The second season of "Rings of Power" has once again sparked controversy, as expected.
I don't intend to comment on it just yet, as I'm waiting for the entire season to be released so I can binge-watch it, because, unfortunately, I'm a product of the streaming era.
However, amidst the clash between supporters and opponents, we are distracted from the essential question that RoP raises to the masses, which I don't know if it can ever be universally answered.
Does a cinematic/television adaptation have to be faithful to the book? And more importantly, why?
My personal opinion is a categorical NO.
Whether on the small or big screen, the adaptation is a new piece of work and must have artistic freedom and independence from the source material, given that we are talking about two different perspectives, two different creators.
I don't want spoon-fed content; I want to see how a work inspired a director and how that will be conveyed to us. How they will communicate the emotions that a work of art evoked in them, again through art.
And if Jackson's trilogy taught us anything, it's exactly this. As an adaptation, it's TERRIBLE. But it doesn't matter at all. Because it does its job well as a high fantasy epic. They're three nearly four-hour movies that, 20 years later, we binge-watch like crazy because the final product is AMAZING and no one cares how faithful it is in the original.
And that's the magic of cinema.
Whether a movie or a series is good or bad doesn't depend on its fidelity to the source material. If something is good, it's good. If something is bad, it's bad.
The dramatic drop in quality in "Game of Thrones," for example, when the original material from the books ran out, isn't connected to this. The screenwriters were just bad at their job.
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Similarly, most of the "Harry Potter" movies, except for "The Prisoner of Azkaban" , aren't mediocre because they butchered the books, but because WB are idiots.
And so on.
In conclusion, the books will always be there. Anyone who wants to (re)read them is free to do so. However, demanding that a creator not have the artistic freedom to adapt a work HOW THEY WANT, offering their perspective, is deeply conservative and foolish.
That's all. In my opinion, anyway.
