The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
On his throne in the Golden Hall in Edoras sits Helm, King of Rohan, flanked by his sons Hama and Haleth and his daughter Héra, the rumour that she is to be married to a lord of Gondor having brought an unwanted audience with Freca, a lord of Dunlending, who had presumed she would be betrothed to his own son Wulf, neither party interested in her own feelings in the matter.
A challenge is issued, and with a single blow Freca lies dead on the stones; calling for vengeance despite his father clearly being the aggressor who prompted the incident, Wulf is banished from the kingdom but not from the thoughts of Héra who misses her childhood friend, but in his exile he has become a cold and cunning man obsessed with revenge and possessing both her and the lands of her people.
A tale set around two hundred years before the events of the War of the Ring in the familiar lands of Rohan, the wooden fortress of Edoras and the high stone walls of Dunharrow as well as a brief trip to the Isengard and the stone tower of Orthanc, The War of the Rohirrim is liberally adapted from J R R Tolkien’s appendices on the history of Middle Earth with credit to five writers including Philippa Boyens who co-wrote the scripts for Peter Jackson’s films of The Lord of the Rings.
Directed by Kenji Kamiyama, established in the field of anime, The War of the Rohirrim is an uncomfortable attempt to blend that animation style with the equally distinct world of Middle Earth slavishly recreated in every detail of architecture and costume, the resulting hybrid an unwarranted epic rendered as though it were shot as live action, taking no advantage of the opportunities animation offers to present a more fantastical realm while also sidestepping the astonishing achievement of the original films, that such sets were built and that hundreds of horses were ridden across remote plains into simulated battle.
Narrated by Miranda Otto’s Éowyn to conspicuously tie the film to future events, as did the overextended version of The Hobbit, butter stretched over too much bread indeed, a cameo by Saruman is shoehorned in and former Hobbits Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan make voice cameos as hungry orcs hunting for rings, although the leads are Brian Cox as Helm, stubborn to the point of self-defeating, Gaia Wise as Héra, managing to be kidnapped, captured or cornered no less than three times, and Luke Pasqualino as Wulf, shallow, duplicitous, vicious, and incapable of forgiveness or self-reflection, a fittingly cartoon villain.
The dialogue stilted and lifeless and events often painfully stupid to witness, one character giving such a lengthy speech before his noble sacrifice that he could easily have reached safety, particularly if the archers who man the battlements above hadn’t apparently been given the night off, the finale shameless regurgitates the arrival of the cavalry as already depicted by Jackson in The Two Towers and Ralph Bakshi in his own more imaginative animation, small grace found when Kamiyama holds back in Héra’s rebirth as shieldmaiden from presenting her as full-on anime princess with ribbons flowing in her hair.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX
