look at the series, Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh play our harfoot heroes. We’ve also seen glimpses of familiar figures who appeared in the movies, such as Elrond (Robert Aramayo) and Galadriel (Morfydd Clark).
Besides them, The Rings of Power stars Ismael Cruz Córdova as Arondir, Owain Arthur as Prince Durin IV, Nazanin Boniadi as Bronwyn, Sophia Nomvete as Disa, and Charlie Vickers as Halbrand. The first two episodes are directed by J.A. Bayona, and the series premieres September 2nd on Prime Video. Without further ado: Check out the teaser trailer below.
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