I would certainly argue that there are certain scenes or types of scene in film which are best experienced at the cinema. Scenes which draw you into a film, so that you can’t take your eyes off the screen: think car chases in Bond films, or long, sweeping shots of star ships in science fiction films. Of course you can watch such things on smaller screens at home, but it simply doesn’t do them justice.

I would include the battle sequences in the Lord of the Rings among such scenes. What Peter Jackson did with such moments in his trilogy is truly incredible. You can’t fail to get drawn into the action. Yet to experience everything which is happening on the screen, to appreciate every little detail, surely it is best watched in a cinema, the entire screen dominating your view and the audio filling your ears: you start to feel like you’re actually there.

I saw another trailer for Amazon’s Rings Of Power series earlier today. To be honest I couldn’t make out much: the series looks like it will centre on a character they are referring to as Galadriel, but who, as far as I can make out, bears little resemblance to the Lady of Lorien. I would need to brush up on my Second Age Lore to comment much further though. However, one thing I found noteworthy was the fact that the trailer appeared extremely battle-heavy – there seemed to be quite a lot of action or battle scenes in it, as if the guys at Amazon had assumed that the best way to entice viewers to watch their new show was to include a lot of battle scenes.

If that is so then they have missed the point entirely. The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings weren’t just about battles: at their core, the books (and films) were about characters like Bilbo, Frodo and Sam, and the journeys they took. The battles were peripheral: they were secondary elements which Jackson opted to emphasise in his adaptations because they would be highly cinematic. He knew how awesome it would look to have a thousand Rohirrim charge across a cinema screen, or to see Ents throwing pieces of Orthanc around.

Yet the key term here is ‘cinematic’. Jackson made these films specifically for the cinema, which is why he payed so much attention to things like the battle scenes. They are supposed to be watched in darkened rooms on huge screens. Only there can we appreciate the awesomeness of the battle scenes. The Amazon series, on the other hand, is being created for an online streaming service. It is going to be watched on televisions, computer screens and maybe even mobile phones. On such small-screened devices, viewers just won’t have the same experience.

If the guys at Amazon think the Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings were all about epic battles, and that it was the battle scenes which made the films so successful, then they are gravely, gravely mistaken. They have misread the whole phenomenon. These two stories were about people, not violence; characters overcoming massive barriers, not just two groups of people fighting one another. I fear the tale Amazon now intends to tell will have the most ephemeral relationship with Tolkien’s writing, and just be a blurry, gruesome, violent insult to his work. No doubt it will use the characters and places he invented, but seek to be as commercial as possible, hurling battle scene after battle scene at us in order to keep viewers coming back. Where peter jackson quite successfully adapted two fully-formed works of literature, as I touched upon here, “While Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are fairly coherent narratives, much of the rest of Tolkien’s work is composed of shorter pieces which, taken together, form a very rich, detailed history of his created world. I fear these will be much more difficult to translate to the screen, small or big, meaning any director or producer will inevitably need to take liberties with the source material. The danger is too many liberties will be taken: Amazon will be dying to capitalize on and emulate the success of the New Line films, so they will stretch Tolkien’s work as far as possible, and possibly too far.”

It now looks like Amazon simply wants to use this fragmentary history simply as a loose basis for a narrative with which it can hurl battle scene after battle scene at us, dropping in the occasional, probably wholly misplaced, reference to Tolkien just so that they can claim it has a link to it. Amazon also seems to desperately want to replicate the aesthetic / mise en scene of the New Line films, yet does not seem to realise that cinema is fundamentally different to streaming. Of course I’m only basing this assessment on a trailer so I could be wrong; yet I am now very concerned that Amazon are simply producing the most commercial, derivative violent pap possible, and trying to tie it to Jackson’s films just to give it a successful springboard. If that is indeed the case, then as someone who has loved Tolkien all his life, I am very concerned indeed.