It’s Amazing! Granted I’m only like 110 pages into Fellowship but Tolkien is an amazing story teller. I read the Hobbit a while back and since I work from home (the one benefit of my company having Covid hysteria) I get to read a lot more.
I remember Peter Jackson saying he wanted to tell Tolkien’s story. It’s too bad modern day adaptations don’t have that respect for source material. Wheel of Time comes to mind. That showrunner is more concerned with lgbt representation than actually adapting the story. And I have no hope for the new show based on the Simarillion (which I’ll read after I finish the trilogy).
I can't compare it to the books since I've not read them, but the theme in the first three episodes is definitely PC and racially based. You have the old empire that is controlled by a white patriarchy prophesied to die and the heroes are two black women from unprivileged origins who acknowledge that it cannot be saved, only changed.
It's a message that is all too similar to other modern envisionings of our ethos of heroes: death to whitey, especially white heterosexual men.
Like in West World, all the women kill all the men, Mad Maxx when our hero spends half the movie shackled and gagged, Star Trek Discovery when in the first 15 minutes of episode 1 the black klingon tells the white klingon that his color is a problem for him, The Last Jedi when Solo is killed off and the only white character that everyone wants to be a hero is side lined by feminist ideologies.