Paper-thin characters and a derivative plot make this Lord Of The Rings anime into a flashy legal exercise. Here’s our The War Of The Rohirrim review.
A film which exists to settle Warner Bros’ Lord Of The Rings development obligations, War Of The Rohirrim is an anime-inspired epic set 183 years before Peter Jackson’s trilogy, and a 134-minute accounting exercise. That isn’t necessarily a problem; in a year when 14 of the top 15 highest-grossing movies worldwide are sequels of one form or another, sometimes we just have to take the blockbusters we’re given.
Sometimes, however, the business case for a film so obviously outweighs its artistic merit it proves too distracting to ignore. As Blade Runner: Black Lotus director Kenji Kamiyama’s adaptation of another J R R Tolkien appendices settles in to reproduce its fourth or fifth plot point from The Two Towers, it’s hard not to wonder just what we’re all doing here. Who is this film for?
If you’ve ever wondered how the big castle in the second Lord Of The Rings film got its name, then it turns out this film is for you. Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox) is the very large king of Rohan with a pointy helmet and a daughter, Héra (Gaia Wise). He’s an angry man who can take the head off a troll with his bare hands. She’s a tomboy-ish character with a marriage proposal from a local evildoer (we can tell he’s evil because he looks like anthropomorphised fan art of The Lion King’s Scar, and his name is Wulf). After what we’ll politely call “a diplomatic faux pas”, they’ll have to lead the kingdom of Rohan against the Dunlending tribes intent on setting things on fire and causing mischief.
History might not repeat itself very often, but in the world of Middle Earth it gets pretty darn close. How else can we explain the character of Fréaláf Hildeson (Laurence Ubong Williams), Hammerhand’s nephew who fulfils a beat-for-beat identical role to his descendant, Éomer, nearly 200 years later? Or the multiple action sequences, set pieces and lines of dialogue apparently copy-pasted from one of the world’s most successful film trilogies? Or the 3D-animated New Zealand with 2D anime characters hastily (a feature-length animated film, the director notes, would normally take between five-seven years; Rohirrim was finished in just over three) drawn on top?
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Even this might be excused if the novelty factor of a Lord Of The Rings anime allowed the film to take some more liberties with the source material. Instead, the film takes great pains to tie itself into a cinematic universe the form just doesn’t fit into: characters jump from guard towers and cliff faces without a scratch; fight off gangs of enemies with un-acknowledged super-strength, and build siege weapons not so much taking liberties with the laws of physics as taking a battering ram to them. Meanwhile, Miranda Otto’s sporadic (and unnecessary) narration reminds us this all takes place in the same world as Jackson’s original trilogy (the New Zealand director has duly been wheeled out on the interview circuit to further ram this point home, despite only holding an Executive Producer credit). The trailer above even starts with a shot of Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, for Pete’s sake.
But with a budget of $30m (coincidentally, the exact reported sum Warner Bros received as a tax rebate after scrapping Coyote vs Acme last year), it’s hard to imagine anyone at the studio will really mind. It can make its new Gollum film in 2026, and that’s the only reason we’re here. That a few hours of occasionally diverting sound and colour were spat out of the end of the process is more or less secondary.
The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim arrives in UK cinemas on 13th December.
