I Watched Rangz of Power so you don’t have to – Part 1

NOTE: I will be away from home without my computer over this upcoming weekend, so be prepared for drastically less content. I have scheduled a piece for each day, with the help of guest writers.

I was having a fairly lazy Sunday, and how better to procrastinate than to watch a horrible new show called Kangz of the Rangz. Sorry, Lawd dem Rangs. Sorry, Rings of Power, by Amazon Studios.

I covered the disastrous trailer, as well as the WMD Liars whining about the peasants not liking it. They claimed that everyone secretly loved it, but were review bombing this wonderful piece of cinematic brilliance. How else to test this theory but to watch it ourselves and see what we think?

I decided to do exactly that, and was treated to a black screen for twenty seconds while some music plays in the background. Then the female narration begins over stock sounds of childrens laughter.

Nothing is evil in the beginning. And there was a time when the world was so young there had not yet been a sunrise, but even then there was light.

*childrens laughter plays in background*

I expected a lot of things, but this is just flat out weird and stupid.

It’s a bunch of children waltzing around laughing for no reason as this narration goes on about how there’s light without a sunrise. We’re fifty seconds in, and if I’m going to need to pause this often we won’t finish this episode any time this century.

Anyway, the Aryan children all make fun of this blonde girl who makes a presumably shitty paper boat. They say it’s going to sink, to which she responds.

It’s not going to float, it’s going to sail.

Lol, okay bitch. Go right ahead and disrespect all the other kids who are trying to give you advise.

Anyway the music then swells as this child looks extremely smug with herself. The asshole kids, who all have English accents for some reason start throwing stones at the boat. The blonde girl then flies into a roid rage and starts trying to beat the ringleader of the stone throwing children.

Which is when this LARPer shows up. He calls her Galadriel, and then we cut to a conversation between the two of them. I have to transcribe the entirety of their conversation, because it’s so fucking stupid that it made my head hurt.

LARP guy: It was a good ship, sister.

Galadriel: I made it just as you taught me.

LARP guy: Do you know why a ship floats, while a stone does not? Because a stone sees only downward. The darkness of the water is vast, irresistible. The ship feels the darkness as well, striving moment by moment to master her, and pull her under.

But the ship has a secret. For unlike the stone her gaze is not downward but up, fixed upon the light that guides her, whispering of grander things than darkness and the new.

Actually I do understand. This is the dipshit writers attempt at being really deep. They truly believe they put a bunch of metaphors in there when they claimed that ships don’t really float due to displacement, but rather because stones look downwards into the darkness of the pond, while ships crank their necks back and look up into the sun or whatever. They thought they wrote something really profound, but the problem is just that they didn’t. 

Galadriel: But sometimes the lights shine just as brightly reflected in the water as they do in the sky. It’s hard to say which way is up, and which way is down. How am I to know which lights to follow.

What the fuck are these people talking about? None of this makes any sense at all. It’s dumber than random gibberish produced by an AI. 

LARP guy then leans in and says something to her that we don’t get to hear.

Galadriel: But that seems so simple.

LARPer: The most important truths often are. But you must learn to discern them for yourself. I won’t always be here to speak them for you.

What!? What did he whisper to her?

An entire conversation of gibberish, and then when it’s time to actually say something it’s done off screen IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CONVERSATION. Look, Amazon, you can’t just do this to me. It physically hurts me how stupid the writing is on this show, and then the first time I actually care what these two retards have to say I don’t get to hear it.

We’re barely over the four minute mark and I’m struggling to justify not transcribing the entire script. The writing only gets slightly less stupid from here and I sort of feel like someone needs to record just how idiotic the whole thing is.

Galadriel Narrating: We had no word for death, for we thought our joys would be unending. We thought our light would never dim. 

*Music turns ominous*

So when the great foe Morgoth destroyed the very light of our home we resisted. And a legion of elves went to war.

We’re treated to some shots of elves LARPing around a table. This is followed by shots of their journey to slay this Morgoth douche.

We left Valinor, our home, and journeyed to a distant realm. One filled with untold perils, and strange creatures beyond count. A place known as Middle Earth.

Upon arriving in Middle Earth, her LARPer brother gets shanked, and dies one of the bitchiest deaths I have ever seen in a movie.

This is just one of many shots where he’s acting like a gigantic pussy. I get that they didn’t want him to be all Sylvester Stallone, and having the protagonists be visibly scared can be a great way of getting the audience to empathize with them and build tension. But they went way overboard with this guy and you get the sense that he literally shit himself while fighting these orcs or whatever they are.

Yeah, orcs. But seriously that’s no excuse for this dipshit vegan to have the same frowny face the whole time.

I don’t even know if this guy is just a terrible actor, but it really took me out of a filmgoing experience I was already pretty clearly out of.

Who even frowns like this?

That’s the first five minutes of the first episode of Lord Dem Rangz, an Amazon Studios billion dollar project. I’ll try to watch the rest of the episode at some point. For now let me just say that this is truly the worst writing I have ever seen in such a big budget production, but the cinematography is fairly decent. And honestly it’s legitimately so bad that it’s good, especially if you hate the people who made this and enjoy laughing at their failure.

For now I give it a solid two thumbs up, provided you can watch it for free like I did. If you’re paying for it, that’s gonna be a hard pass for me. In summary, the cast is a lot Whiter than I thought, but the script is beyond stupid.