by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Gaia Wise, Brian Cox, Miranda Otto
Intro:
… delivers the kind of petrichor high fantasy that has no business being as rare as it is nowadays …
It’s been at least a decade since a decent Tolkien film has made it to cinemas. Yeah, Rings of Power is a thing, but in comparison to the genuine breakthrough that the original LOTR trilogy made within the entertainment industry, even that massively budgeted series’ successes fall short of the monolith before it.
Recapturing that magic is a trick that even Peter Jackson actively struggled with on the Hobbit trilogy, making the prospect of new stories both tantalising and worrisome. But like those who make a habit of fiddling with magic, such things arrive neither late, nor early, but precisely when they’re needed.
The War of the Rohirrim is a collaboration between Jackson’s Wingnut Films (with story co-writer Philippa Boyens bouncing ideas off of Jackson and Fran Walsh during pre-production, anime director Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex), and writers Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance). And yet, it’s as far removed from a ‘too many cooks’ scenario as it gets.
The animation, spearheaded by Sola Entertainment, seems to operate on George Pérez logic – at its best when there’s a lot in the frame. In early strictly-dialogue scenes, the frame skips of the Unreal Engine graphics combined with the bog-standard facial expressions make for a shaky first impression. But as it progresses, the visual definition grows in lockstep with the characters, and the fight scenes are everything an audience would want from a Middle-Earth anime. The sound design adds immensely to that, bringing the earth-breaking crack out of every bruised knuckle and splintered shield.
The script taps into the multi-faceted world-building of both Tolkien and Jackson, only directly pulling from the latter’s cultural imprint sparingly. It doesn’t fall into the Hobbit problem of parasitically attaching itself to all things recognisable to justify itself. Rather, it expands on some of the many enticing appendices of the original text to tell its own story about the tragedies of war and how grief can poison the heart as easily as any Morgul-blade; with the occasional moment to reiterate that there is a larger world beyond the borders of Rohan.
It even manages to one-up Jackson’s previous work in its approach to female characters, specifically the lead (Gaia Wise as Héra). While the previous films had their share of righteous moments (“If you want him, come and claim him”, “I am no man”), they also came across as if their respective characters’ quivers were emptied with that one moment, spending the rest of the story being as passive as possible. But with every defiant moment to her name, Héra’s journey only gets fuller.
Fuelled by the legends of Rohan’s shield-maidens, Héra weaponises the same femininity that others held against her to stake a claim as a genuine hero (given metatextual weight by Ms. ‘I Am No Man herself’ Miranda Otto serving as narrator). Even with the impressive Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhand (complete with a scene that is sure to have gamers running for their Skyrim mod lists to recreate it for themselves, or maybe that’s just us…), Héra shines proudly as the burning beacon at the heart of it all.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim lives up to the mythic standards of its literary and cinematic foundations, at a time when the glories of the Siege of Gondor have become distant memories. It delivers the kind of petrichor high fantasy that has no business being as rare as it is nowadays (as the Brony phenomenon proved years back, the audiences for this brand of fantasy are ravenous), and at a level that restores the word ‘legendary’ from an overused flippancy into a genuine descriptor. Ready to fall in love with Middle-Earth again? You should be.
