georgewhittingham1

I title this as it is because this truly did not feel like a film to me. This 'film' is one continuous scene/moment, (other than the opening, which reminds us in a fun way what the year is and shows the bond of our characters).

Other than the intro and outro, we also have no soundtrack, and you'll feel aware of this, just drawing you in to intense focus on every small breath, every booming explosion, every bullet ricochet.

You are quite simply, dropped in to a real life war; and it left me contemplating the state of the world, the respect I have for those who take part in combat, and just how horrifying it really is.

I highly recommend that everyone should see this film, it's riveting, surreal and yet very real, scary, brutal and eye opening; even more so in today's political climate. Make sure you get to the cinema if you can.

I didn't even have high expectations for this film. I thought to myself, there is no chance it'll be as good as the original, but maybe it'll be a worthy sequel.

It's biggest issue, a common trait with films now days, is that the writing is just awful. There is no time to connect to any characters (in fact, dialogue is something lacking in this film), what is spoken is either cheesy, unnecessary or ultimately just informing of us of the plot.

I feel bad for Paul Mescal, I would say he didn't give us a bad performance, but he never really stood a chance with what he was given. The twin emperors are comical, and whilst Denzel is the best in this, he doesn't really have much time to shine either.

I am genuinely sitting here flabbergasted at just how bad this was. Even if you look at it as a stand alone film, and try to forget about the original, it's a B grade movie, in almost every scenario. Even the CGI, which is over used, isn't good either. Time to give it up Ridley.

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.