Film Review — The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Kenji Kamiyama’s animated take on an obscure bit of Tolkien’s appendixes is well made but entirely superfluous to artistic requirements

Credit: New Line Cinema/Warner Brothers

We are doomed to live in times when JRR Tolkien’s fantasy masterpiece is strip-mined and squeezed dry for every possible penny, yielding nothing of significant artistic value. TV series The Rings of Power is a depressing case in point, and now there are absurd plans to make a film about the time when Gandalf and Aragorn tracked down Gollum to learn the truth about the One Ring. None of this is necessary for any reason other than money, and it greatly depresses me, considering how much I love Tolkien’s original novel and Peter Jackson’s classic big-screen adaptation. I have much the same feeling about The War of the Rohirrim.

Jackson’s visual style is inherent throughout this animated take on an obscure bit of the appendixes, concerning King Helm “Hammerhand” of Rohan and his unnamed daughter. Set a couple of hundred years before the events of the novel, the film gives a name to the aforementioned daughter, Héra, showing her to be a spirited, fierce, independent young woman who gets her kicks attempting to befriend the (highly dangerous) giant eagles by feeding them. When one of Rohan’s Lords, Freca, attempts to wed his son Wulf to Héra, Helm sees through the scheme to end his royal bloodline and gets rather shirty. Suffice it to say, things go south, with civil war proving the eventual upshot. I won’t describe the plot any further, though the trailer gives away more than I have.

Director Kenji Kamiyama does a decent job wedding his anime style with Jackson’s established aesthetic. The vocal cast also does well, with Miranda Otto’s Eowyn narrating with the feel of a Rohan fireside story. Brian Cox is suitably gruff as the flawed, prideful, but legendary warrior king, with Gaia Wise and Luke Pasqualino solid as Héra and Wulf, respectively. Stephen Gallagher tries hard to add some memorable music to Howard Shore’s classic Rohan themes and, in all fairness, the film is never less than moderately diverting.

However, it’s impossible to shake off the feeling that we’re viewing something entirely superfluous to requirements. There’s a reason Tolkien relegated incidents like how Helm’s Deep got its name to the background, sketching out the narrative in basic terms as part of a longer, rambling history of Rohan, buried in appendix footnotes. The main plot of The Lord of the Rings is what really grabs us, not this. That’s why one’s excitement goes up several notches at peripheral elements; a couple of roaming orcs confused as to why Mordor is looking for rings, the brief appearance of Saruman (with archive recordings of Christopher Lee used as dialogue), the mere mention of Gandalf, and so on.

Of course, all that does is make one wish one was viewing Jackson’s earlier masterpieces, which makes The War of the Rohirrim a weirdly unsatisfying experience. I suppose it’s passable on its own terms. There are plenty of action, battles, and fantastical creatures (the giant eagles, mumakil, a watcher in the water, and a Hoth Wampa-ish snow troll all make appearances). Yet the plot meanders, failing to maintain the siege tension that ought to be present. Many a narrative beat is repeated from The Two Towers, and the screenplay (by Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins, and Arty Papageorgio, from a story co-created by Phillipa Boyens) includes too many dialogue callbacks.

Therefore, it’s impossible to view this without a certain nagging frustration. The War of the Rohirrim suffers from prequelitis, boxed in by the already established timeline. An inevitable sense of lower stakes also hamstrings proceedings. With the fate of only one nation at stake, rather than the whole of Middle-Earth, it fails to recapture the epic sweep of what made The Lord of the Rings so special and instead feels like a superfluous afterthought. Phillipa Boyens may feel Wulf’s human antagonist is more relevant to current events (as she told Entertainment Weekly), but relevant or not, the lack of flaming eyeball Dark Lord villains emasculates this film in comparison to its illustrious predecessors. For Middle-Earth completists only.

(Originally published at Medium.)

The Dillon Empire beyond Substack

For a full list of my published novels, click click here.

For more on my novels and other fiction projects, click here.

For my Patreon page, click here.

For my Medium page, click here.