Going Back to the Old Days of Rohan

J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a lot about the world of Middle-earthCreated by J.R.R Tolkein, Middle-earth is the setting for the author's big sagas, featuring the characters of hobbits, dwarves, elves, and men., his fantasy realm that housed the tales of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Those two books (because The Lord of the Rings was meant to be a massive single tome, but the publisher broke it into three novels) became massively popular and ended up defining the entire fantasy genre. He had a lot more he wrote about the world, various notes on ancestry, half-finished stories and tales, all kinds of little bits that helped him flesh out the world, but none of it was as complete or finished as his two main novels. The best we had after was The Silmarillion, which was a collection of many of those half-finished bits and bobs, but nothing else truly finalized.

That makes adapting his work into an entire, successful franchise difficult. Once you’ve adapted The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (which New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. did, to varying levels of success) there isn’t a whole lot else truly official you can work with. Amazon has been trying, putting out the very long, very boring The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, based on many of those little notes and bits and set in the world of Middle-earth thousands of years before the stories we know. Warners, though, also wanted to continue the franchise which had made close to $6 Bil for the company (and continuing to secure the licensing rights for Tolkien’s works probably doesn’t hurt, either).

As such, without touching the original works again in some way, Warners elected to lure Peter Jackson and his team back in to make their own adaptation of some of Tolkien’s stray works (that Amazon wasn’t already handling), and that led way to a prequel set two hundred years before The Lord of the Rings, with characters we’d barely heard of before going on an adventure that doesn’t really influence anything we know, except by name dropping characters and locations we’ve seen in other films.

Okay, that does sound harsh. I actually don’t have an issue with the idea of a distant prequel to the time period of The Lord of the Rings. While prequels generally suffer from trying to set up events we’ve already seen, informing us of things we should already know, distant prequels can be freed of that. They’re allowed, by time, to focus on their own events, tell their own stories, giving us worldbuilding without being beholden to the needs of the next story in the sequence. In theory, a prequel set in Tolkien’s world could just be about people, living their own lives, having their own adventures, without a world of the Fellowship, Sauron, or the One Ring. And The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is almost able to do that. Almost.

It’s biggest sin isn’t being a prequel to The Lord of the Rings but an inessential adventure in general. Its story isn’t quite interesting enough and its characters aren’t quite investing enough, to actually make us care about this specific time and place in the world of Middle-earth. Whatever ambitions Jackson and his team had for this film, they were let down by a generic fantasy story like we’ve seen before with a central character who isn’t developed enough to carry her own story. In a way, this feels so much like every other fantasy tale that’s been released in the last 70 years that it feels like a dull copy of a copy instead of a trailblazing story from Tolkien’s own world.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim goes back to the time of Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox), the tough and fearless king of Rohan. King Helm has three children, his sons Hama (Yazdan Qafouri) and Haleth (Benjamin Wainwright) along with his brash and headstrong daughter, Héra (Gaia Wise). Rohan has seen a time of peace under the leadership of Helm, but that all comes to an end when the king gets into a fight with Freca (Shaun Dooley), a Dunlending lord who wishes, nay demands that his son, Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), marry Héra as a way to united the kingdom. Helm sees it as a power grab for the throne and challenges Freca to a fist fight. Although unintentional, Helm lays out Freca with a single punch, killing the man (and earning the king the title “Hammerhand”).

Wulf, his temper hot, swears he will have his revenge, an act that gets him and his men banished from the kingdom. But just a few seasons later Wulf is back, with an army. He attempts to kidnap Héra, but that plan is foiled by her shieldmaiden, Olwyn (Lorraine Ashbourne), and her cousin Fréaláf Hildeson (Laurence Ubong Williams). Helm, though, fails to see the true danger of Wulf and his men, instead thinking it will be an easy battle to protect Rohan. But Wulf has a plan, and secret allies among Helm’s own counsel, and it might just take Héra and her cunning to save the kingdom.

There’s an interesting story in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim: the story of how Hammerhand got his name. That, and Wulf coming for revenge afterwards, could make for a solid short film. If it were one of a few tales of Rohan, packaged together into a single film, I think that would have made for a pretty interesting movie set in this world. There’s enough story here for thirty, maybe forty-five minutes of film, but The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim has a two hour and fifteen minute runtime, and there just isn’t enough here to warrant that.

Because of that, what we do get is a lot of padding, a lot of pacing, and a ton of reminders of other, better films that we’ve seen before. Mostly what this leads to is a lot of establishing shots or scenes of people waiting and watching, while the film slowly drags along getting to the next beat. Things are told and said, and then said again later. Plot points that don’t really matter have to be set up, more than once, just so we can “understand” them when they pay off. Everything feels slow and bloated because this is a The Lord of the Rings movie and that means it needs to have a stately runtime and long pace. It can’t just be a short film or a medium length movie. It has to have the runtime to match one of Peter Jackson’s films, and that drags everything down.

Also not helping matters is the fact that the film feels the next to explain a lot of things to us instead of showing them. Take, for instance, the opening narration. We get told that Héra is a headstrong and free spirited girl, the best rider in the land, the apple of her father’s eye who he would do anything to protect. Nothing about this needed to be told to us when we could have had the characters show us. Héra could go riding and out pace all the men in the pack. She could throw herself into danger without a care for her own safety. Her father could dote on her and give her love he doesn’t show to his sons. Some of these things do happen in the film as well, but only after the movie first feels the need to tell us and beat us over the head with it. This is a film that doesn’t trust us to appreciate what’s presented.

Or maybe it’s just that the character at the core of the film doesn’t have enough going on to carry her film. Héra could be a great character. She could be all the things the film narrates at us, and that would make for a deeply interesting, flawed but heroic character. Instead, while the film tells us all about her, the character that’s actually presented is too often meek, weak, and bland. She’s a complex character on paper, but in her actions and her performance there’s very little actually there. Héra should be someone that can stand head and shoulders with Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas, but there’s not enough of her spirit and force of will presented here for us to see it.

This makes The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim something of a let down, which is a pity because, artistically, the film is fantastic. The music sweeps and swells with all the emotion of Peter Jackson’s original films. The anime artwork, done by Sola Entertainment, is stunning, with wonderfully animated characters staged against photorealistic backgrounds. The artistic style of the film has all the investing design that the story lacks, and if the plot and characters of the film could have been as interesting as what was visually on screen, this film could have been as good as anything Jackson created.

The simple fact is that this is just a brand extension of Warner Bros.’s license, designed to try and milk some more money from the franchise and keep the rights locked down for a little while longer. It’s not the most terrible thing Warners has produced for this franchise (that would be the trio of The Hobbit films), and it’s nowhere near as horrendous as what is getting released over on Amazon Prime, but that doesn’t make it great. Just because I’d rather watch The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim before I ever think to go back and watch The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, says more about how bad those are than how good this film is. It’s mediocre at best, made better only because it could be so much worse.