I was never quite sure what to think about the Lord of the Rings anime film War of the Rohirrim. With lukewarm reviews, I waffled on whether to bother seeing it in the theatre, and by the time I finally decided to, it had already ended its theatrical run. Now, though, I’ve finally gotten around to watching it on streaming.
By all logic, this should be the story of Helm Hammerhand, the king of Rohan during a war with the Dunlendings, or perhaps his nephew and ultimate successor Fréaláf, but instead both are barely in it, and the focus is on Helm’s daughter, who is unnamed in Tolkien’s writings but given the moniker Héra in the film.
This might be all right if Héra was fleshed out into a compelling character, but she is not. Instead she’s yet another fantasy princess who hates wearing dresses and just wants to ride horses and sword fight, just like every other fantasy princess written in the last fifty years or so.
For the love of god, I would give almost anything just to have one royal heir in a fantasy story who embraces their role and isn’t a villain, just for variety’s sake. Every hero prince is a bookish, soft-hearted geek, and every hero princess is a rough and tumble tomboy who hates the trappings of court. Every. Single. Time. It never ends!
I could easily spend a thousand words or more tearing this movie apart, listing off its many plot holes and painfully dumb moments, but I don’t want to waste the effort, so I’ll just point out a few other lowlights.
One thing that really struck me about War of the Rohirrim is that every major character — hero and villain — is a whiny, incompetent moron. It’s less a clash of titans and more a struggle between Helm, Héra, and the villain over who can screw up harder.
The other is that this is one of the worst examples yet of what I recently dubbed “hey, remember when” media. So much of this movie is just a series of soulless, mindless callbacks to the Lord of the Rings films, to the point where that seems to almost be its entire reason for existing.
Indeed, Héra’s entire character seems to be an attempt to just tell Éowyn’s story all over again, but it’s done without heart or thought and thus lacks all of the poignancy of the original.
There are those who would say that this is what happens when you make a whole movie out of a few paragraphs from Tolkien’s appendices, but competent writers can easily flesh out a basic premise into a compelling story. This very much could have been a good movie. Instead it’s just empty shovelware.
Can I say anything good about it? Well, I did enjoy hearing Miranda Otto narrating. It’s a shame they wasted her on such a dumb movie, but that was a form of nostalgia bait that was more welcome. The soundtrack was pretty solid, with lots of callbacks to the excellent Rohirrim theme of the Jackson films. And there’s about five minutes where Helm remembers he’s a functioning adult and actually lives up to the badass legend Tolkien wrote around him.
Otherwise it’s a disaster, though. As bad as Rings of Power, I’d say.
Overall rating: 3/10
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