[Hack&Lube]

I caught up with this show last night and boy I wish there was an 8.1 audio version of it as I want to isolate the music track and mute it. Bear McCreary is difficult for me to get behind in any project he composes. I understand if you might like it, but soundtrack is 50% of what I experience when I watch things.

I absolutely cannot stand how his melodramatic western choir music constantly tries to tell you how you should feel about a scene rather than having the scene and action dictate it for you. Like when you first see the Mines or Numenor, rather than have them looking epic and majestic and sweeping you away from what the character experiences through their eyes, you get generic majestic music to tell you how to feel even before the camera pans to what you see.

The same thing happens with any scenes with emotion or action or bad guys. The buy guy music plays before baddies appear so you know they are bad. You get sappy sad music when something sad is supposed to be happening. And the bombastic swashbuckling action music is droll and infuriating. Rather than accenting and punctuating action beats, it's just repetitive like Bear's usual output. Add to that, it's all generic western orchestral and Gregorian chant material that's overdone in everything he makes, I'm about to watch the rest of the show on mute. Bear McCreary has ruined every show and franchise I have ever watched or played (he's done a lot of videogames too) that has featured him as a composer.

To be fair, I checked out the LoTR trilogy after this as well to see if my memory had failed me and it's very much in the same style, but it's also a little more relaxed and subtle, allowing the viewer to get more out of what's on screen rather than having the music try to dictate it for you.

Aside from that, I'm not a huge fan - I haven't watched the LoTR except for once when they first came out but I know the basic lore regarding the forging of the rings and the old civilizations of Eregion and Numenor from wikipedia curiosity over the years etc. so I am interested to see how they play out. The pacing is a bit odd, with a lot of television show filler of people bantering about that doesn't push forward the story that much so I wished they would better use the time to add more depth to the show as the timeline does seem compressed. Some of the sets look amazing, but other times the CG and greenscreen is obvious. It doesn't feel like a $500M per season show.