6.5 is just about where I would rate this show.

It seems like a generic high-production-value fantasy show, not being particularly reliant on source material (and thus not really benefiting from being associated with Tolkien).

The acting is pretty average so far, and the storylines are too early to judge, but seem to gravitate to generic 'Good vs Big Great Evil' narrative. The pacing is also fairly slow to accommodate the TV series format.

Not sure why this elicits such a strong reaction? Is it because of how Amazon is treating its warehouse/delivery workforce?

The reaction is likely because Tolkien has many hard core fans that did not appreciate the changes made to the lore.

I really don’t understand how Amazon could plan a TV series set in the 2nd Age without buying more book rights aside from the Hobbit and LotR. The show is only based on LotR’s appendix.

Now we know why their LotR consultant left early

Exactly that - take a look at YouTube and you'll see many channels that were thrashing the series even before release, for that exact reason.

Reading the first page of user reviews on RT, one thing I found interesting is that the low and high reviews said similar things.

The high reviews praise the set, setting, and production value.

The low reviews also like the set, but claim they spent too much on production value, and nothing on writing.

I'm not a LoTR fan[1], but I would agree about the writing. Some of the dialogues are complete joke. The entire beginning with Galadriel, her brother and her bullies sounds as if it was written by a 6yo, wrt logic and poor attempts at gravitas. Also the choreography of Galadriel's fight with the troll and writing of the scenes immediately leading up to that moment don't make any sense. On top of that, the whole thing feels poorly paced and boring.

Note that in the above I haven't said anything about faithfulness to the lore, which I'm not particularly attached to. To me the show can't stand even on its own, much less as part of a larger whole.

When it comes to stylisation, with Elves, at one point I felt as if I was watching Vulcans from Star Trek rather than Elves from LoTR. They obliterated all their features except the ears, and most of them look ridiculous (what's with the haircuts?).

So: I'm not angry (since they didn't break anything I cared about). But I am completely unamused be the show. I won't continue watching it.

[1]: I didn't dislike LoTR, but neither is it something I care all that much for.

Theses graphs are always so useful on IMDB. The popular or controversial movies are always like that, usually it's less bad and you can actually see the normal distribution in the general population, but we are lucky to have the top 1000 raters in this case.

I find if you toss out the 1's and 10's you'll get a much better idea of whether it's worth watching.

>> While a third of the IMDB ratings are 10, another third of the ratings are 2 or 1

Makes sense to me. For the most part, a review is going to be either "it rocks" or "it sucks".

Is that a pretty primitive mindset by those reviewers? No nuances, either or. Still so common ...

Why don't they use the median instead (or maybe they do?)

when looking at the metacritic user reviews the other day they seemed obviously brigaded / amplified and i was wishing there was a tool available for filtering so i could do what i would consider their job, verifying reviews / protecting from bots. i was kind of thinking a good comparison for a userscript approach could be to just exclude the 0,1 and 9,10 ratings for everything assuming that anyone trying to skew the aggregate rating will choose an extreme individual rating