Rolling Stone; ‘Wheel of Time’ Grinds Things Like ‘Plot’ and ‘Character’ to a Screeching Halt
Adaptation of Robert Jordan’s beloved fantasy book series offers lovely scenery and little else
Robert Jordan’s beloved, massive (more than a dozen books, several of which were completed after Jordan’s death) Wheel of Time series, with a reported $10 million budget per episode — more than the comparatively modest $6 million-per-episode cost of that first GoT season with Ned Stark, though less than the $15 million of that last batch of installments, with all their CGI ice zombie and dragon battles.
We’ll have to see next year how effectively House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings have used their budgets, but the underwhelming Wheel of Time is a reminder that money alone does not make a fantasy world go around.
In one episode, Moiraine gets into a philosophical argument with an opponent about the nature and purpose of the Wheel of Time itself. Moiraine argues that the Wheel can’t want things any more than a river or the rain do, but that, “It’s people who want.” The people, though, are the big problem here. Most are bland and forgettable, and a few are outright annoying. Moiraine and Mat are the only two who stand out even a bit, and that’s owing more to the performances by Rosamund Pike and Barney Harris than anything either is given to do. (And Harris has reportedly been replaced for the second season, which is in production now.)
Almost everyone gets one note to play, maybe two — Rand, for instance, alternates between exasperatingly pouty and generically heroic — in ways that are perhaps meant to make them seem archetypal and instead render them fairly dull. One of Moiraine’s colleagues complains that it’s hard having a conversation with someone like her who won’t say anything, which sums up our overly cryptic heroine. That said, Pike’s sheer presence is often the most compelling thing in a given scene, and the show suffers even more during a stretch where Moiraine is sidelined by injury.
The thing that’s easy to forget about Game of Thrones is how relatively modest it was in the beginning compared to what it became. Battle scenes were often skipped over in their entirety due to budgetary limitations. It didn’t matter, though, because the heart of that show at its best was its interpersonal dynamics; put any two characters with even a bit of shared history in a room together, and something interesting was sure to happen. The huge fight scenes of the later seasons were fun in their own right, but they worked because the audience was already invested in, say, Jon Snow before he had to defend Castle Black against a horde of Wildlings, or in Jamie Lannister and Bronn before they came under literal fire from a dragon. There’s an action set piece in the climax of the first Wheel episode that’s bigger and mostly more visually impressive(*) than anything Thrones did in its early seasons, but it feels like hollow spectacle because we’ve barely gotten to know any of the people involved by that point. Battle and chase scenes in later episodes aren’t much better, because even though the show has spent more time on the characters, they remain flat ciphers whose fates feel irrelevant. The scenery in and around Prague is stunning, though, with certain vistas capable of evoking a similar feeling to some of the New Zealand travelogue sequences in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. But when the scenery is one of a drama’s biggest selling points, that’s a problem. Whether a lot is happening in a given episode or scene, or we’re just watching people journey from place to place, little of it feels engaging because the characters are so threadbare.
Wheel of Time is arriving in this long gap between the end of Game of Thrones and the premiere of several other shows like it, which may bring in some fantasy fans starved for any morsel of magic and wonder. But the whole thing is empty, if expensive, calories.