The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024)
Directed by: Kenji Kamiyama
Written by: Arty Papageorgiou, Jeffrey Addiss, Phoebe Gittins, Will Matthews
Starring: Brain Cox, Gaia Wise, Luke Pasqualino, Miranda Otto
USA / JAPAN
IN CINEMAS NOW
RUNNING TIME: 134 mins
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera
It’s 183 years before the events chronicled in The Lord Of The Rings. The kingdom of Rohan is ruled by King Helm, and his daughter Hera is to be married to a lord of Gondor. A Dunlending [hill tribe] lord named Freca isn’t happy about the latter and tries to force a marriage between Hera and his son Wulf, in order to usurp the throne. Helm fights Freca and accidently kills him. Wulf swears revenge and is banished, but, a few years later, when Hera is kidnapped by Targg, one of his generals, she finds out that Freca has become High Lord of the Dunlendings, and he’s about to invade Rohan….
The War Of The Rohirrim is in no way the first animated movie based in J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings; 1978 saw the release of Ralph Bakshi’s ambitious – so ambitious that he ran out of money and could only cover the first book and most of the second – adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, and soon after more juvenile cartoon features of The Hobbit and The Return Of The King followed. This one, which will probably be followed by more Tolkien-inspired big screen adventures in the next few years, seems to have been made largely to protect a loss of film rights. It’s based on a few paragraphs in the Appendices to The Lord Of The Rings, and one wonders if screenwriters Arty Papageorgiou, Jeffrey Addiss, Phoebe Gitttins and Will Matthews would have been better off expanding a more interesting story, of which there are loads in the Appendices, not to mention The Silmarillion, and certainly not one which didn’t recall The Two Towers so much – hell, a lot of it even takes place in one of the main settings of that movie, though I guess that deliberately recalling familiar elements was considered to be a good idea. I dunno – there’s so much they could have done while keeping it respectful to Tolkien and not actively pissing on him like a certain TV show has continually done. But nonetheless Rohan and Helm’s Deep Revisited is what we have, and the result is a simple tale of war and heroism whose simplicity actually works to its advantage, though only a small amount of the frequent action gets the blood going, and it’s animated in a curiously inconsistent fashion, sometimes looking great and sometimes looking lousy. Was the budget too low to achieve everything, or was this just a peculiar creative decision?
So, you’ll recall from The Two Towers that Rohan was the Anglo-Saxon-like kingdom that Aragorn, Merry, Pippin and eventually Gandalf find themselves in, and having to help defend it from Saruman and his orcs. The king in that was Theoden, but, as the Appendices tell us, he was only one of a long line of kings. Helm Hammerhand was one of the most important, indeed so important that Helm’s Deep was named after him, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, this film, despite having Helm in it a lot, chooses to focus primarily on his daughter who’s only mentioned in brief anf isn’t even named in the writings. Now called Hera, she’s the first person who we see, riding toward a mountaintop, feeding the neighbouring Eagles in the process, after a nice opening where, as we hear some familiar Howard Shore themes on the soundtrack, a map dissolves into almost photo-real countryside from above and the familiar voice of Miranda Otto as Eomer narrates – though successive bits of narration are a bit intrusive and uneccessary. Upon her return to Edoras, the headquarters of Rohan, Hera comes across her brother Hama singing a saga. She also meets Haleth, her other brother and her cousin Frealaf. A man called Freca is arriving with his son Wulf. He’s the leader of one of the neighbouring Dunlending tribes which, we’re told, also inhabit Rohan and which are resentful of their rulers having more than them. While this particular detail is never revisited, it’s rather nice to learn that the people who are the enemy in this movie have maybe a bit of reason to dislike their bosses, even if it’s common to most kingdoms and countries, and it’s something that could easily be stirred up. This is the first sign that here, we have a different approach to the villains than is common in Tolkien-inspired movies, villains who are human and aren’t purely evil. Wulf wants to marry Hera but she’s not interested. In fact she soon after states that she doesn’t want to marry anybody, and the same later on. Yeah we get it, marriage is passe nowadays.
Freca complains about the possibility of Hera becoming married to a lord of Gondor, saying that it will make Rohan weaker. Helm becomes wary and believes that he’s only interested in seizing the throne. The two fight outside and Helm unintentionally kills Freca with a single blow, earning Helm the nickname ‘Hammerhand’. Wulf, devastated, vows revenge, us now being given a main villain who, despite his unpleasantness beforehand, has an understandable excuse for being villainous thereon. He’s expelled and disappears, and time passes until we revisit Hera and her cousin Frealaf out and about and coming across a dead soldier and tamer of Mumakil – also called Oliphants – which are, yes, the big elephants that we’ve seen before, though this one isn’t quite as huge. It’s a bit of a stretch that this creature would even be in Rohan, but not impossible. It’s rabid and attacks Hera, who disposes of it by luring it to a lake where it’s eaten by a Watcher in the Water; remember the tentacles monstrosity the Company encounter in The Fellowship Of The Ring? There’s something slightly off about the action here, it’s not as exciting as it ought to be, and this will become a bit of a problem. Unfortunately, Hera is then kidnapped by General Targg who takes Hera to Wulf’s stronghold where it’s revealed that Wulf has become lord of the Dunlending rebels; he cuts her face on purpose after accidentally cutting it when they were younger, the latter nicely shown in a flashback. She offers to marry him, in the hope that he stops attacking Rohan, but Frealaf and her aunt Olwyn rescue her. Helm thinks that Frealaf failed to protect Hera and sees his advice of fleeing Edoras for the Hornburg [aka Helm’s Deep] as cowardice and casts him out. Helm then prepares for battle after Lord Thorne promises to raise men, but there’s a traitor in their midst.
Us eventually getting the Battle of Helm’s Deep “trial run” will be no surprise to viewers, though it’s oddly low key, us never really getting the mass conflict that things seem to be building up to until a very final brief battle which is rather too familiar [hell, even some of the shots are the same], the emphasis being general on skirmishes, the idea being no doubt being to differentiate from what we saw before as well as to save money. And skirmishes there are certainly plenty of, though only two or three are properly thrilling, a duel towards the end being the most notable example, which is began by Hera appearing in a seriously cool-looking though rather impractical white outfit. However, I was more interested in the way one of her other outfits sometimes made it look like she was showing lots of skin and was almost naked because of its colour, even though that was probably not intentional, it just being my dirty mind, in an age where the new Red Sonja’s costume has been changed to avoid the “male gaze” or whatever. Hera is a great heroine we can get behind; those worried about the tiresome “girl boss” trope appearing yet again needn’t worry, as she isn’t automatically superior to all these men, learning lessons from some and even needing rescuing. Saying all that, the strongest character might be the admirably but perhaps excessively brave Helm, who becomes an object of fear for the bad guys, in a section that had tremendous potential but which seems rushed and only partly realised. Two Orcs and presumably a Cave Troll later show up, though their designs are rather different to what we’re used to; I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
One of the things that anime often does so well is to mix 2d and 3d animation, but for some reason it’s not always pulled off well here. Things are strange right from the beginning when characters don’t look as if they’re really moving in their environment; it’s like we’re watching the animated equivalent of rear projection. Sometimes people are actually floating in the air while walking. Huh? Said environment is often convincing and detailed but sometimes it has really shoddy fake depth of field. Characters are usually hand drawn but when there are crowds we sometimes get digital people, usually mixed in. There’s a very odd bit when lots of Dunlendings are moving towards the camera, and they seem “rotoscoped” – rotoscoping being that technique where they trace over live-action footage – while the people look like they’re literally slowly sliding down the hill they’re on. I wonder if the rotoscope effect we sometimes see was intended as a sort of tribute to the 1978 The Lord Of The Rings, but other stuff is just bizarre, looking almost amateurish. Odd angles are often employed for some of the action sequences, which usually doesn’t help, but there’s a good variety of colour schemes even if perhaps too much of what we see is muted, and there’s some nice attempting to replicate lice action techniques, such as something or somebody being out of focus while we focus on what or who our attention is intended to be fixed on. And occasionally there’s something rather magnificent, perhaps most notably a pan out from one character battling loads of opponents while snow is falling, the combatants being lost in and being reduced to almost nothing amidst the all-conquering mother nature.
The music score by Stephen Gallagher replicates the Shore style, with much usage of Shore harmonies and not that much usage of Shore themes, though Gallagher seems unable to come up with decent themes of his own, and the orchestra at times sounds thin. It’s still a decent element of this effort, as is the way that it restrains itself in connecting with the events we’ve seen in other films; even at the ending, where we expect some, it’s not overdone, though a cartoon version of a certain character played by a certain favourite actor of mine doesn’t look that much like said certain actor. The War Of Tbe Rohirrrim may have been better served by going for a higher rating, considering the often dark nature of a tale where characters we like tend to die yet can be stabbed in closeup with no blood. But it’s definitely a reasonably diverting return to Middle-Earth which just about justifies it having been made, even if it often doesn’t seem fully achieved in rather a lot of areas.
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