The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

[Alatar]

Have to say I really love this.

[Snowdog]

Just booked tickets for Elora and I at the IMAX theatre for Saturday the 14th. Looks pretty good.
It's an 8 minute clip, as in a chunk of the movie. It is not a 'trailer' or a 'teaser'. Don't watch it if you don't want to see an 8 minute official clip of the movie with no breaks.

[Alatar]

Just booked tickets for Elora and I at the IMAX theatre for Saturday the 14th. Looks pretty good.

Maybe add a spoiler warning? Some might think its a trailer rather than the full first 8 minutes of the movie. I certainly wouldn't want to watch that much in advance of the movie.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks Al, and thanks Snowdog for editing your post. I probably will watch the clip, but then I am not likely to see the full film any time soon.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Well, I watched the clip, and that was quite enough for me.

[Alatar]

Really? Its getting rave reviews!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Glad to hear it!

[Frelga]

Well, I'm certainly not watching at the theater. But maybe when it's streaming.

[Eldy]

Thanks for posting the clip, Snowdog! I'm really tickled by just how anime this is, and pleased to see Kenji Kamiyama directing in 2D again.

I'm hoping to see the film on Friday night. I'd prefer a cheaper time, but it should work well for me in terms of scheduling, and watching with a crowd (if indeed it draws one, as I hope) will probably be more fun for a movie like this.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I hope you love it!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Really? Its getting rave reviews!

63% 62% at Rotten Tomatoes.

[Alatar]

Its definitely getting some bad reviews, but overall the positive ones seem to be very positive while the negative ones mostly seem to just be complaining that its not LotR.

Of course, once the public ones come out its gonna get review bombed to hell and back for being too "woke".

[Frelga]

What Al said. I'm surprised it hasn't been review bombed yet.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought that review-bombing referred to audience reviews, not critic reviews.

In any event, I'm interested in hearing what you guys (e.g., Al, Snowdog, Eldy and anyone else who goes to see it) think of it then either the critics or the general public.

[Alatar]

Yeah, RT isn't open to public reviews yet. The review bombing has yet to start. I did watch a youtube last night about whether it was "girlbossed" and the guy who was reviewing said that despite the trailer making it look like a Girlboss, in the story she's very much an ordinary person caught up in events against her will, and in fact her name is forgotten.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm so out-of-touch that I had to google the term "Girlboss".

[Snowdog]

An interesting and fairly-balanced 'non-spoiler' review.

[Eldy]

TL;DR I really wanted to like this, but I don't.

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT:

Based on the very few reviews and impressions I've glanced at (i.e. the video Snowdog shared and a handful of TORn posts), the fannish response to WotR seems pretty positive — at least in the corners of the fandom I frequent — and I'm pretty pleased by this. As a fan of both Tolkien and anime, some of the knee-jerk "ew, animation" responses over the past 3.5 years were kinda disheartening, so it's really nice to hear from Tolkien fans who aren't into anime but enjoy this film. I'm pleased they like it, and I'm pleased that a concept which half a decade ago would've been a punchline actually got made. And it was a bold move that the first official spin-off movie from the PJ Middle-earth hexalogy stars a de facto OFC (Original Female Character, to borrow a bit of fanfic jargon) as the main protagonist. That's great in my book, and I don't want this project to be a box office bomb since that risks discouraging similar projects from being made in the future.

I just wish it had paid off better creatively.

I need to prefix this with my standard disclaimer that I am way too close to the source material to be objective, though I've made some attempt to mitigate this. I'd thought this would be less of an issue than with ROP since Rohan is not as near and dear to my heart as the Second Age, but I (re)discovered greater depths of passion than I anticipated. Also, my overall impression is tinted by my reservations with how the film frames the central conflict, and I don't expect most fans to share those reservations since they hinge on (what is in my experience) a minority opinion, though (I think) a textually grounded one.

(Begin purist grumblings)

I've commented in a number of places that I hoped the film wouldn't try to whitewash Helm's canonical racism and thuggishness. That's not to say I expected to get what I want, but I hadn't resigned myself to it being quite this severe. As a refresher: the titular war is an outgrowth of the political tensions between King Helm and one of his wealthiest and most powerful vassals, Freca, a lord from the far west of Rohan who "men said [had] much Dunlendish blood, and was dark-haired". The Dunlendings were (along with an always small, and much diminished, Dúnedain minority) the inhabitants of what became Rohan before the Stewards of Gondor granted it to the Rohirrim. After this, the Dunlendings were expelled, driven west across the River Isen to the Dunland region for which they were later called. I want to be clear that this is not a "revisionist" left-wing reading of the text, it's what the books describe.

‘I hear them,’ said Éomer; ‘but they are only the scream of birds and the bellowing of beasts to my ears.’

‘Yet there are many that cry in the Dunland tongue,’ said Gamling. ‘I know that tongue. It is an ancient speech of men, and once was spoken in many western valleys of the Mark. Hark! They hate us, and they are glad; for our doom seems certain to them. ‘‘The king, the king!’’ they cry. ‘‘We will take their king. Death to the Forgoil! Death to the Strawheads! Death to the robbers of the North!’’ Such names they have for us. Not in half a thousand years have they forgotten their grievance that the lords of Gondor gave the Mark to Eorl the Young and made alliance with him. That old hatred Saruman has inflamed. They are fierce folk when roused. They will not give way now for dusk or dawn, until Théoden is taken, or they themselves are slain.’

Gamling is not a Dunlending sympathiser per se — he's in the middle of fighting a war against them — but he doesn't dispute that their grievances are based on real things that happened to their ancestors (and, though he doesn't comment on it, continue to make their lives worse centuries later). I think the least we can do as fans is extend them the same courtesy. It's also instructive to consider the events directly leading to the war. In the book, Freca and Helm trade insults after Freca suggests their children marry, and then Helm tells Freca to meet him in the parking lot ...

‘When the council was over, Helm stood up and laid his great hand on Freca’s shoulder, saying: ‘‘The king does not permit brawls in his house, but men are freer outside’’; and he forced Freca to walk before him out from Edoras into the field. To Freca’s men that came up he said: ‘‘Be off ! We need no hearers. We are going to speak of a private matter alone. Go and talk to my men!’’ And they looked and saw that the king’s men and his friends far outnumbered them, and they drew back.

‘ ‘‘Now, Dunlending,’’ said the king ‘‘you have only Helm to deal with, alone and unarmed. But you have said much already, and it is my turn to speak. Freca, your folly has grown with your belly. You talk of a staff ! If Helm dislikes a crooked staff that is thrust on him, he breaks it. So!’’ With that he smote Freca such a blow with his fist that he fell back stunned, and died soon after.

‘Helm then proclaimed Freca’s son and near kin the king’s enemies; and they fled, for at once Helm sent many men riding to the west marches.’

The equivalent sequence of events in the film is superficially the same, but differs in some very important ways. The book doesn't provide us with the wording of Freca's marriage offer, but in the film he starts making barely veiled threats right away and is consistently the one to escalate. During the final showdown between the two men, Freca throws the first several punches rather than getting clocked before he can even get any more trash talking in. Unlike the book, a number of Freca's men are present, including Wulf (though the surrounding crowd mostly consists of Helm loyalists). After Wulf confirms his father is dead, he draws his sword and tries to kill Helm, who then strangles Wulf and only allows him to live when Héra asks him to, at least partly because for the sake of their former childhood friendship. Wulf is then banished but is allowed to ride away, not pursued by the king's men. So the film casts Helm in a much better light, downplaying his role in escalating the conflict, and while they leave in his use of "Dunlending" as a pejorative there's no context given to the racist backdrop to these interactions. And in the film's world, there's no reason to think that Wulf couldn't have lived out his life in peace, albeit deprived of his family's former wealth and status, had he stayed beyond the borders of Rohan.

This bears emphasising, so I'mma put it on its own line: as punishment for the supposed sins of his father, book!Wulf faced the choice of fighting back against Helm or spending the rest of his days as a hunted man. This casts his decision to build an army and go to war in an extremely different light.

The fact that the movie changed this is not inherently a flaw, but it rubs me the wrong way. Besides stripping out most of the nuance of the book version, it reinforces the misconception that Tolkien was a pro-imperialism and pro-colonialism author, which he just plain wasn't. I have many political, religious, and philosophical disagreements with Tolkien, but this isn't something you can validly lay at his door. Enough people get tripped up into thinking Tolkien endorsed all the actions of what one might call his POV cultures because their actions and attitudes are not usually called out in the text, but a high-profile adaptation whitewashing the story entrenches this idea that much further. And in a film with a grand total of two Orc characters, one can't even fall back on the excuse of the caricatured baddies being innately evil (setting aside the morass of problems with that concept).

(End purist grumblings ... mostly )

So, my issues with the film's Secondary World politics notwithstanding, I did try to be fair to it, and going in I thought there was a very good chance of it being a fun romp that I might even like to see a second time with my dad, who was the one to give me my first box set of TH and LOTR way back when. The film definitely nails the PJ Middle-earth aesthetic, visually and aurally, and seeing that look filtered through an anime lens is inherently enjoyable to me, though part of that is the novelty factor. The film's budget of $30m is peanuts compared to the live-action films. but it's a budget most anime directors would kill to have. Perhaps that gave me an inflated sense of expectations, but I don't have any major complaints about the animation, even if it's not sublime. The small-scale action scenes were quite good, though the larger battle scenes suffered from issues unrelated to technical animation.

As alluded to above, the main character of the film is Héra, daughter of Helm, who exists in "canon" but never directly appears and is given neither a name nor any traits beyond her gender and a rough sense of her age. Héra is very "anime", especially her character design, from her vividly blood-red hair to the thigh-high boots she rocks for most of her time onscreen. If I thought of this film chiefly as a Tolkien adaptation, that might have annoyed me, but I have different standards for something that's explicitly a PJ spin-off (believe it or not, the above rant could have been much worse! ). I agree with "Nerd of the Rings" that Helm gets his moments to shine, but Héra is unambiguously the main character, which is fine by me. I'm sure everyone here is very familiar with the character type of the free-spirited princess who doesn't want to marry, but covering well-trod ground isn't a dealbreaker for me. My issues on the character front are not with Héra herself but rather her relationships with other characters — specifically, that I would've liked to see a lot more from at least one of them.

Even after confirming that film!Freca was turned into a one-note heel for the sake of Helm's likability, I held out some hope that Wulf might be an interesting and complex character. Héra and Wulf are childhood friends, and it seems that they grew apart due to the tension between their fathers (Héra accidentally cut Wulf's face with a sword while sparring, and child Wulf was more concerned about what Freca would do to her than anything else). When Freca and Wulf show up to give the marriage proposal, Héra and Wulf get a private scene together where Wulf insists he loves and genuinely wants to marry her, not solely because of his father's political ambitions, and at the time I thought he was telling the truth (I still think that might have been the writers' intent). During the multi-year timeskip, the exiled Wulf forms an unprecedented coalition of Dunlending tribes, somehow arms them with better weaponry than they've ever had, and negotiates with the Haradrim to get his hands on some mûmakil. None of these are small achievements, and any leader capable of them, especially at a young age, must be pretty remarkable.

... or so one might think, but apparently not, because from the moment we first see post-timeskip Wulf, his driving goal is to kill Héra after destroying everything she holds dear. By the second half of the film, this goal has eclipsed all other considerations. Wulf displays no interest in being king of Rohan, the ostensible reason for his war, and even killing Helm (the man who killed Wulf's father right in front of him) is less important than killing Héra. This is just as uncomfortable as I'm sure it was meant to be, but it's also boring. Nearly every character in league with Wulf has similar violent (if not sociopathic) tendencies bubbling just under the surface, with the exception of the one (1) subordinate of Wulf's who speaks out against him and eventually gets killed for his trouble. Really, it beggars belief that a character as unstable and frankly kind of stupid as Wulf could have put together the invasion force we see. I just don't buy it.

But invade he does, which quickly leads to the first major battle scene. I don't want to harp on the incoherent geography much, because that's a tried and true characteristic of the PJ films, and one of the most egregious things here (leading a slow-moving column of refugees west from Edoras after they're menaced by an invasion from the west) is found in near-identical form in PJ's The Two Towers. But the incoherence of the battle near Edoras really can't be ignored. Shortly beforehand, we're told that Wulf's force, which consists of giant elephants and infantry as well as riders, is 20 leagues (60 miles) away, but also that they plan to attack that night (I guess they left their trucks just out of frame before the fight). After dark, the battle occurs near enough to Edoras that it's visible from the front steps of Meduseld. During the battle, Héra realises that one of her father's other vassals has turned traitor, and she organises the evacuation of the entire civilian population to the Hornburg. Which, to be clear, means walking past the imminently victorious enemy army which is already within eyesight of the city gates. Honestly, I kinda checked out at this point, but even as mindless spectacle I find the battle wanting because it consists almost entirely of callbacks to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. I expected there to be lots of callbacks between the two sieges of Helm's Deep, but (perhaps foolishly) I wasn't expecting them to ape the battle from RotK as well — and frankly more blatantly — so I found it more jarring.

Héra's brothers both die around this point: in accordance with the book timeline for Haleth, the older, but ahead of schedule for Háma. I think Haleth's death scene worked as intended, but Háma's failed to connect for me. He falls behind during the retreat to the Hornburg and is later executed by Wulf within sight of the fortress. This is not because he decided to stay behind and make a heroic rearguard stand so that his sister, their wounded father, and the others could escape; it's because he nostalgically chose to ride his old and physically incapable horse into battle — something Héra advised against earlier in the film — and the poor thing gave out on him during the retreat. I'm not sure what the movie was trying to say here.

So with her brothers out of the picture and her childhood friend turned enemy all but frothing at the mouth in his desire to kill her, Héra is left with (by my count) three or four relationships of even minor note, depending on whether you include her horse. There's Lief, the nerdy kid who follows her around, who I thought was a page or a herald though he claims to be her guard near the end of the film. I'm not sure I buy that, but I don't care enough about him to have more of an opinion. There's also Olwyn, the badass former shieldmaiden who describes herself as Héra's lady's maid, though she seems more like a surrogate mother figure than anything else. Olwyn is great — probably my favourite character in the film. The name of Héra's horse escapes me at the moment, but she (the horse) is pretty great in her own right, the inclination to eat while surrounded by enemies notwithstanding. For better or worse, Héra's relationship with her horse is not nearly as sensual as Aragorn and Brego's in The Two Towers, so take that for what it's worth.

So that leaves us with Héra and Helm. I had relatively high hopes partway through the movie that the father-daughter relationship between them would be a saving grace for WotR despite my various complaints. Helm clearly loves all three of his children, but he overlooks Héra in some ways because she's a woman. Getting his ass handed to him by Wulf after he ignores Héra's and Fréaláf's advice about when and where to fight opens Helm's eyes ... y'know, all pretty standard stuff for the character types of the wild, wilful princess and her gruff warrior father, but some things are common for good reason. Héra and Helm definitely get a couple good moments between them, but not nearly enough in my view. After they reach the Hornburg, Helm pretends to be in a coma while secretly sneaking out at night to kill Dunlendings with his bare hands. Héra learns of this after she stumbles upon the secret passageway out of the keep that Helm was using. She follows him, he saves her from a couple Orcs and a snow troll, he's able to tell her he's proud of her, but then he dies.

I almost left out this complaint because it can get tiresome harping on plot holes too much, but Helm's sacrifice scene didn't fully connect for me. That's partly because I was already grumpy about a bunch of other things, but Helm's final stand occurs because he leads Héra up the main — highly visible — causeway to the Hornburg, which he claims is "the only way" back inside the fortress. But we know this is untrue, because Helm has been coming and going from the fortress every night for weeks if not months, and the others inside know only of rumours about the wraith of Helm killing Dunlendings. If Helm had been coming back in through the very heavy, well-guarded gate, they would know, so he must have been using the secret passageway we already saw, or another like it. (Héra was unable to open the hidden door from the inside of the passageway, so either there was some trick to it she didn't know, or there was a different way back in.) It's a pet peeve of mine when heroic sacrifice scenes occur not to achieve something that would have been impossible without said sacrifice, but because characters forget important information we know they know. This could easily have been avoided if there was an insurmountable foe between Helm and Héra and the secret passageway, leaving the causeway their only option, but whaddaya gonna do?

The preceding paragraph aside, I was not wholly unaffected by the heartstring-tugging in Héra and Helm's final words to each other, but it was also the last gasp of relationship-driven storytelling — Olwyn's admirable efforts notwithstanding — which tends to be my jam. The final fight between Wulf and Héra left me completely cold for the reasons described above. If other people found it effecting, then I'm sincerely glad it works for them, but I can't even think of film!Wulf as anything but a waste of potential. Fréaláf has some nice moments, including helping Héra escape after she was kidnapped early in the film, and as this story's designated eucatastrophe-bearer at the end, but he was absent for most of it since (as in the book) he was holed up in Dunharrow throughout the Long Winter. The film fleshes this out by having Helm (egged on by the aforementioned traitor) throw a tantrum about his nephew disagreeing with him and order Fréaláf to go to Dunharrow rather than join the impending battle with Wulf. That felt pretty in-character to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, that's about everything I wanted to say about War of the Rohirrim, but unfortunately I'm too tired to put together a conclusion. I don't think it's a bad film, but I also don't think it has a ton of substance, and I'm too close to the source material to turn off my nitpicking impulse even when I try to. Nonetheless, I'm glad it exists, and I'm happy for anyone who gets more enjoyment from it than I did.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks for the great review. As someone who is not planning to see the film any time soon, I really enjoyed reading it!

[Snowdog]

My review pales in the shadow of Eldy's review, but here it is as posted on Tolkien Forums.

Saw it yesterday. I liked it. I give it 3½ out of 5 stars. A worthy addition to the Middle Earth media, but not without its problems.


War of the Rohirrim managed to keep their crayons pretty much inside the canonical lines of the couple pages of Appendix A that covers Helm Hammerhand and family. It handled fairly the major characters of the story... Helm, even though they turned the initial aggressor around; the brothers Haleth and Háma, cousin Fréaláf, Freca, who was made out to start the fight with Helm; and Wulf ... though despite a fair start for Wulf; he was soon reduced to a rage-boy edge-lord who wouldn't listen to General Targg, his older, wiser advisor and chief commander (I will give creditto him for organizing the alliances between the all Dunlending hill-clans, and the Haradrim).

The added little bits of development to some of the characters were different than how I see them, but this is PJ Boyens and co backing the project. Háma for instance was a bard, which I liked as a character-trait addition, and he seemed more culturally immersed than Haleth, his big brother and heir to the throne. It sort of had that Boromir/Faramir relationship vibe between them sans the hateful father bit. Helm loved all his children. Háma does get shortchanged with his capture and death I thought.

The depiction of 'the long winter' was good, and I liked what they did in portraying the Hornburg. The Eagles were a nice touch as well... it wasn't too far-fetched from PJ's Tolkien world. I worried the whole 'wraith' concept that was mentioned in the trailer would be a bone of contention, but it worked. He was only thought of as a wraith by the Dunlendings when he raided their camps in the snowy frozen nights. As far as Saruman goes, you see all there is in the Japanese trailer. They used a line spoken by Christopher Lee from his filmings decades earlier, and it was well done.

The story gets a bit reachy with the introduction of the Southrons and the Mûmakil. Outside of a question being asked "What are Southrons doing this far north?". There is no mention of how they got that far north, or how they managed to become allies with Wulf, etc. They just kind of 'appear' with Wulf's army of Dunlending hill-clans.

The animation was good for the most part. There were few noticeable flaws that shown through. The worst one of note was a dancing Mûmakil in the background during Wulf's attack on Edoras. It was more a nitpicky thing, and may have been amplified by my watching it at IMAX. Then again, maybe it was a hat-tip to Ralph Bakshi and his Lord of the Rings animated project of 1978? Who knows.

Ok, Héra... they had a blank slate to turn Helm's 'unnamed daughter' and youngest child of Helm, into a good deep character... and this is what they came up with? No serious complaints on my part really. She just seemed ... flat ... two-dimensional. She was the primary character of the movie, and she portrays the part well for the most part, but I think there could have been... more ... to her.

The movie starts out with her riding free in the mountains and communing with eagles, and she has the whole cliché 'rebellious young daughter' vibe coming in to Edoras. She gets along with her brothers, and of course she is 'protected' and the whole Éowynesque 'I can fight' when not allowed to go to war by the king thing going on. Héra is central to the movie's storyline all through, yet I had a hard time feeling anything for her. Some of the minor characters had deeper development. She is just ... so perfect from start to finish, with little to no emotion or character development or flaws. She fits the definition, even if she is more 'girl' then 'boss'. At the end, she seemed to not really be bothered much by the death of her father and brothers. She just ... rode away happy onto some adventure and that was the end of it. No real major complaints; just seemed there should have been ... more. More feeling and depth to her since she was their central major protagonist original character of the movie.

As for the whole Order of the Shieldmaidens thing mentioned in the movie, it was just a loose string they hung on the wall. It didn't really come into play in the story other than alluding to Héra's maid having been a 'shieldmaiden'. My wife Elora/Alqualisse developed a concept of a Rhovanion/Rohirrim Order of the Shieldmaidens from a roleplay-turned-fanfic starting in 2011. Also, they mapped the look of Héra to an original character 'Freja Fireborn' that was created in 2015 or earlier.