REVIEW: The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024)

Movie Reviews

I’ve been looking forward to The War of the Rohirrim since I first heard of it. The people behind the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy are involved, and this is just one animated movie, so I wasn’t worried about it becoming bloated or self-indulgent like the Hobbit movies. The animation looked sleek and impressive, and the cast includes Miranda Otto (Éowyn) and Brian Cox, among others. I’m unfamiliar with the story, so I went into The War of the Rohirrim open to anything. Let’s take a look. 

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim follows Princess Hera (Gaia Wise), defiant only daughter of King Helm Hammerhand of Rohan. Hera likes to ride horses and lure Great Eagles, but the story begins when she receives two marriage offers: to the Prince of Gondor and to Wulf, son of Freca. Freca is one of King Helm’s lords but aspires to more, trying to position Wulf on the throne of Rohan. Hera doesn’t want to marry either man, or anyone, for that matter. But this uninvited move from Freca isn’t well-received, and he and Helm go outside to fight. Freca dies after one punch from Helm, enraging Wulf, who likewise charges at the King. Helm quickly bests the young man but lets him live because Hera begs him to. For now, Wulf is banished and disappears with his men. However, the quiet doesn’t last. Wulf launches an escalating series of attacks on Rohan until the people are forced back into the Hornburg to hide. Can King Helm protect his people from a vengeful, power-hungry disgraced lord?

People have grown increasingly hostile toward this movie as its release neared, but I wanted to stay positive and give it a chance. Much about The War of the Rohirrim looked good to me, and I don’t want to jump on a naysayer bandwagon. The problem is that the movie just isn’t very good. Hera is a stereotype more than a character, and one that is beyond played out. We don’t learn much about her aside from her love of horses and disinterest in marriage. Hello, Merida from Brave? But seriously, this was tired even 12 years ago. Hera’s affinity for horses hardly makes her unique among a culture known for training and riding horses. The architecture in Rohan even features images of horses atop the houses. Hera being so flat makes it hard to care about her when things go wrong. Her relationships should be more fleshed out; Wulf is a childhood friend, which they tell us and briefly show in a short, forced flashback. This should be a bigger deal, and when Hera feels conflicted about fighting him, the audience should feel something, too. Hera’s familial ties are similarly paper-thin, and we don’t know much about her brothers, Haleth and Háma. Important moments later in the movie depend on Hera’s bond with her father, King Helm, but the filmmakers have failed to build this relationship up. Major conflicts and deep losses don’t register when it’s so difficult to care about anything—any big scenes intended to be cathartic or touching end up feeling forced and unearned. 

The animation is one facet of the movie I wasn’t worried about, but it’s not as good as it looked in the trailers. I like the designs of the main characters, but Freca looks ridiculous. They animated him like a Dragon Ball Z villain, both in design and movement; this guy flails around like crazy, despite the weight jokes at his expense. I don’t like how the environments look 3D, and almost real at times. The characters don’t look at home in these buildings and landscapes; the filmmakers should have chosen one of the two styles and stuck with it. I don’t like how they animated the Oliphaunts either; they’re sleek and shiny, less like creatures and more like vehicles. I can’t imagine why this creative choice was made, but it looks bad. I usually try not to harp on a movie’s visuals, and it’s far from my top priority when watching something, but it’s odd for a mainstream animated film to look this bad. The characters’ movements sometimes lack that sense of weight and heft. The War of the Rohirrim was animated in Japan, and directed by Kenji Kamiyama(Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Blade Runner: Black Lotus.) I’m not an expert by any means, but the Japanese animation I’ve seen is sophisticated, clean, and pays attention to the kind of detail that this film lacks. There’s plenty of detail in the wood carvings in Rohan, but the fundamentals of animation are sometimes ignored. The action in the movie is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it looks pretty good, but when Helm strikes Freca, he literally goes flying. It looks silly at a time that’s supposed to be tense and sets up the film’s conflict going forward. Hera’s fight with an Oliphaunt is similarly over-the-top in a way that’s difficult to accept in an otherwise serious story. 

The pacing in The War of the Rohirrim is sluggish and worsens over time. There are various side quests like Hera fighting the Oliphaunt, Helm hunting down individual soldiers in Wulf’s camp, and the antics of an older woman in the Hornburg. This movie is about two hours and fifteen minutes long, much shorter than any other installment in the franchise, yet it drags worse than any except for perhaps The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. I wasn’t tired heading into the theater, but this film made me sleepy. It became hard to pay attention and hold my head up about an hour in or so. It’s not the material but how it’s presented; make us care about Helm and his family, and take out all the filler set dressing stuff. I don’t care about this creepy old lady, and in the end, her “arc” doesn’t amount to much anyway. 

The film’s original score by Stephen Gallagher is dull and forgettable, completely outshone by the Howard Shore music from the originals. I think using Shore’s work here was a mistake, keeping this movie from establishing its own identity. We already know it’s Middle Earth; you don’t have to beat us over the head with it. But that’s not where the callbacks end; Saruman gets an unnecessary, extravagant cameo, complete with Christopher Lee’s archival audio. Hera also makes reference to Gandalf at the end, and this would have been fine with me if she hadn’t said his name. A wizard who “has many names” is fine; we all knew what that meant. But she starts riding away, stops, and tells her maid, “But in the common tongue, he’s known as Gandalf;” cringe. This was so unnecessary. The fan service might not be a problem in a better movie, but it feels like a last-ditch effort to beg the audience to like The War of the Rohirrim. It doesn’t work on me because if you’re going to do fan service, it needs to accentuate a great story or be a cute wink-and-nod for fans. This movie doesn’t stand up on its own merits, so no fun references can salvage it. 

The War of the Rohirrim is a significant disappointment. I like the voice acting, at least from the primary players, and some of the art is good. But a lot of it isn’t very good, especially in motion. The new music is bland and will be forgotten, and it is unable to stand up against Howard Shore’s themes from the live-action movies. But the biggest failures are the characters and their relationships; there’s no fellowship here, even amongst family.

Let us know what you thought of the trailers from The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim in the comments!

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