The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is New Line Cinema's return to The Lord of the Rings franchise, ten years after the end of The Hobbit trilogy. It's a movie that, as many pointed out when it was announced in 2021, has been made in order for New Line Cinema (subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery) to retain the film rights for The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and its appendices. So yes, in a way it's equivalent to those weird Spider-Man spin-offs from Sony or that awful 2015 Fantastic Four reboot from Fox, made just for the purpose of retaining IP rights.

Thankfully, it's better than any of those films, as it opts for something different that gives it its own energy: as it's an anime movie from a renowned Japanese director, Kenji Kamiyama (director of Blade Runner: Black Lotus and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex). Its anime format ends up being the one thing that justifies the film as you have seen this story before (in some parts, almost literally), only now you see it animation instead of live-action. And even that has serious limitations, as while the animation is technically good - with some beautiful shots but nothing breath-taking - it takes place in too few locations and feels too limited and dull when you think about the potential of an animated reimagining of Middle-earth...

Audiences have already been entertained by (or subjected to, depending on who you ask) Prime Video's The Rings of Power, which takes light inspiration from the movies' aesthetics but builds everything from scratch, so they may feel a bit confused when they hear Howard Shore's iconic score at the beginning of The War of the Rohirrim.

To maximise the ties with the movies, something that ends up being counter-productive, Miranda Otto also reprises her role as Éowyn (in reality, she is just a nameless narrator), and the movie revisits well known locations from the core trilogy: the Kingdom of Rohan and Helm's Deep... before it was known as Helm's Deep. They look exactly as you remember them from The Two Towers, which will be a plus for fans, but also feels like a detriment to this animated alternative, as everything feels too familiar.

The story takes inspiration from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings about the Rohan dynasty, and is set 183 years before The Lord of the Rings, telling the story of Helm Hammerhand and his daughter, who was not named by J.R.R. Tolkien. Screenwriter Philippa Boyens, who wrote all six previous The Lord of the Rings movies, decided to focus on her and named her Héra, after Hera Hilmar, the Icelandic actress from Mortal Engines. As Tolkien himself, who based much of the Rohan's army on medieval England, Boyens based Héra on the historical figure of Æthelflæd.

The story is very straightforward. Don't expect much political intrigue between royal families within Rohan and Gondor, as the reduced number of characters are quite one-dimensional, particularly the weak villain. There are also some very brief callbacks to the story of Sauron and the Rings, but the film is heavily built around Héra's story, her family, and a conflict that lacks true emotion.

The Rings of Power, Amazon's TV series, has been heavily criticised for having too many characters and locations and being, in general, boring. But after watching The War of the Rohirrim, it has made me appreciate it much more, because it tries new things, it's visually amazing (obscenely expensive too), and while many of its plotlines fail and had a very rough start, if you have some patience it will lead you to truly amazing moments, as it happened in the vastly underappreciated second season.

With The War of the Rohirrim, this sensation is the polar opposite. It's very easy to follow and the stakes are clear from the very first moment, stakes that are also unusually low for The Lord of the Rings, which could be a good thing if it didn't feel so... recycled. The Helm's Deep siege is one of the best moments of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and this movie asks you to watch it again, with characters you've just met, without enough background nor time to care much for them.

It's alarming, and honestly disappointing, that an animated movie feels so reduced in scope and so plain looking despite being technically good. The mix of realistic backgrounds and effects and 3D camera movements with hand-drawn animation is a bit odd sometimes but it works. There's just simply not much to look, since you already saw it all 22 years ago.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a good-looking and entertaining movie. It also has beautiful music too. But the story is simply not well-developed or even relevant enough to justify it being its own two-hour movie when most of the key scenes feel like a reprisal from The Two Towers, interlinked with a weak plot. The movie does have some teases of sequels along the journey, but neither feel, a priority nor attractive enough knowing its placement within the Middle-earth timeline (set less than two centuries before The Lord of the Rings).

But for new instalments in Middle-earth, it's either this or, unfortunately, the incoming The Hunt for Gollum... It's understandable that New Line Cinema doesn't want to lose the film rights for one of the greatest film trilogies of all-time, but they need to find better and more ambitious stories. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim isn't a bad film on its own, but it lives in the shadow of what came before. And it's main saving grace, it being an anime film, is also its biggest shortcoming. Animation should be used to let the artists' imagination run wild, not just copy what was already built 20 years ago.