By Petr Navovy | Film | December 23, 2024
One of my key cinematic beliefs is that there exists no greater battle scene in movie history than the Battle of Helm’s Deep from 2002’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. What Peter Jackson and his team accomplished there—in marrying pure epic scale to intimate human moments; in contrasting rousing moments of heroism with the raw reality of war—eclipses even the achievements by the likes of Kurosawa, Miike, and other greats of the form. Jackson’s trilogy is so stacked with incredible scenes and moments (especially the first two films) that it takes a lot for something to consistently stand out, but for me, Helm’s Deep does exactly that.
I say all this so that you might understand how I would feel about any film or other property that might attempt to replicate or otherwise recapture the magic of that monumental achievement. Enter the animated 2024 film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. To be fair to the newcomer, it’s by no means a fair comparison. While the location might be the same, the dynamic of the events therein is quite distinct (though other similarities abound, very much to The War of the Rohirrim’s detriment, but more on that later). In contrast to the Helm’s Deep sequence in The Two Towers, which takes place over one very intense night, the events of the valley of the Horburg in The War of the Rohirrim settle into a prolonged siege that takes place over a number of winter months. It is a whole film, after all, rather than just a part of one.
Let’s take a step back for a moment though. Directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) from a screenplay by (deep breath) Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews and Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou, The War of the Rohirrim takes place 183 years before the events of the trilogy we know and love. The story here centres on the King of Rohan, Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox), and his free-spirited, warrior soul daughter, Héra (Gaia Wise). If that sounds like a familiar family dynamic, then you’re probably just picturing Theoden and Éowyn and their clashes about what a woman’s place should be vis-à-vis battles, halls, and other staples of fantasy society. In fairness, that’s the kind of repressive attitude that probably would have gotten frequent pushback, so why not replicate it here?
Stubborn and contemptuous, and not one to suffer fools, Helm Hammerhand is not exactly one for tactful diplomacy—how did they think to cast Brian Cox?!—and this leads to some rather messy political squabbling at the start of The War of the Rohirrim, which eventually culminates in the king’s flight from Edoras and to the safety of that storied valley fortress. The politics here is simplistic and heavy-handed, and that would be fine if it was used to provide basic context for some exciting and kinetic fantasy action spectacle. The trouble is that Kamiyama seems oddly reticent to utilise the possibilities of his medium. Sir, you are doing a Lord of the Rings film in anime—let loose some bonkers camerawork and gonzo imagery! Audiences expecting the freewheeling kineticism of, say, Attack on Titan, will be disappointed to say the least.
Héra makes for a sympathetic enough protagonist. Not extraordinarily so, but sufficiently smart and resourceful that, were she surrounded by a better film, she might prove compelling. As things stand, however, the ingredients do not add up. It doesn’t help that her and other character animations appear oddly lifeless too. Anime often conveys a bounty of emotions with just a few lines, yet here that flat effect seen in most of the film’s action is replicated on its faces. That’s not to say there aren’t a few moments of excitement and empathy scattered throughout, but they are few and far between.
More egregious is the film’s attempted piggybacking on the glories of the property that it is attached to. This is one of the cardinal sins of the unimaginative, cynical era of prequels and remakes that we find ourselves in. The entertainment executive prayer: ‘Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, look, a reference to something you love, that’s enough for your dopamine hit, isn’t it, you unwashed fiends?’ Narrated by Miranda Otto’s Eowyn, The War of the Rohirrim features a number of shots and moments/sequences that a better film would work in as loving homages but that here come across as cheap. The most striking examples of that are the times that the film’s score quotes passages from Howard Shore’s transcendent soundtrack to Jackson’s trilogy. It does so without logic or sense, hoping that the power of those notes will be enough by itself to stir and carry the emotion as it did twenty years ago. It does so if you close your eyes during those scenes, but if you keep them open then you’re just left confused and irritated.
