Amazon Prime Video released its main teaser for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power yesterday, after months of dropping enticing images since its first teaser trailer premiered during Super Bowl LVI. The two-and-a-half-minute video paints a mesmerising world set in The Second Age – a few millennia before The Lord of the Rings took place. A dark force (Sauron would be a safe guess) is gaining control over Middle-Earth and Galadriel, played by Morfydd Clark here, vows to demolish it.
While fans might recognise a few familiar faces (some immortal elves appear as their younger selves, including Galadriel), the teaser introduces us to newer characters like the human Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) and elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Cardova). It also gives us our first glimpse of an army of orcs and a mystery man who seems to have landed on Middle-Earth along with a meteor.
The epic visual scale seems to do justice to Tolkien's lore – we get flashes of the Elven realms of Lindon and Eregion, the Dwarven realm Khazad-dum and the island kingdom of Numenor. Its promising authenticity shows that Amazon took its job seriously.
The series, which has J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay as its showrunners, is set to have five seasons. Catch the first one on Amazon Prime Video on September 2.