Amazon Has Turned ‘Rings Of Power’ Star Ratings Back On, Here’s How Fans Are Scoring It

In a somewhat unprecedented move seemingly designed to protect its most valuable media property, Amazon shut off the ability to rate Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon itself, when normally, it’s standard for every show, Amazon original or otherwise, to have a star rating next to it, voted on by thousands of viewers.

Amazon was attempting to shield Rings of Power from the negative review bombing that was occurring on Rotten Tomatoes, where the show has a 39% score, and IMDB (which Amazon owns) where it has a 6.8/10, with 24% of all scores being 1 star ratings.

But it seems that Amazon could not keep reviews off forever without that looking weird, so now they are back, and with 1,400 scores in by the time of this writing, the audience scores coming in are…at least slightly better than those other sites. It has a 3.7 out of 5, with 23% of reviews being 1 star, but that’s higher than the RT or IMDB totals. It may be because some of the initial wave of hate-reviews are past, which is what Amazon was banking on, or people just don’t know they’ve been turned back online.

The reviews here are not just spam one way or the other, and with Amazon reviews, you can write pretty lengthy rationale for your score. One of the “Most Helpful” reviews is a 3/5 one that is practically an entire article. Here’s part of it:

“After all the back and forth regarding the previews, etc., I really had no idea how good this show was going to be. And now that I’ve seen the first two episodes, my current verdict is “eh, it’s okay.” I’m probably going to go on about the things I didn’t like at more length than the things I did, just because the things I didn’t like stuck with me more, but in my view Rings of Power was perfectly adequate entertainment.”

There are of course, lengthy 1 star reviews as well, this one focused on what it views as a poor presentation of Galadriel and the elves:

“Who is this disagreeable and unlikeable person you’ve got pretending to be Galadriel? Where is the Elf-Lord she has been married to for about a thousand years at this point? Where is the daughter of Celeborn and Galadriel? Where is the wife of Elrond? Why is Galadriel trying to avenge her brother Finrod, who isn’t dead at all, but alive and well in Valinor? The nobility, faithfulness, and true heartedness of Finrod Felagund is legend in Middle Earth. His heroic death and the deeds which led to that death are symbolic of the bond of friendship between Elves and the Edain. The ring he gave to Barahir is the same ring worn by Aragorn in the War of the Ring thousands of years later. There was nothing dark or bitter about his death. His sacrifice was so noble that the Valar reembodied him in Valinor almost immediately.”

Most of the 1 star reviews you can see are focused on the show not being faithful to Tolkien’s source material, and I am not seeing any of the “dwarves and elves shouldn’t be black” type pushback we’ve seen on the internet about the show. I assume it’s possible that outright racist/sexist reviews are policed and deleted, leaving the ones that are more about the substance of the show, the characters, the writing, and the supposed lack of faithfulness to Tolkiens’ work. I saw one review that spent a whole paragraph on how the elves shouldn’t have short hair. People have lots of thoughts.

Amazon needs Rings of Power to be a huge hit, given what they’ve spent on it, and it’s unclear if this upset contingent of fan is something they can ignore, or symptomatic of a larger problem. I will say Rings of Power seems like it’s starting off more unsteady than HBO’s House of the Dragon, which has proven to be less controversial and has acquired a more dedicated fanbase quickly. But again, it’s still early, and we’ll see where all this goes.

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