Moved from the other thead:
I agree about the elves. They did not feel like Tolkien elves, to me. You're right that they might as well have been just humans with pointy ears. I'm not a big fan of Galadriel or Elrond. Their okay, but my issue may just be that they conform to the same style of elf we are being presented. Just don't feel the way Jackson portrayed them, or how I always read them to be.
Don't know who this giant is supposed to be, but I hope to god he isn't supposed to be an Istari.The Harfoots are fine, I guess, but every time they went back to them, I was ready for that scene to be over.
I'm still just not a fan of the random casting of various races all over the place in a world like this. Does it ruin the story? Not too much. But it makes shows like this just seem like i'm watching a play, but not a movie or show attempting to ground itself in the reality the storytellers are trying to create. It's just even more out of place in an IP like Middle Earth. A world Tolkien painstakingly spent decades building a mythology around with history, languages, geography, etc. Sure, cast whoever you want, but it makes it feel artificial to me, just like overuse of CGI does.
If you want to cast blacks, asians, other brown peoples in this particular world, then build a storyline around those races and a geography. Have them hail from a particular region. I wouldn't create a mythology around Africa and cast a large number of white people.
Nazanin Boniadi... so hot...
Music was kind of generic to me. I found the opening theme especially drab and uninteresting. A far cry from a theme like Game of Thrones.
The very beginning with the brief telling of the rise of Morgoth was cool to see. I wish we had shown more of that.
Overall, it was entertaining enough to continue watching and save my overall judgment of the show for how the story ends.