The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Season 2 Review - More Rings, More Power, But Does It Rule Them All?

There is an inarguable grandeur to Amazon's "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power," a sense of scope and ambition that persists even in the show's smallest moments. While the show, developed by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, is directly based on J.R.R. Tolkien's own Middle-earth world-building, the thing about it that seems truest to Tolkien above all else is the sense that it is expanding to fill every corner of this fictional universe. It's vast, and in the first season that worked both for and against its narrative.

In Season 2 of "The Rings of Power," premiering this week on Prime Video, that sense of expansiveness deepens and broadens as the stakes are raised and the characters are moved into even more precarious positions, and once again this works both for and against the show. After a first season that was often a lot of (admittedly graceful) table-setting, the second season puts the pedal down on plot — but even with a bigger story and bigger developments on the horizon, it still can't quite get out of its own way.

After a series of major revelations at the end of "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" Season 1, many of the major players enter Season 2 in a state of upheaval. The Elves are at odds with each other, as the three rings forged by Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) become the subject of a power struggle between Elrond (Robert Aramayo) and Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), who's still smarting from the reveal that she was deceived by a disguised Sauron (Charlie Vickers). 

Meanwhile, Sauron's got schemes of his own, while the Orc leader Adar (Sam Hazeldine) attempts to lay down a base of power in Mordor and the Elf king Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker) seeks to protect his people. Elsewhere, the Harfoot known as Nori (Markella Kavenagh) travels to parts unknown with The Stranger (Daniel Weyman); the Dwarf prince Durin (Owain Arthur) tries to repair relations in his own kingdom; and Numenor faces questions of power as Queen Regent Mirielle (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) returns home.

This is just a glancing preview of the kind of storytelling you can expect in "The Rings of Power" Season 2, a story that also includes new characters, new locations, and new weapons for major contenders to battle over as the show pushes further into the meat of the narrative that its title promises. We do indeed get closer to the actual Rings of Power this time around, and their influence and potential provides plenty of fodder for debate among key characters. It's the part of the story, as the Elves scramble to contain the threat of Sauron and Sauron does his best to influence all of Middle-earth in secret, that works best in the series, as J.D. Payne, Patrick McKay, and company are clearly having a ball with these ingredients. It's when the show expands out beyond that hook that things get a bit trickier, and a bit less satisfying.

All of the ingredients that made "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" Season 1 are still here the second time around, often in greater quantities and more intensely expressed. There's the richness of the costumes, the breadth of the world, the action sequences that are both surprising and satisfying, and of course the characters who managed to compel us in those early episodes. But the pitfalls of that season are here too, and they're arguably harder to ignore.

The good news is that, as the show expands and the stakes rise, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay are able to conjure up an image of Middle-earth truly on the brink of some kind of awful catastrophe. When the various storylines work, and especially when they work to complement one another, they express this sense that everything is urgent — that so many pieces have to fall into place to save the world that it seems impossible, but these characters are going to keep trying anyway.

It's an exhilarating storytelling style, but unfortunately it only works part of the time. Just like last season, there's an unevenness to the plotting and pacing of "The Rings of Power" Season 2 that acts as a liability, and it's dialed up by the added intensity of the story. In one scene, you might have characters who are talking about a secret weapon that could make or break the entire world and everyone in it, and in the next you might have a ragtag band of people trying to make it across a landscape. Sometimes those two things match up well, and other times the second story falls flat, making you yearn to go back to the first scene and all those big implications. Court intrigue in one city might only be half as interesting as the schemes of another, and the creature work in the first sequence might feel more like a distraction than actual story. The idea here, of course, is to create a world in which both big and small stories matter, a world much like J.R.R. Tolkien's own writing of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. In the end, though, the show feels stretched too thin despite its big budget and long runtime, and you can't help but feel that some of these stories would be better left curtailed.

Still, if you've bought into the kind of fantasy experience this show is selling, there's a lot to like in the second season, from a great Morfydd Clark performance to some wonderful monsters and an overarching mythology that, when it's firing, really is gripping. "The Rings of Power" might never be as magical as the writing that inspired it, but it's still trying to be, and sometimes that's what matters most.

"The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" Season 2 premieres on August 29 on Prime Video.