'The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim' briefing

1 ½ (out of 4)

            For the vested Tolkien nerd, who could be anything but disappointed about what led to this empty, unhappy dud? Not until very close to the release of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim did I wonder where the marketing was — I couldn’t be too surprised when the box office opening weekend was like seven million, especially you find out New Line Cinema was basically in the same situation as Sony when they clung to their Spider-Man rights by fast-tracking those Andrew Garfield reboots. The quality of The War of the Rohirrim has to be calibrated later since it’s all clouded by business decisions rather than clear creative spurs... at least in Sony’s case you have piles of comic books to flip through, meanwhile Peter Jackson’s best interns are working with about three or four pages from one of the appendices in the back of The Return of the King, and HECK I THOUGHT THE HOBBIT MOVIES WERE BLOATED! By the same math (in terms of butter being scraped over way too much bread) they could’ve split The Hobbit dozens of times instead of into infamously criticized thirds, just incalculable levels of milking that money machine bone dry!

It didn’t do anything too drastic to violate those precious few pages at its disposal and anything directly lifted from those numerable paragraphs gets a pass. But note for note, The War of the Rohirrim is a never-ending ladder of pointlessness, fan or no. Even when you get to the cinematic story and the whole gun-to-your-head moviemaking arrangement, it’s just glorified, glossy fan-fiction — working with so little is like making a movie out of an illustration on the back of Reader’s Digest. For weird standalone spin-off movies I can’t help but think of Star Wars "Stories" and all those damn streaming shows… akin to Rogue One, this is based on the nugget of a nothing idea and, along with Solo, there’s an absurd amount of teased and reworked lines meant only to repeatedly reference The Two Towers and Return of the King’s Rohirric elements. You HAD to have Helm Hammerhand’s son Fréaláf kill a big ol’ war elephant Legolas-style, and screw it, why not shoehorn wizards and resurrect Christopher Lee’s voice from beyond the grave, for no reason! I’m vexed by vacuous lore media, I can’t decide whether it’s worse as an outsider or not, regardless I sure don’t need every other exchange to mirror or reconfigure the most throwaway lines in LOTR to some degree, no matter how faint — “we must be reminiscent at every POSSIBLE MOMENT, EVERY MOMENT can be a fan service moment!”

Then you get to anime aspect, which from afar seemed benign enough, maybe even inspired, ’til you realize the studio just wanted costs minimized. Expensive things like sets, costumes, special effects and horse trainers weren't worth it to Warner Bros, and they were sadly, cynically right. Listen, I’ll not pretend I’m familiar with anime outside of basics like Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon, and I'm sure I've never touched a manga — ignorance aside this looked like Nausicaä in the worst way…. the integration of the backdrops and CGI flourishes (done beautifully like in Makoto Shinkai's works, most famously Your Name for instance) does nothing for this decades-dated, drab-ass accident of an anime. Despite a positive Japanese influence in reverence for the world, when it came to the fights this was certainly more a wuxia than English fantasy. As much as I can’t really compare it to much Eastern animation, I really don’t have to! The style is a facade, a distraction, for even at its most scenic and transporting, it’s just copy-pasted from the visual hallmarks of Jackson’s films, primarily manifested from the page to the palpable by illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe, as well as WETA Workshop creative director Richard Taylor, all of whom return here to no artistic avail after translating so much of Tolkien’s visual ideas as we know them. Their brilliant old designs are recycled to almost exclusively showcase the Rohirrim, the least fantastical culture in all of Middle Earth no matter how many eagles and mûmakils you cram in there — I’m kinda shocked the ents didn’t cameo.

This movie’s stately, pompous masquerade will have you longing for the daytime soap opera feel of the awful, overproduced Rings of Power show on Amazon Prime, picking your poison between serious sentimentality or absolute schlock. If you’re gonna fuck up Tolkien why not make it interesting? But LOTR adaptive scribe Philippa Boyens, now solely producing, has let the 'next generation' take a stab at Middle Earth, namely her untested daughter Phoebe Gittins, as well as collaborator Arty Papageorgiou, who both re-wrote the COVID script from another novice duo Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews. The four hacks stretch it as far as they can, sorry, what does that work out to, like a paragraph per person? The first act is full-scale nonsense aside from the inciting death-punch by King Hammerhand (Brian Cox) uppercutting his chubby, covetous brother Freca, leaving the fall of Edoras, its people’s exodus and the eventual siege at Helm’s Deep (including Helm slaying Dunlendings in the dead of night) by a vengeful progeny Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) to situate you’re remaining movie but JESUS, 133 minutes of this unceremonious excess? WOW a Watcher in the Water swallowed an oliphaunt… it’s all relatively inoffensive and simultaneously utterly insulting. 

You can see why Fran Walsh and Jackson sat on the sidelines rather than than go all in tricking us with shameless nostalgia and a fucking UNTOLD story that is just politically desperate. From square one Miranda Otto’s narration as Eowyn (nicely echoing Galadriel’s prologue in the original trilogy) tells us not to look for said tale in writings as “there are none,” (*TITLE DROPS*), as these New Zealanders try to frame business-dictated limitations with asspull, Princess-Peach-level girlboss feminism, all for a character with literally no name? “DON’T BOTHER, IT WASN’T RECORDED BECAUSE OF SEXISM OR SOMETHING.” Sure, yeah, Rohan’s historians are misogynists didn’t you know?

And all this for what? To ensure the same hacks can help Jackson make two mother-fudging parts of The Hunt for Gollum, which will be more fan-fictiony than ever considering you’re working with ZERO PAGES IN THAT CASE RIGHT?? I hate the bitter irony of holding on to your precious piece of the IP to prevent the step-by-step dismantling of a wondrous legacy, Tolkien’s death by a thousand cuts, only to wield the knife yourself? And the Hobbit movies already drew a considerable amount of metaphorical blood. Maybe they’ve prevented Jeff Bezos from rebooting LOTR and I should actually be super grateful, not sure. But The War of the Rohirrim, Eru almighty it’s so useless I shouldn’t even be talking about it, it’s already forgotten. Like all box office failures of recent days, it was online within TWO WEEKS — just another Warner Brothers write-off, they didn’t even blink.