The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review - a middling return to Middle-earth

Lauded by Auden, detested by Edmund Wilson, the Tolkien sagas have divided many from childhood onwards: for kids, they’re not quite pulpy enough to be the first choice for a Halloween costume, for grown-ups not quite literary enough to be literary.

 

They’re written in an adventure-rich, psychology-light middle style, full of dorkiness and idyll, and serenely suited to post-CGI cinema, where complexity of story takes precedence over complexity of mind.

They’re perhaps best viewed – and this may be how the enigmatic Tolkien saw them – as a compost-turning of history, except that history never had any magic in it.

 

This new animated feature from the same stable that produced the six Peter Jackson hobbit blockbusters has little magic and no hobbits, and feels like a placeholder for fans ahead of the long-awaited new live-action offerings. Almost wholly populated by regular humans, it tells of clashes between contending armies in a Beowulf world where the survival of dynasties and bloodlines is all. Worked up from an appendix at the back of one of the Rings books, and set nearly 200 years beforehand, the movie resembles a 12A-certificate Game of Thrones, though without that show’s critique of the need for dynasties and bloodlines in the first place.

 

It showcases Héra, the “wild” and “headstrong” daughter of a Thor-like warlord called Helm Hammerhand, who takes on the defence of the Rohan people after a proposed marriage pact with a rival tribe goes awry and other hairy types gang up on Rohan’s rough but courtly horse-riders – the unpronounceable “Rohirrim” as the philologically obsessed J. R. R. called them. (To help those, like me, who prefer giving the full name of a movie when asking for tickets at the box office, it sounds close to “R-rim” when uttered in the film.)

 

Driven back from their bases at Edoras and Isengard, our team make their last stand at Helm’s Deep, the mountain-gap fortress also assailed in the remarkable sequence in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers back in 2002. 

 

The visuals here, and throughout, compare poorly with the Jackson epics. Under the direction of Japanese anime specialist Kenji Kamiyama, the characters appear very drawn and 2D-like atop computer-made backgrounds that are more polished and three-dimensional. The background art thus has the effect of distancing the foreground. And although reference actors were filmed to get the character movements, these come over as juddery, with simple walking sometimes a struggle.

 

For those fed up with the cyber look of Pixar, there’s not the crafted flow of the Studio Ghibli films (which can be like listening to a concerto for wind after years of hearing electronic music) nor yet the 2D-within-3D vibe of the brilliant Spider-Verse movies.

 

The script, full of backstory gubbins, also lacks zing. Among the voices, the resounding RSC tones of Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhead commands the blasted heaths of Middle-earth with “We will paint the dawn red with the blood of our foes!”, and there’s fine support, as lowly folk, from Brit stalwarts Lorraine Ashbourne and Janine Duvitski. In the absence of hobbits and elves, you wouldn’t really know this was Tolkien-land but for the film’s title and brief treat-like appearances of orcs looking for gold rings, unearthed vocal offcuts from the late Christopher Lee as Saruman and a reference to Gandalf.

 

Gamely voiced by relative newcomer Gaia Wise, the action lead Héra – who becomes “the last of the true bloodline of Rohan” – is a strong argument for women in the military, and something of a riposte to the famously woman-wary Tolkien, who omitted to give this blade-swirling “shieldmaiden” a name in his story fragment.

 

With her anime-style pond eyes and pimple nose, for much of the time she’s dressed by Kamiyama in vaguely fetishistic corset-like leatherette which looks as though it might have come from the Middle-earth branch of Ann Summers. You can take anime out of Japan, but maybe you can’t take the Japan out of anime.