I attended the Premiere yesterday, which was held in Leicester Square in London.
August “.. he walked down the many winding ways ..”
The square was completely taken over by Amazon for the Premiere. The centre of the square was labelled a 'fan-pen' by Amazon, I did not arrive on time to go into this section.
July “Sam and his Master .. ate their stew ..”
Fan Pen - Photo by Dr Sara Brown (Twitter)
Two Cinemas (Theatres) were used, The Odeon and Cineworld for the screening.
I had a ticket for the Odeon and this was the cinema that the cast and crew were in.
May “Now Lord .. look upon your land!”
Odeon Leicester Square
Before the screening of the first two episodes, interviews and 'fans' were shown on the screen in the Odeon, Olwe made an appearance, Marcel can now say that he has been shown on the screen in the Odeon Leicester Square
After the interviews, we had a brief talk from Jeff Bezos, who had also managed to get a ticket, and the show-runners. Finally, all 22 of the main cast came onto the stage, they could only just fit. Some of the cast were seated for the screening in the rows just in front of me, but I could not see them.
June “.. About midnight .. the Ents broke the dam ..”
Photo by Dr Hannah McDonald (Twitter)
The first two episodes were shown and then a trailer for the rest of the series.
I am not going to give any spoilers, but my initial thoughts after watching the first two episodes, were underwhelming.
The episodes are 'fan-fiction' so I am judging this on the quality of the writing and the direction, sets, music, and acting. Nothing in these stood out as being 'great' for me. Númenor is not in the first two episodes, and I am hoping that the story-arc for Númenor is more promising.
Some of the programme seemed to be 'filler' and that for me included the Hobbits and the elf-human romance.
However, I am looking forward to seeing the rest of the show and was glad to be able to attend the Premiere. I'm also hopeful that people could watch this and then think, I would like to see what Tolkien wrote about this and read his books.
Interested to see people's views on Friday of the episodes, we will have a thread to discuss each episode after it is aired, they will be 'unlocked' on the day the episodes are released by Amazon.
Thanks for the thoughts Trotter. I go in expecting fan-fiction so I am actually glad to read a view that is not "this is a love letter to Tolkien". I go in with my expectations firmly set where they have been throughout the buildup.
Hope you had a great experience all the same. These things are literally a once in a lifetime thing so I hope you had a lot of fun.
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