O Senhor dos Anéis: A Guerra dos Rohirrim

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.

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 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.

I am a long time (40+ years) Tolkien fan, and arguably fall into the category of being hard to please. I saw this film on IMAX and I must say that it looks pretty nice, with the scenery being exemplary. The animation style might put some people off, depending on preference, but I think it holds up. In summary, overall production value is up to expectation for me (picture, sound, voice acting etc).

Now, where it falls short is definitely on the script side, and I join the (growing) crowd who has a hard time understanding why they decided to change the storyline from the book instead of just building on it. I get the motive and all, but it is still a mystery why they decided to go in this direction, despite the fact that they know EXACTLY what will happen when it hits the Tolkien fandom.

Filmmakers could easily have done more or less the same story, including the Hera perspective, but without tampering with the source material and they would have gotten through this in a much better shape.

I guess it is a sign of the times. Sadly.

This movie is based on a one-page story (mostly) about Helm Hammerhand from Appendix A of the LoTR book (which is a pretty nice read btw). The book's dialogue and events are actually kept to quite an extent, with only minor alterations in detail. The film does an especially good job capturing the epic character of Helm Hammerhand, as depicted in the books. However Hera, introduced in the movie, is not in the books at all and some of her deeds are actually done in the original work by her cousin, Fréaláf.

What many people like about Tolkien's universe is its pre-industrial, simple world, where this simplicity highlights the theme of human nature/values and the moral order of the universe. In the 'classic' movies there is a lot of wisdom hidden in everyday conversations, like "All we have to do is decide what to do with the time given to us" (LoTR) or "It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep darkness at bay" (Hobbit), which I would say are timeless truths about our world, and these are lines I think about sometimes even after the movie ends.

However, this movie has nothing to add in this front. It introduces modern issues (feminism), into Tolkien's world in a way that feels both foreign and forced, ultimately undermining both Tolkien's vision and the cause of feminism it seeks to support. It's not as bad as RoP, but still shows. Of course it's not about that women can't do any of the things depicted in the movie, or that the book should be followed exactly. It's just that it's not guided purely by the love of Tolkien's work and legacy, and it really shows.

But besides that, it's not a terrible movie. I would say it's worth a watch.