Let's Watch The Wheel Of Time Trailer

Hey everyone, Amazon is putting out an adaptation of a beloved fantasy novel series!

No, not that one. The other one. The bad one.

Let’s watch the first Wheel Of Time trailer!

(Disclaimer: I have only read the first five-ish WoT books and it was a long time ago, so if I get anything wrong here then you’re not allowed to post about it in the comments)

The trailer starts off, somewhat strangely, with Nynaeve pushing Egwene off a cliff (or maybe it’s the other way around, I spent about a third of the first book thinking they were the same person). I don’t remember this scene at all in any of the books I read, but either way it’s kind of an odd way to start off a trailer for a fantasy epic.

The very obvious attempt to look like Lord Of The Rings would be kind of cringey even without the fact that Amazon is also making a Lord Of The Rings TV show. 

This is supposed to be the Shire Two Rivers, the quaint fantasy burg where the characters all start out, which based on its description I always pictured as being very flat and agrarian, but I guess since the Peter Jackson LOTR movies came out big mountains is how you signal that you’re in a fantasy universe.

The bois having a laugh before the trollocs show up. The casting for Perrin, Mat and Rand is pretty spot-on in terms of how I pictured them looking in the books, although Mat’s messy bed-head doesn’t really gel with his smooth-talking lady’s man persona.

Interestingly, in the showrunner’s quest to make this as much like Lord Of The Rings as possible, they seem to have shifted the setting’s historical analogue back a few centuries. Wheel Of Time often gets lumped into the “medieval fantasy” sub-genre, but if you pay attention to the descriptions at all it’s pretty clear that the setting is analogous to fairly advanced renaissance (the ebook covers are a good illustration of this). The Two Rivers inn/pub that this shot is presumably depicting is described in the books as a pretty modern building, but here it’s your generic Ye Olde Taverne.

No idea what’s happening here. I assume this is the aftermath of the opening cliff-push and if I had to hazard a guess I’d say it’s part of the Aes Sedai initiation where the novices confront visions, but I don’t remember any of them being described like this.

This is probably the Aes Sedai city. In the books it’s a place built with ancient magical technology and has impossible organic-looking constructions, whereas here it looks like something from a Skyrim mod. The CG is about as impressive as well.

I don’t really put much stock at all in characters looking like their book counterparts in adaptations, but fair play to the makeup and costume departments: this is more or less exactly how I pictured Moiraine (except that the Aes Sedai are supposed to have a kind of eternal youthfulness that makes the look simultaneously younger and also older than their physical age, but that would have been hard to pull off in live action; even in the book’s, it’s not entirely clear what exactly Robert Jordan was going for).

Speaking of costumes, here’s an example of a recent phenomenon in live-action fantasy (which I blame squarely on the latter half of Game Of Thrones), which is that no one seems to know how to design fantasy costumes anymore.

In the books the Aes Sedai all wear robes fringed with one of several colours that denote their Ajah (Hogwarts House, basically); in the series the coloured fringes have become full-on technicolour outfits like they’re Power Rangers, and the robes have become...whatever all this is. 

This is par for the course in modern fantasy, where any outfit more complex than armour turns into a ridiculously ornate affair with loads of fur, yards of fabric and complicated wrapping that seems extremely impractical for people who are supposed to be going off adventuring and fighting all the time (and sometimes even the armour isn’t spared).

I’m highlighting the Aes Sedai because they have the highest concentration of weird costumes, but even the more mundane characters also have it bad; Rand is wearing this bizarre sheepskin trench-coat thing that looks like it would suffocate you if it got wet.

Seriously, what is this? Why does it look like something out of The Wizard Of Oz? 

I’m not saying I want my fantasy properties to all look like a bunch of muddy peasants LARPing in a field, but there’s such a thing as being too creative. When I see stuff like this I always assume the different art departments were going hog wild on their own with no unifying creative direction.

The man-hating Red Ajah, looking like the mean clique in a dystopian YA novel. This is the specific shot that makes me think this series is going to suck.

This isn’t actually from the show, they just filmed one of the actresses watching this trailer for the first time

They’ve apparently decided to keep in the sub-plot where Mat gets corrupted by a cursed dagger, which is funny because it’s the most obvious point where the first book is just blatantly ripping off The Lord Of The Rings.

This is clearest look we get at the show’s take on the Orcs Trollocs, which are described in the books as looking like humans blended with features of animals. I always took that to mean that they’re like humanoid beastmen, but apparently some people interpreted the “blended” part a little differently, as in this artwork from the comic adaptation:

Thankfully, the show’s Trollocs are more in line with what I imagined.

Presented without comment

Here’s several screenshots highlighting Wheel Of Time’s visual approach to the One Power, which apparently involves lots of hilariously fake-looking CGI swooshy effects.

Admittedly the show’s creators were in a bit of a tough spot here, as magic in the books is mostly a mental process where the characters “weave” elemental energies together in a way that’s usually invisible to anyone watching until the intended effect takes place. Also, quite often the element being used to actually accomplish physical action is air, which is hard to depict in a visual medium to begin with.

But there has to be a better way than this. Just having the arrows stop mid-flight or having a bunch of guys go flying would look far more effective without adding cheap-looking CGI shimmer effects.

It’s a shame because the way magic is depicted in the first book specifically--before Jordan started really codifying the Aes Sedai’s powers into discrete categories--was very otherworldly and mysterious, which could have been neat to see in the series.

In Conclusion

Lest I give the wrong impression via my encyclopedic and absolutely correct knowledge of the books, I should be clear that I’m not a big wheelhead at all. I think the first book is a fun Tolkien knock-off that had a lot of potential for further development, but from the second book onwards it quickly gets bogged down by glacial pacing and Robert Jordan’s inability to keep his dick in his pants.

Even still, I spent quite a bit of time with these characters and this world before giving up on the books, and I have some residual interest in seeing them adapted to live action. There’s a decent fantasy story in there somewhere, if the bloat and self-indulgence could be cut away.

And maybe The Wheel Of Jeff Bezos will still deliver that, but based on this trailer, I’m not hopeful. The big problem seems to be a tight budget, and the fact that Amazon, one of the co-producers, is also bankrolling the most expensive TV series ever made surely has to be one of the reasons for that. When you take into account that said TV series is also en epic fantasy series--except based on an IP with orders of magnitude more mainstream cachet, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for a second season.