J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings saga struck such a colossal nerve when it was first published because it was a reaction to the loss of the first World War. The displacement of the muddy, modern conflict into a deliberately regressive story of magic and magical creatures fighting in a feudal setting helped people process their grief and forge a new way forward. The trilogy of movies by Peter Jackson in the early noughties permanently changed world cinema with their enormous scope, integration of CGI and (not entirely successful) attempts to modernise old stories. Tolkien’s work continues to hold an outsized influence on so-called fantasy tales, palpable every time someone speaks in a made-up language based on English mythology or lives in a style based on what we know of the Mercian kings. This dichotomy is apparent in every frame of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, a prequel story to the books that tries to use the same magical settings to center a woman. That is something Tolkien, for all his linguistic skills and fervor for world-building, never managed to do. Unfortunately the filmmakers allowed themselves to be limited by the limits of Tolkien’s imagination which not necessarily appropriate in the current moment.
That said, the animated style really works and director Kenji Kamiyama, who got his start in Studio Ghibli before working on the Ghost in the Shell franchise, enabled the action to pop. The attention paid to the horses was especially charming. The Celt-ish/Viking-ish setting, full of snowy mountains and cold stone steps, manages not to provoke too many comparisons with the How to Train Your Dragon series thanks to a largely hand-drawn (or hand-drawn-seeming) style occasionally zhuzhed up with 3D or computer-forward techniques. But the story itself is not particularly fresh: Hera (voiced by Gaia Wise, previously better known as the granddaughter of Phyllida Lloyd and daughter of Emma Thompson, so a nepo-grandbaby) is the only daughter of King Helm (voiced by Brian Cox, who is now officially and patriarchally typecast). Hera’s mother died in childbirth (innovative!) so she has been raised as a wild spirit, happy throwing haunches of meat to enormous flying eagles and riding her horse unaccompanied all over the kingdom. But she is also beautiful, so her childhood friend Wulf (voiced by Luke Pasqualino) is very keen to marry her, even though Hera wishes to marry no one at all. Keeping spoilers to a minimum, a dispute about this turns to war and Helm’s subjects must flee to a mountain fortress, where other battles happen.
The narration done by Miranda Otto, who was involved in the Jackson trilogy, insists both on Hera’s free will and in her erasure from the stories of the kingdom. This is, to put it mildly, odd. The entire point of royalty is they are not free to choose their own destinies, and someone as excellent a leader as Hera seems like they would be an ideal person in charge of keeping everybody safe. Everyone reading this review also knows whose face launched a thousand ships, so it’s implausible that the person who was the reason for a war would be written out of the history of it. And we all also know no kingdom would go to war over a cleaning lady’s right to choose. So we have many scenes of a whole lot of men fighting to the death over one girl’s ability to not have a boyfriend, even as Wulf is as handsome an anime character as has ever been drawn. In a small win for feminism, at no point does anyone complain about this, especially not Olwyn (voiced by Lorraine Ashbourne, who happens to be married to Andy Serkis, another actor from the Jackson trilogy), Hera’s bodyguard/lady’s-maid, and the only person Helm listens to, other than himself.
It’s strange indeed to see a series of beloved books turn into practically a family project for people connected to Mr. Jackson, most especially in the brief vocal cameo from the late Christopher Lee. The producers have taken great pains to assert this was done with the enthusiastic participation of the family and without generative AI, both good things, and it is certainly less intrusive than the recent disturbing re-animating of Peter Cushing, Carrie Fisher and Ian Holm’s images in various other major films. And yet it is something of a horror to realise that the people interpreting Tolkien’s tales of war, trauma and sacrifice no longer feel it necessary to bury the dead. Why on earth cannot bravery be appreciated and remembered while also making way for new people to continue the fight?
The past was not always better – just take a look at the sexism in his work Tolkien couldn’t see – and there is a huge hunger for new stories about olden times, even fantasy olden times, that set their prejudices aside. Therefore it should have been very easy for the four credited writers to revisit Tolkien’s settings and tell a women-centric story without repeating Tolkien’s mistakes. And yet, somehow, the filmmakers either could not or did not. This is a further shame since they helped themselves to Mr. Lee’s past work in ways he could not have imagined or foreseen. Why are studios willing to endlessly repurpose the work of actors, and not the ideas of writers? Written words are less idiosyncratic than a physical performance, after all. Or is it just that writers have copyright protection (to some extent) and therefore better lawyers?
All that said, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim on its own is better than this grousing would suggest. The pacing is good, the fighting sequences are well done and the many Easter eggs don’t subsume the plot. This will have a lot of appeal to the kind of pre-teen girls who see themselves as the princess at the center of every story. Otherwise it’s hard to see for whom this movie would appeal. It’s too girlish to appeal to most men, and too battle-focused to appeal to many women. As long as you admire the visuals and don’t allow yourself to think too deeply about the lore, whether from the original books or what the feminists of the past were trying to tell us, you’ll probably have a wonderful time.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film, including how to buy tickets, at the official website.
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