The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024, dir. Kenji Kamiyama)

by Jack Martin | Dec 12, 2024

Certificate: 12A

Running Time: 134 mins

UK Distributor: Warner Bros

UK Release Date: 13 December 2024

WHO’S IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM?

Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Luke Pasqualino, Miranda Otto, Laurence Ubong Williams, Shaun Dooley, Lorraine Ashbourne, Yazdan Qafouri, Benjamin Wainwright, Michael Wildman, Jude Akuwudike, Bilal Hasna, Janine Duvitski, Christopher Lee

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Kenji Kamiyama (director), Jeffrey Addiss, Phoebe Gittins, Will Matthews and Arty Papageorgiou (writers), Philippa Boyens, Joseph Chou and Jason DeMarco (producers), Stephen Gallagher (composer), Tsuyoshi Sadamatsu (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

In ancient Middle-Earth, the kingdom of Rohan goes to war…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM?

Twenty years have gone by since Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy brought J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth to sprawling live-action life, but the magic has scarcely been recaptured in the years since. Not even Jackson could manage it a second time round, with his Hobbit trilogy gaining far less critical and audience appraisal, while the ongoing Prime Video series The Rings of Power hasn’t caught on quite as much as Amazon may have hoped. So, in a last-ditch effort to remind audiences of the sheer storytelling might of Middle-Earth (but mainly to keep the rights from reverting back to the Tolkien estate), Warner Bros has turned to an unexpected source: animation.

Of course, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim isn’t the first time that Middle-Earth has been adapted into an animated feature. The infamous Ralph Bakshi-directed adaptation of Lord of the Rings divided audiences back in 1978 but has since gained a cult following, while the two Rankin/Bass takes on The Hobbit and Return of the King are also fondly remembered, if not entirely for the right reasons. But by taking this unconventional route for a major new entry in a hugely popular franchise, even hiring acclaimed anime filmmaker Kenji Kamiyama to direct, The War of the Rohirrim immediately opens up a number of exciting possibilities, from stylistic action sequences to pulling off stunts that would simply be impossible to do in a live-action setting.

Unfortunately, The War of the Rohirrim does not take as much advantage of its animated form as much as it should. It is, quite surprisingly, a sluggish and rather uninteresting affair, one that disappointingly feels like a missed opportunity to do something profound and original with this material, thereby ensuring that the magic once felt during the Lord of the Rings trilogy has still yet to be reclaimed.

As narrated by Miranda Otto’s Éowyn – presumably because Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel was off sick that day – the film, set a couple hundred years before the events of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogies, takes place in the kingdom of Rohan, where the headstrong Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise) freely gallops across the plains feeding the giant eagles that occasionally fly overhead. When she’s not doing that, she’s the dutiful daughter of Rohan’s mighty King Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox), who one day is approached by Dunlending lord Freca (Shaun Dooley) and his son Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) to propose uniting their rival kingdoms. The resulting fist-fight ends in Freca’s death, leaving a vengeful Wulf to declare war on Rohan and round up an army of Wildmen to take on Helm’s fierce Rohirrim soldiers, with the King responding in kind as Héra helps defend her people and her kingdom from Wulf’s wrath.

The problem, though, is that unlike the Lord of the Rings films, and to a point even the Hobbit films, there’s really not much reason to care about any of it. The script lacks considerable depth in its storytelling, with the titular war coming down to a black-and-white showdown between good and evil that barely feels complex, let alone worthy of being told on the big screen in the first place. Very few of the characters are fleshed out enough to hold your attention, with the vast majority of them feeling particularly bland and unmemorable, to where you don’t even remember what their names are when the time comes for their biggest moments. Any hint of a character showing signs that they’re more than their designated good or evil archetypes are distinguished just as quickly, and there’s never really any other aspect of their personalities – particularly both the main hero and the central villain – that are gripping enough to make you feel as though you could watch them as long as you did in Jackson’s earlier trilogies.

Even the animation, arguably the most distinct selling point of this film, is lacking in scope. The hand-drawn anime style is admittedly pretty to look at, but often it feels restrained in its movement, with some action sequences coming off as oddly stilted since it has a stop-and-start nature as characters lunge at each other or away from giant rabid creatures, a far cry from the much smoother anime stylings of, say, Studio Ghibli. Many of the 2D drawings are also superimposed onto 3D backdrops that closely resemble Jackson’s vision of Middle-Earth, and most of the time it can be distracting with how awkwardly they go together, since you can always spot where the hand-drawn figures were probably meant to be positioned before being dropped in the middle of CGI graphics. This does not help the film during big battle sequences that feel strangely underpopulated, as the budget appears to have only allowed for a handful of soldiers on screen at a time, making this war come off as more of a mild scuffle than anything truly on the same scale as what we’ve seen before.

What makes this movie so incredibly frustrating is that the whole time, you’re always envisioning the kind of movie this so easily could have been, perhaps a stylish, innovative, and fresh approach in the same vein as the Spider-Verse movies. But instead, you’re stuck with something that plays it glaringly safe in both its style and its substance, like many of those direct-to-video animated Batman movies that they’re often churning out, rendering it an even bigger waste of potential that only completionist Lord of the Rings fans will truly get something out of.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a colossal disappointment that fails to take advantage of its unique animation style and the rich storytelling of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth to make something truly worthy of Peter Jackson’s previous trilogies, in both style and substance.