Bezos’ grand adventure pays off with this majestic fantasy
At first inspection Amazon’s The Wheel of Time looks like Game of Thrones with its plumage tweaked. Bearded men dash about waving swords; female characters are belted into many shades of fantastical frock. The series even features a Hollywood name clopping around grimly in cape and hood – Rosamund Pike taking up the baroque baton from Thrones’s Sean Bean.
There are also murky mutterings about dragons and ancient prophecies whilst an all-powerful dark lord slumbers in the shadows (the Jeff Bezos jokes write themselves). But substantial differences exist, too, between WOT and GOT. And the success or failure of this $100million adaptation of Robert Jordan’s fantasy saga may hinge on how its more distinctive elements are received by audiences hungry for further helpings of what Game of Thrones had to offer.
The biggest departure is tone. Wheel of Time does not feature 10-year-olds shoved from windows or right royal incest. It isn’t entirely squeaky clean and is too gory for children, but it is recognisably a grand adventure. In its early episodes this big Wheel has enough sweep, mystique and momentum to suggest that it can give Amazon the global hit it dearly craves.
That oomph is partly down to the massive budget. It is also, though, a testament to the mythic grandeur of Jordan’s 14-volume tale. As a bonus, it makes an unexpected case for Pike – porcelain-delicate star of Gone Girl and An Education – as hard-bitten action heroine. She plays Moiraine, a warriorpriestess in a blue cape. As the excitement begins she is scouring a Middle Earth-esque fantasy realm for a Messiah figure, the “Dragon”.
According to prophecy only the Dragon can stop the Satanic “Dark One” from breaking free from his chains, unleashing chaos, forcing us all to listen to Gary Barlow’s new Christmas album etc, etc. After years of searching, Moiraine and her laconic bodyguard Lan (Daniel Henney) have tracked the potential saviour to a remote land called The Two Rivers.
Her information is that the Dragon is approximately 20 years old and has lived out their life in bucolic obscurity, unaware of their heritage. What she discovers are five young people more or less matching that description. These are likely lads Mat (Barney Harris), Perrin (Marcus Rutherford) and Rand (Josha Stradowski) and their friends Egwene (Madeleine Madden) and Nynaeve (Zoë Robins).
Alas, the Dark One strikes before Moiraine can identify the Dragon. And it is with the arrival of baddies such as the Trollocs and Fades that the scale of Amazon’s investment in The Wheel of Time becomes clear. Hordes of monsters romp across the screen – a testament to the luminosity of Jordan’s imagination and the awe-inducing reach of Bezos’ chequebook.
Jordan’s novels are widely beloved. And fans may not be on board with some of the alterations by showrunner Rafe Judkins. These start as relatively minor but become significant further into the season. Judkins has, however, preserved Jordan’s feminist take on fantasy and the idea that only women can be trusted to wield magic. Yet the prophecy suggests the Dragon is probably (not definitely) a man. Will he be able to channel his abilities against evil? Or might he plunge the humankind into a second darkness?
The monsters and the fight scenes are exquisite. Still, for all Amazon’s resources, The Wheel of Time manages to be simultaneously ravishing to behold and slightly cheesy. The costuming in particular has a pantomime quality. Rand, one of the five who is the potential “Dragon”, sports a long fur coat that screams craft beer and banjo. He looks more like a Mumford and Sons roadie than a great redeemer. And a whiff of kitsch similarly emanates from the brightly hued outfits of Moiraine’s Aes Sedai order of magical nuns. Dressed in blues, greens and reds – representing their varying political perspectives – they have the fancy dress overtones of something you might see at a Dungeons & Dragons convention.
But these aesthetic blemishes are eclipsed by the sheer pace of the story and by the gripping vastness of the world Jordan has created. Wisely, The Wheel of Time doesn’t lean too deeply into the books’s spa retreat philosophy (Jordan was forever bunging in woolly allusions to Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism). It instead serves up a vast tableaux of plucky heroes and heroines, homicidal wizards and curly-haired ogres. Game of Thrones buffs may very well be devastated by the lack of nudity/incest/kit Harington looking sad. For everyone else this fantasy saga has the potential to cast a spell of its own devising.
The Wheel of Time ★★★★