Amazon’s Big-Budget Fantasy Has One Thing Game of Thrones Didn’t

(Bloomberg) -- You could be forgiven if you watched the first few episodes of the Amazon Prime Video series The Wheel of Time, and thought to yourself, “Wait, I’ve seen this before.”

Here’s what happens, and I’m not spoiling anything, because you have seen it before: A pod of innocent, grubby pals live in a small farm town minding their own business, clanking tankards in poorly-lit pubs, and flirting heavily with each other despite all the obvious body odor. Then, suddenly, an enigmatic wizard shows up, followed almost immediately by a bunch of nightmarish monsters. The wizard scoops up the friends, tells them, Surprise!, it’s YOUR fault that the monsters are in your small town, and they all flee together into the big wild world outside. 

The beasts follow, and there’s a close call scene with a creaky ferryboat at a river crossing, because monsters famously can’t cross rivers, and thus these things always have a scene with a creaky ferryboat. (How they haven’t instituted a mandatory swimming requirement at Hellpit Elementary School by now, I’ll never know.)

By the time there is a high-speed chase on horseback through a bare forest landscape, viewers will find themselves waiting to hear the voice of Liv Tyler hissing to the monsters over Elijah Wood’s shoulder, “If you want him, COME AND CLAIM HIM.” 

Because this is Lord of the Rings, right? Some of the sweeping opening scenes even feature distinctive craggy geography that is near-identical to the New Zealand vistas where Peter Jackson shot his genre-defining trilogy of films. 

But no, this is Amazon.com Inc’s new big-budget production of The Wheel of Time, and it was shot in and around Prague, Croatia, and Slovenia. And the similarities are deliberate. I hope. According to the late Robert Jordan, who wrote the books upon which the new millions-spent-per-episode series is based, he hoped to appeal initially to readers who were familiar with the works of legendary Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien.

The show’s creators have clearly taken this approach as well, assuring viewers that they will be familiar with the contours of this new realm. (Plus, a wizard explaining to small town rubes how things work in the big new world is a great way to explain it to Amazon Prime subscribers who aren’t familiar, either.)

Thankfully, after the first three beautifully-shot episodes of The Wheel of Time, the plot begins to diverge from LOTR—and that’s where things get good. Because the Wheel of Time books are actually great yarns, with their own mythology, politics, villains, and system of magic. The world that Jordan spun up over the course of 14 tomes and 23 years is incredibly detailed—it’s like if the royal scheming of Game of Thrones was combined with the magical mythology of a series like Legend of the Seeker. 

The wizard protagonist here is Moiraine Damodred, played by Rosamund Pike, an icily beautiful alternative to Ian McKellen’s Gandalf. She has spent decades traveling the world to find the next “Dragon,” a world-saving figure who has been prophesied to be coming soon. If she finds her or him, she must hide that person from other forces seeking them, until they can fulfill their destiny and defeat humanity’s greatest foe, “the Dark One,” once and for all in the Last Battle.

The action begins when Damodred arrives in the town of the Two Rivers and finds the gang of friends: Mat (Barney Harris), Rand (Josha Stradowski), Perrin (Marcus Rutherford), and Egwene (Madeleine Madden), one of whom Damodred is convinced will become the next Dragon. She’s promptly followed by a whole mess of monsters, and the adventure begins. Soon we are tracking the kids as they get split up, get lost, and gather a colorful collection of friends and protectors along the way. 

The actors are likable and well-cast. The main characters display an appealing subtlety and wariness about the dangerous world around them, which leaves side characters and villains ample room to chew scenery. The shoots are stunning in that way that Game of Thrones was—you can’t know what was real and what was digitally painted onto the screen. There appears to be a cast of hundreds, if not thousands. And the way they decided to show magic being used (in the books, it’s generally invisible to the naked eye) is exciting and fun.

Oh yes, that’s right: People actually use magic. Specifically, women do. This isn’t Game of Thrones where scant spells are cast in whispered tones in dark rooms, or The Lord of The Rings, where Gandalf—supposedly one of the most powerful wizards in the world—runs around battlefields literally hitting people with a stick. These women are powerful. And it’s a joy to watch them summon great energies, save lives, and kick ass.

There’s no point in trying to hint at what else happens because there’s so much to explain—and that’s where the Amazon series is going to face its biggest challenge. Beginning with his first book, The Eye of the World, in 1990, Jordan created a profoundly in-depth world that would be impossible to completely capture in one television series. 

And Amazon shouldn’t try; the books are Bible-thick, with colorfully painted dust jackets. The plot moves quite slowly at times, bloated with characters, swimming in elaborate locations, and bogged down with arcana. Jordan died in 2007, before he could finish the last one, and the series had to be finished by fellow high fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, who did heroic work. Since they took so many years to roll out, fans like me will often keep the hardcovers we waited so anxiously for in vast chunks on our bookshelves. Even Jeff Bezos couldn’t afford to get all of it onscreen.

So far, two seasons have been shot. GQ has a great story on the making of the series, which showcases how complex it was for showrunner Rafe Judkins (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) to be in the field filming the second season while still getting thousands of notes from Amazon on the first. It’s been reported that filming costs ballooned above $10 million an episode, which puts it in Game of Thrones territory. (The first season of Thrones cost $6 million an episode to produce. The last, according to Variety, cost $15 million an episode.)

There are eight episodes in that first season, and I’ve seen six. It’s hard to imagine they’ll wrap up everything from the first novel in the next two, so I imagine the seasons won’t correspond directly to the books. The episode titles don’t give away much, and Amazon has not indicated how many seasons there will be. With fourteen books, it’s possible that work on the series could easily stretch to two decades. That’s a lot of commitment for a crew, a cast—and for viewers.

So far it seems like the writers are doing a decent job of distilling everything to the essentials. The show moves at a brisk pace, and the adjustments in plot that I picked up on seemed smart. In the books, for example, all the potential “Dragons” are male. Including Egwene is a smart choice to catch the story up to the sensibilities of 2021. Also, one of the core female friendships has gone from intimate in the novels to fully romantic in the show, which also is a welcome update.

But as for how the world is built and explained, I’m not sure people who aren’t already fans will totally get it. I tried to convince my husband to watch it with me, but he wouldn’t, because he’s annoyed at how many times we have had to pack up all those huge hardcovers every time we moved apartments. Even if he had, I’m not sure he would have followed everything that was happening. This will be a hard sell at first for people who haven’t read the books. The Wheel of Time is certainly no The Witcher, the wildly expensive 2020 Netflix fantasy show starring Henry Cavill that was utterly impenetrable in its first few episodes. But it’s also not the goes-down-easy Ted Lasso. 

There are some amazing set pieces to look forward to from the books: multiple epic battles à la Helm’s Deep or the Battle of the Bastards. Wild feats of sorcery. Smart, internecine world politics. Polyamory. But with the amount of money Amazon is spending on the show, there’s a lot of pressure for it to produce huge numbers. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the most successful Amazon Prime original series to date, averaged just over 3 million viewers a week in its third season. By the end, Game of Thrones  was pulling in over 44 million viewers per episode. That’s a lot of ground that Amazon is hoping to gain for its Prime Video originals.

The material is there, and the execution so far seems up to the task. But there is a lot of magic that’ll have to be performed in front of our eyes between now and the Last Battle.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.