All 42 games on the Nintendo Switch eShop this week, including Monster Hunter Stories 2

August’s first PS Plus game confirmed as Hunter Arena: Legend

Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 will be released on July 13, and that’s what it does

The highly anticipated first season of Robert Jordan's adaptation will arrive this week.

Author: Dan Auty, November 17, 2021 at 5:50 AM PST

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is an extraordinary achievement on many levels, helping to set a new standard for fantasy stories on the screen. However, despite its artistry and great global success, it did not inspire many other filmmakers to deal with other great fantasy literary works. Ten years later, HBO's "Game of Thrones" really opened the floodgates to the story of dragons and magic-from wizards and curses to shadows and bones and his dark matter, the past few years have seen a large number of fantasy plot adaptations. Amazon's wheel of time is the latest.

The series is based on Robert Jordan's huge 14-book legend. The first season is mainly adapted from the first novel "Eye of the World" in the 1990s. There is a lot of content in Episode 1 that needs to be unraveled, whether it's the characters or the world carefully designed by Jordan. It focuses on five young people from the forgotten town of Two Rivers—Rand, Matt, Nineve, Perrin, and Egwin—one day when the mysterious and powerful Moirain visited them. She is a member of Aes Sedai, a women's organization with magical powers called One Power. Moiraine believes that one of the five is the "Rebirth Dragon", the reincarnation of a powerful figure in history who can save the world from evil. But the evil dark people are also tracking them, leading them to chase safety across hundreds of miles to reach the safety of Aes Sedai's hometown, Baita.

For writers, it is always a challenge to adapt much-loved but detailed fantasy novels to give up how much information to let those who have not read these books understand the world. The first episode of The Wheel of Time strives to find the right balance. This is an expensive show, and the screen version of Jordan World looks impressive and lives in it (despite some cunning CGI), but there is no way to escape how versatile it all seems. From Shire-style towns and conversations with magic and dragons to nightly attacking creatures and desperate missions, this is Fantasy TV 101. Obviously, the source material is also of great help to Tolkien, but there are roughly drawn characters and some problematic performances in early scenes, which are disappointingly clumsy and versatile.

Thankfully, this season starts with episode 2. Although the first episode gave a large action scene a lot of running time, because the Trollocs of the Dark Man (basically horned orcs) attacked two rivers, the next few episodes did give the characters time to breathe and develop. Rosamund Pike played Moiraine, giving her a quiet intensity and subtly conveying the huge burden she brought to herself. The young actors successfully distinguished their roles from each other, Barney Harris’ arrogant mat, Josha Stradowski’s Wise Lander, and Madeleine Madden’s ambitious Egwin , A young woman with her own power. In the true fantasy mission style, the group soon separated, and on their way to the White Tower, they switched between more and more dangerous adventures for several episodes.

Although it was difficult to get rid of this feeling at first, most of which were done before, but the show host Rafe Judkins slowly revealed the details of the world, avoiding too many exhibition dumps (obviously some). These include the different tribes occupying the land-most notably the vicious light and peace-loving leaves-the practice of Aes Sedai, who all cooperated with a loyal manservant known as the guard, and the wheel of time itself , It will cycle through seven eras to ensure that what has already happened will happen again. In most cases, the action and excitement are well-balanced with role-based drama—the rhythm is relatively slow, and some viewers may want more combat and some less introspective speeches. But Jakins was praised for using the eight hours of the first season's running time to develop a stable, engaging rhythm.

The Wheel of Time is not as bloody as Game of Thrones-and completely avoids any hints of sexual violence-but this is not a show suitable for young children. The battle scene is bloody, with fast cutting but creepy stabbing and dismemberment, and there is a nasty torture scene in Episode 5. All of these help to increase the cruel reality of the world, but it is certainly much stronger than the Lord of the Rings movie.

Amazon obviously has high hopes for "Wheel of Time", with a budget of $10 million per episode, and the second season is already in production. Of course, the studio also has the "Lord of the Rings" series waiting for you. Once it is released, "Wheel of Time" may inevitably look like a small footnote. But this is still a while, and the first season has become the most successful season in the current fantasy show.