The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review: a slight prequel

In terms of desperate attempts to keep beloved franchises going, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is one of the most ingenious that’s come along in recent memory. The new film, which is set around 200 years before the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, is based on an event that Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about in the appendices of his original trilogy. Its story includes multiple battles and explores the history of Rohan, a kingdom anyone familiar with Tolkien’s novels or director Peter Jackson’s movies should remember. It is, additionally, a big-screen anime adventure that has the potential to drastically and excitingly expand the Lord of the Rings franchise’s multimedia scope.

All of which is to say that The War of the Rohirrim seems, on paper at least, like the answer to all the problems that Warner Bros. has run into while trying to keep its Lord of the Rings film franchise alive, most of which stem from a shortage of existing narrative material. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like the kind of franchise spinoff that requires extracurricular homework or is stuck suffocatingly in the shadow of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, either. Both of those assumptions are thankfully true of The War of the Rohirrim, though the film does shoehorn in more unnecessary Easter eggs and references than even die-hard Tolkien fans may see coming. Unfortunately, The War of the Rohirrim lacks both the magic and the affecting grandeur necessary to bring its alluring fantasy world to life with sufficient vibrancy. It is a strangely and surprisingly lackluster epic.

Directed by longtime Japanese animation director Kenji Kamiyama, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim begins in a time of tenuous peace in Middle-earth. It follows Héra (Gaia Wise), the “wild” and strong daughter of Helm Hammerhand (Succession star Brian Cox), the mighty reigning king of Rohan. Helm’s hold on his kingdom and its people is tested early in The War of the Rohirrim by Freca (Shaun Dooley), a rich lord of a neighboring region who demands that Helm marry Héra to his son Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) rather than a lord of the nearby Gondor or any other land. When Helm refuses, he and Freca come to blows in a brutal confrontation that sets the stage for the vengeance-fueled war between Rohan and Wulf that encompasses The War of the Rohirrim‘s final two-thirds.

This story is well-known among Tolkien obsessives, but it is around Helm himself or his valiant nephew Fréaláf (Laurence Ubong Williams) that The War of the Rohirrim‘s military conflict is usually centered. In this case, the film finds a unique way into its story through Héra, an Amazonian figure of fierce intelligence and courage so clearly drawn in the image of future Rohan noblewoman and warrior Éowyn (Miranda Otto) that The War of the Rohirrim is actually narrated by Otto herself. The present but unspoken parallels between Éowyn and Héra’s stories prove to be the film’s most effective and powerful attempts to connect its plot to the events of the War of the Ring. Other crossover efforts, like a brief run-in with a pair of ring-hunting Orcs sent from Mordor and a couple of last-minute name-drops, are less successful.

The War of the Rohirrim sticks pretty close to Tolkien’s original, truncated retelling of its story. What original material it creates is done in the service of fleshing out Héra, who emerges across the film’s 134-minute runtime as a figure who feels both strikingly modern and timeless in a way that makes her a fascinating and welcome compatriot to the other heroines, like Éowyn, whom Tolkien included in his fictional world. The movie, however, struggles to create the same depth that it does in Héra in nearly all of its other characters, including Freca and Wulf, two villains who remain frustratingly underdeveloped. Olwyn (Lorraine Ashbourne), a shieldmaiden and friend to Héra, stands out less because of what is revealed about her and more because of what is implied. Cox’s commanding vocal performance as Helm, meanwhile, gives the kind of weight to his character’s ferocity and short-sightedness that The War of the Rohirrim‘s screenplay fails to convey on its own.

Kamiyama is no stranger to franchise filmmaking, having previously worked on Blade Runner: Black Lotus and directed the best episode of Star Wars: Visions volume 1. He has a hard time nonetheless making The War of the Rohirrim feel like a worthwhile companion piece to Peter Jackson’s live-action Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. The new movie feels almost slavishly devoted to the look and designs of Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations, but no matter how detailed and stunning its animated frames often are, The War of the Rohirrim never manages to fully recapture the magic of Jackson’s Middle-earth.

Much like The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, The War of the Rohirrim fails to realize that the lived-in, tangible quality of Jackson’s original, live-action take on Middle-earth is why it feels so real and inviting in his Lord of the Rings films. The War of the Rohirrim may cover why the Rohan fortress of Helm’s Deep receives its name and reputation, but none of the scenes set there come close to matching the visual beauty of those in 2002’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

From its aesthetic to its sometimes lethargic pace, The War of the Rohirrim remains unwaveringly committed throughout its runtime to moving and looking simply like an animated version of a Jackson-directed Tolkien film. In doing so, it fails to really explore the stylistic and structural opportunities of its animated form. Its pace could have been faster, editing more experimental, and action more stylized and in-your-face. The Lord of the Rings prequel is made with a kind of rigid formalism, though, which prevents it from ever becoming its own, unique experience. It comes across, instead, like a less vibrant and immersive version of something viewers have already seen done better before.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is far from the worst bit of franchise expansion that Hollywood has produced over the past 10 years. Its obvious attention to detail and faithfulness to its parent films will, in fact, likely make it a more than satisfactory experience for all the Lord of the Rings fans out there who are just desperate to return to Middle-earth on the big screen. For everyone else, though, The War of the Rohirrim doesn’t have anything truly new or memorable to offer. It’s a fantasy adventure that never really gets going or builds enough power and wonder to leap off the page and screen the same way that J.R.R. Tolkien’s original stories and Peter Jackson’s feature adaptations have continued to for decades now.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is now playing in theaters.