Amazon's Gorgeous 'The Wheel of Time' Is Fast-Paced Fantasy
The Robert Jordan adaptation fits as much as it can into its hourlong episodes—sometimes too much.
With superheroes having claimed movies that are way longer than your average feature-length blockbuster, the realm of television is increasingly home to literature's complex fantasy adaptations. From Game of Thrones to The Witcher, television is swiftly proving itself to have the bandwidth necessary to tell these convoluted tales, with multiple hours and many seasons devoted to realizing their source material's richly imagined worlds. The Wheel of Time, Amazon Prime's adaptation of Robert Jordan's intimidatingly dense 17-book high fantasy series, is well-suited to this kind of lengthy, episodic storytelling, its many characters hopping from one crucial location to another as their paths of destiny unfold and intertwine.
As a sort of audition for Amazon's Lord of the Rings series (especially as the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, draws so much of its plot structure from The Fellowship of the Ring), The Wheel of Time isn't exactly auspicious, but there's enough there to keep high fantasy fans watching, if only to absorb the bucketfuls of information thrown at you with every episode while you look at everyone's gorgeous costumes and sets and sweeping vistas.
Three thousand years after an event known as the Breaking of the World, a group of female sorceresses known as Aes Sedai channel the One Power, a magical source of energy flowing through space and time and all living things, which is known to drive men insane if they attempt to wield it. A powerful Aes Sedai named Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) finds four young people in the nowheresville village of Emond's Field—Rand (Josha Stradowski), Mat (Barney Harris), Perrin (Marcus Rutherford), and Egwene (Madeleine Madden)—one of whom she believes to be the Dragon Reborn, an all-powerful figure whose first incarnation was responsible for causing the end of the world. Moiraine and her protector, a warrior named al'Lan Mandragoran (Daniel Henney), help the four youngsters escape from their village when it's attacked by a band of Trollocs led by an eyeless Fade bent on corrupting the Dragon Reborn to the dark side.
With all that information to get through, the show at times feels much too breezy, with each episode spanning large chunks of narrative and backstory that would take hundreds of pages to get through in book form. The pacing is really my only criticism, though it's a big one. I can't help but compare it to something like the Lord of the Rings movies, which, even in their theatrical cuts, spent long stretches of time with certain characters in certain environments, allowing the audience to get a firm sense of place before moving on to the next thing.
The rest of the show is remarkable in its scope and general sense of aesthetics, dressing its characters in the type of swooshy cloaks and tunics and boots and belts that put me in the mood to find the nearest Renaissance Faire. The sets feel lived-in and detailed, with lots of scenes of characters sitting down in taverns with bread and ale, a high fantasy staple. The cast of mainly newcomers are compelling to watch more often than not, especially when they're eventually separated into smaller groups and allowed meatier, talkier interactions with each other. Daniel Henney is fantastic as the stoic Lan, and Rosamund Pike is wonderful and a little bit terrifying, though she's mostly out of commission in the first few episodes (the first three of which will all drop at once, a good strategy considering how much story there is to get through in three hours—you'll know if you like the show by the time you've watched those).
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The show has a lot going for it: rich source material, a cast who seem game for anything, well-choreographed fights (tons of them), some of the most beautiful visuals in a television show this year, and a very promising start, if a little clumsy with the exposition. If television is the new home of labyrinthine high fantasy stories, you could do worse than spend a few hours spinning around The Wheel of Time.