War of the Rohirrim revives everything good about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings

About 25 years ago, the production team of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy put out an open call to any able-bodied equestrian willing to take themselves and a horse to a remote New Zealand shooting spree to become an extra in the legendary cavalry. from Rohan. Stop me when you’ve done that I’ve heard this one beforebut production did not anticipate the number of women who volunteered for the assignment.

So you could say that Peter Jackson’s Rohirrim was associated with women taking on unexpected roles, even before Miranda Otto’s cry, “I’m not a man!” in The return of the king. Those legendary riders return triumphantly The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirriman animated film in which a challenging shield maiden of Rohan plays the central role.

Director Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) takes on the task of creating an animated Middle-earth that feels like part of the same tapestry as Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. This attention to detail and reproduction is the film’s greatest strength: The War of the Rohirrim looks and feels like Jackson’s LotR in the best way. It’s packed with sword-swinging adventure, royal drama and riveting monster mayhem. Unfortunately, it also reproduces the aspect of the Jackson films that has aged the worst.

Rohirrim guarantees its fidelity by borrowing directly some of the great conceptual talents of Jackson’s Middle-earth films. Producer (and co-writer of the Jackson trilogy) Philippa Boyens enlisted original concept artists Alan Lee and John Howe and ensured Kamiyama’s team had full access to Wētā Workshop’s archives as visual references. This Middle-earth will be very familiar to fans, right down to every relief on the sculpted columns of Meduseld, the Golden Hall of Edoras. Miranda Otto is even back to voice Éowyn and narrate the film. And it’s all in service of a story co-written by Boyens, based on a small piece of fictional history that Tolkien wrote down in the previous part of The return of the king: the legend of Helm Hammerhand.

The ‘Vikings, but for horses’ atmosphere of the Horsemen of Rohan is apparent from just a quick glance. More than any other culture in Middle-earth, the Rohirrim expressed Tolkien’s love of (and academic expertise in) Scandinavian languages, mythology and medieval poetry, so powerful and joyful that by the time Théoden’s horsemen make their final assault on Minas Tirith in The return of the kingTolkien’s prose begins to split into alliterative verse in the middle of paragraphs. In his short, lightly explained story of Helm Hammerhand, the last king of the first line of Rohirric kings and the namesake of the Helm’s Deep fortress, Tolkien gives Rohan his own Epic of Beowulf.

Nearly 200 years before the Ring Quest, Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan (Brian Cox), is an aging but respected ruler, whose legacy is secured in his two righteous sons. Our real protagonist, however, is his adventurous daughter Héra (Gaia Wise), who befriends the giant eagles of the wilderness and doesn’t want to marry anyone.

Normally this would not be the case That A big problem for her, as the third royal child, until the ambitious Lord Freca (Shaun Dooley) calls her to be betrothed to his son, the warrior Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), who was also her childhood friend. Helm sees Freca’s request as legitimate, and from this dispute between the gentlemen arises a multi-generational conflict that – well, I’ll avoid spoilers for this story, even though it was first published almost 70 years ago. Suffice it to say, there’s a reason Helm was the end of his dynasty.

For anyone worried that the transition to animation would get in the way of the kind of indelible performances that characterized Jackson Lord of the rings, RohirrimThe voice cast of Cox and Pasqualino, especially Cox and Pasqualino, brings it all together. Cox steps into the shoes of the “tragic Rohirric king” that the late Bernard Hill filled in Jackson’s films, and he shows that Hill isn’t the only one who can roar.Come on, Eorlingas!” and making a theater full of people sit upright in their seats.

The War of the RohirrimThe script by Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou is both an adventurous and tragic royal drama. Great beasts stalk the land and threaten only human warriors, an endless winter ravages a besieged fortress, sons see their fathers cut down before them, and in return they cut down the sons of their enemies.

But there’s still room for that old hallmark of screenwriting from Boyens, Jackson and Fran Walsh: thrilling monster attack action scenes. War of the RohirrimThe elephants in particular are making a stunning comeback. They’re honestly more terrifying here, under Kamiyama, than ever in the live-action trilogy. RohirrimThe film’s background art is also stunning, appearing almost photorealistic in places.

Admittedly, in some of the most creatively shot action scenes, the detailed backgrounds make the characters look as if they’re floating above a green screen. But most of the time it works, and when it works, it’s beautiful. Kamiyama wanted to make an animated film feel like it was part of Jackson’s live action trilogy, and he succeeded.

Where Rohirrim what it unfortunately fails to do is repeat the mistakes of the Jackson trilogy. It’s a film in which all the bad guys have darker skin and hair than the good guys, and wear more crude animal materials – adapting Tolkien’s orientalist world-building with little change.

This may seem like a minor nitpick: I hear the cry There are two token brown good guys! rising from apologists. But we live in an age where right-wing billionaires unironically name their companies’Sauron“And”Palantir”, and both the Italian extreme right and ‘post-liberal right’ vice president-elect of the United States’ claim The Lord of the Rings for their own. With each triumphant, nostalgic sound of the Howard Shore-inspired score in my theater, I felt an inaudible little note: this story, about a war that started when a good white father didn’t want a bad brown man for his son. -law, becomes a softball pass to some of the worst parts of the Tolkien fandom.

Tolkien himself was furious at the approval of the Third Reich are favorite arena of fantasy for supremacist propaganda. In a long 1941 letter to his son Michael, expressing many wartime concerns and a general malaise of powerlessness in the face of the approaching horrors, he also takes time to express a more personal complaint.

“I harbor a burning personal grudge in this war – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than at 22: against that ruddy little ignorant Adolf Hitler (…). Ruining, distorting, misapplying and making forever cursed that noble Northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and which I have tried to present in its true light. And I think if we love Middle-earth and everything derived from it, we owe it to that bond to interrogate what’s attractive about it to white supremacists, and to soften that through adaptation when we can.

Sitting in the theater, my little one Lord of the ringsA loving horse girl’s heart was thrilled when she saw a movie about a horse girl princess who picks up a sword and leads her people through hell. I wish all I was thinking about was how happy I was to see a new, exciting, expressive Middle-earth adaptation.

A lot of things have changed since Jackson’s trilogy first hit the screens, not least of which is that there are plenty more Middle-Earth prequel projects floating around. (Heck, We even have a Middle-Earth book!) War of the Rohirrim is distinguished by its confidence in the human drama of Tolkien’s stories. It’s a Lord of the Rings movie with no rings, no Dark Lord, no wizards, not even a hobbit. Yet it has more than its fair share of fantastic tragedies and epic adventures.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim will be released in US cinemas on December 13.