Le Seigneur des Anneaux : La Guerre des Rohirrim

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) : Movie Review -

We are all die-hard fans of Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy and somewhat of "The Hobbit" trilogy. Let's just forget Prime Video's failed attempts for now. Kenji Kamiyama's tale is a prequel to Jackson's trilogy, but it's an "anime," and don't you worry, it has enough content. The problem arises in the scale, which can never be large for an animated feature, and since we have seen Jackson's gigantic sequences, the scale of this film looks quite small in comparison. The film still manages to keep things interesting in the first half, but then it lacks enough material to maintain the same momentum in the second half. Every LOTR film previously had one large-scale action sequence in the climax, and this film lacks that essential element! It's totally UNACCEPTABLE.

Set 183 years before the events of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001-2003), The War of the Rohirrim tells the story of Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox), a legendary king of Rohan, and his family as they defend their kingdom. Helm's daughter, Hera (Gaia Wise), is young and brave and has no thoughts of marriage, yet the matter is openly discussed, and Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) proposes to her. Both she and her father reject the proposal, leaving Wulf's father enraged. He is killed by Helm, and then Wulf forms an army to seek revenge. Hera is kidnapped but saved, and then Helm is trapped and mortally wounded during a war. As winter approaches, will Hera be able to defeat the coward Wulf?

Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins, and Arty Papageorgiou wrote a 130-minute film that features many slow moments. Jackson created almost four-hour-long epics, but they never felt slow or boring. Kenji made a two-hour film and still gave me enough time to take small naps. The first half of the film was indeed interesting, but the second half failed to provide enough support or content. Three back-to-back action sequences appeared in the first half, offering nice entertainment and keeping the film engaging. Two of them take place at night, making it too dark and leading to an unsatisfactory experience. With anime, things are slow, and dialogues come at a tortoise's pace; then you have to endure dark visuals-all of that is too much to handle. The eagles aren't utilized well, the climax lacks action, the middle portion contains too much drama that slows down the narrative, and last but not least, the predictability of the storyline sums up the verdict for you.

Brian Cox voices the hot-tempered King Helm, portraying the character as aggressive and macho. Gaia Wise as Hera was sweet, but as I mentioned, too many pauses between words make things seem childish. Luke Pasqualino has done a fabulous job as the voice artist for Wulf, while Miranda Otto, Lorraine Ashbourne, Shaun Dooley, Yazdan Qafouri, Benjamin Wainwright, and Laurence Ubong Williams provide excellent support. Technically, they are all spot-on for an anime production, but that also detracts from its human connection.

I am still pondering the mediocre sound design and art direction. LOTR implies colossal scale, but where is that in Rohirrim? LOTR requires a proper lineup of events, and this one is far from perfect. Now I just think back to the beginning of the story and realize that Helm could have easily killed Wulf, preventing all this from happening. Anyway, who is interested in watching such a cowardly villain? No principles, no rules, and no loyalty are acceptable, but where is the bravery? The visual effects are good, but the grandeur is lacking. That stupendous quality is clearly absent. Kenji Kamiyama's emotional arcs take too much time, and during that phase, we lose connection with the film as LOTR or action fans. The anime vision is still acceptable and should please anime enthusiasts. Less said is better; LOTR: The War of the Rohirrim gets the Rohirrim part right but forgets to focus on the "war" aspect. This is a decent film, but it falls short of its own potential and could have been much better.

RATING - 5/10*

The lesson here is that it is dangerous to monkey around with Tolkien. Unless you have something that will enhance the story, without mangling it, you will make a lot of people very angry, and angry people don't put their bums on cinema seats.

It is also not a good idea to make the characters do absurd things every 30 seconds or so. The audience are not going to react well to being faced with ridiculous, or improbable situations all the time. They will grumble to their friends about them, and those friends will decide not to bother seeing it.

I am a big anime fan. I think it's fantastic, and I watch a lot of it. It is NOT a good idea to have a film like this directed by an anime director. Anime has a different perspective to story telling. Another reviewer said that he found it strange that people just stand around when someone is in danger. Quite often that is the way that anime scenes are filmed. One defender, one attacker, or even when there is only one defender, and there are a lot of attackers. One attacker at a time, like they are taking turns.

Héra's costumes were frequently a little wrong for the same reason. The style was out of character with the universe it was in. There were also some ragged areas of the animation, where it looked like something from a decade or two ago.

I won't be watching it a second time.

The War of the Rohirrim unfortunately feels like it was made 30 years ago.

We'll start with its biggest negative, which to me is the animation. I knew what to expect, having seen the trailer, that they'd opted for a simplistic style as the source material is around 80 years old, but that is no excuse.

Scenes like riding were poor, facial animations non existent, groups of men running just a faceless mass, but even how they chose to build each scene felt lazy to me. There is one scene for example, where our lead is being chased by a mumakil (giant elephant), where instead of showing our character running with the elephant gaining pace, they opted to have a close up of our characters feet with the noise of the elephant getting louder. It truly just felt like they didn't have the budget to show what they needed to show.

And on top of that, our story is just ok, nothing special, but a lot of the lines were very cheesy, with many unnecessary callbacks to the original trilogy. The middle act felt a little stretched out too, they probably could have shaved 20 minutes or so off.

Helm Hammerhand was a great character, our lead was your stereotypical strong female, no problems there, with no other characters particularly standing out.

It's positive for me was the music, but as they reused the scores from Howard Shore, it's almost something they couldn't get wrong,

It's a shame really, I love LOTR, both the films and the books, so to have something which feels generic and lazy, feels so far gone from the usual love that goes in to making anything based in Middle Earth.

What I would love, is a film using top of the line animation like Arcane for example, and I just hope this film doesn't stop future projects like that coming together,

Overall, worth a watch, but do not expect to be blown away.

The good thing is: animation is good and buitifully made.

All the rest is awfull. The plot is unbelievebly stupid and predictable at evey turn. It lacks any coherence and depth, grown man behave like five-years-old, the authors do not posses the essential minimum understanding of medieval warfare to make the audience take the battles a bit seriously.

The pratagonist is a Mery Sue to the extreme, she is the smartest, the fastest, the bravest and the strongest, she always have the best solution to any tactical or political problem. Well, actually her ideas are naive and shallow, but all the rest on the set are so incredibly dumb that hers seems to pass.

The movie is a waste if time, it comes nothing near the original and just rides on its name.

What can you do when you have Lord of the Rings, having a crossover with anime cinema, and exploring a new era in its universe?

This new Lord of the Rings movie is still, in some ways, an adventurous movie: it's exciting, colorful, tense, and engaging. Sola Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation provides a colorful, adventurous design and presentation there with some well-constructed character designs and battle sequences. Many of the sound designs and action sequences are bright and tense, for LOTR's thrill standards, it still sells out what the world is like. The world J. R. R. Tolkien has created is large and ambitious, there are many approaches and styles that can be explored to see many different aspects about their world and setting.

However, instead of making a wonderful and classic narrative and world of what made Peter Jackson's Lord of the Ring approach. War of the Rohirrim is the definition of a beautiful mess, a mess that still both impresses and fails to impress me at the same time. It suffers from what both modern Anime cinema and Hollywood suffers. Crafted with static colorful animation, ambitious concepts, and great action sequences, but phoned in with the cliche bad aspects of character development and engagement, uneven writing, and phoning the tiresome anime tropes that run the well dry. It lacks what made Jackson's LOTR amazing, because unlike Jackson's approach, many of the characters are not interesting and you don't connect nor remember them on an emotional level. Almost as if it repeats some of the worst aspects about The Hobbit Trilogy.

It's a shame because the beautiful character designs and background are breathtaking, despite some use of poor CGI. The voice performances are all pretty good, alongside the musical score and thrill moments. With the concepts and world, things could have been approached pretty well. But for a LOTR narrative, it doesn't really feel like a LOTR story. You can name it anything else and I would have believed it was something new and different from LOTR.

But let me say this, nobody asked for anime and LOTR to become a thing. Yet it happened. I do applaud the studio and filmmakers to actually do it.