It’s still impressive how evocative Howard Shore’s Middle-earth music can be 21 years after The Lord of the Rings trilogy ran its course. While the composer is most celebrated in fan communities for his rousing “Fellowship” theme, or the provincial beauty (and flutes!) of “The Shire” leitmotif, I’ve always felt like the vaguely Nordic ditty he wrote to signal the Riders of Rohan is its own little wonder.

One might assume anime artist and director Kenji Kamiyama agrees since the opening prelude to The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim also basks in the sounds of Shore’s ode to the ancient horse lords. And when paired with elegant animation of Hèra, the hitherto unsung daughter of the Kingdom of Rohan’s greatest monarch, it can take your breath away. As Hèra rides at sunset along the hills outside Edoras, the ancestral castle we previously saw in the exact same shape in 2002’s The Two Towers, War of the Rohirrim does what it was designed to do. It triggers massive dopamine blasts of remembered splendors from ages past.

But it also makes a promise that the rest of the movie cannot keep. It suggests this film can stand on its own as an epic work which justifies a return to Middle-earth beyond further lining Warner Bros. Discovery’s coffers. The reality, however, is more complicated.

To be sure, there are flashes of brilliance throughout the work, most of them stemming from Kamiyama’s animation and aesthetic choices. A veteran of legendary sagas like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, Kamiyama shrewdly walks a delicate line between echoing the set decoration and production choices made by Peter Jackson a quarter-century ago, often down to a tee, and enjoying a more heightened and melodramatic point-of-view, befitting anime’s strengths.

In its better moments during the film’s first act, War of the Rohirrim visually reminded me of a simpler, almost storybook idea of high-fantasy found in 1980s and ‘70s animation, including Rankin/Bass’ antiquated interpretations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world. Characters can be introduced idyllically strumming an instrument while composing a ballad about a beloved sister; others steal piercing glances at an unrequited love who might as well be the Moon Princess.

Often, though, the film is tasked with recreating the visual vocabulary of Peter Jackson films designed for another medium of storytelling, all without quite finding a story to justify the existence of this specific movie beyond a mandate to further exploit the LOTR intellectual property 20 years after that tale was decisively concluded.

Technically War of the Rohirrim is based on the same massive tome as Jackson’s movies, but only insofar as this film takes the sketch of a story, a few pages Tolkien jotted down in the Lord of the Rings’ labyrinthine appendices, and expands it to feature length. There is opportunity in such a conceit, as promisingly teased in that aforementioned prelude narrated by Miranda Otto, who reprises her role of Éowyn by way of Rohirrim’s off-screen storyteller. On the page, the daughter of old King Helm was never given a name by an unconcerned Tolkien. Yet on the screen, this Rohirrim woman who a war is fought over becomes the central hero. And as relayed by Éowyn, the newly christened Hèra (Gaia Wise) never received the songs she deserved. If this movie is intended to correct that patriarchal oversight, the ballad remains frustratingly off-key.

A retelling of the siege that gave The Two Towers’ fortified Helm’s Deep its ominous name, War of the Rohirrim’s story properly begins when a brooding warlord of the neighboring Dunlendings, Freca (Shaun Dooley) arrives at Edoras. He comes to propose a marital union between the daughter of King Helm (Brian Cox), and Freca’s son Wulf (Luke Pasqualino). Helm is not fooled. Freca clearly wants the throne for his son despite Helm having many boys already lined up for succession. So despite Wulf clearly carrying a long-simmering torch for Hèra after they grew up together, Helm scoffs off the marriage… for his sons’ sakes if not his daughter’s. In fact, the only person whose wants and desires are being wholly ignored in this whole detente is Hèra.

As the Princess of Rohan tells Wulf, she does not wish to marry any man. But the lad and his father persist until things get violent. After being challenged to a duel outside, Helm punches Freca so hard he kills the old man in a single blow. War thus becomes inevitable, and a long siege too. So if the people of Rohan are to survive the winter, it may take the practicality of a woman’s sword hand to break the stalemate—but not before some spectacular action sequences involving Oliphaunts, catapults, and maybe an orc or two.

The War of the Rohirrim is interesting in how it marks the second project in almost as many years that attempts to expand on (or exploit) the Lord of the Rings brand name. And like Amazon’s ponderous The Rings of Power, Rohirrim feels somewhat defensive in justifying its existence. Yet unlike the Amazon Prime series, there are genuine qualities that make WB’s animated movie worthwhile. The aforementioned art direction is beatific and intermittently spellbinding. Whether it is shots of a lone rider breaking through the snow outside Helm’s Deep or vivid sword fights free from the limitations of physics and actors who only had a handful of weeks to train, War of the Rohirrim is a feast for the eyes. It is when it comes to developing emotional resonance behind all those pretty images that the movie runs into trouble.

While the general plot line and arc of the war between the Rohirrim and Dunlendings is taken from Tolkien, it would seem another Warner Bros. Discovery IP treasure trove, Game of Thrones, is as much an inspiration as anything to do with the realms of hobbits and elves. There is in fact an acute ambiguity and complexity to the morality of Kamiyama’s film which harkens back to some of the better qualities of author George R.R. Martin’s riff on high fantasy.

Take for example Hèra’s family life. Wulf and his father might be little more than mustache-twirling villains by the movie’s end, but the royal family in the horse lands could hardly be mistaken for enlightened. Cox’s old king is vain and short-tempered, a brute who is quick to escalate a situation and who sees his daughter as little better than a bargaining chip. And while there is love between Hèra and her brothers, their war with the Dunlendings is ultimately a dance of crowns; a fight for power over who gets to sit in a fancy chair. Thus the personal slights and animosities between rival families, particularly with regard to possessive Wulf, informs some of the surprisingly nasty turns the story can take.

In a certain sense, this is tonal distancing from Tolkien is liberating. In theory, War of the Rohirrm is simply another story in Tolkien’s universe, and one that’s unconcerned with feeling as if Tolkien personally penned it. Much of the original author’s felicity of language or romantic notions of chivalry and medieval pageantry is absent. That is an advantage over, say, The Rings of Power, which flails mightily as it attempts to recreate Tolkien’s grandeur but only replicates the density and impenetrability of his text’s minutiae.

But in actual execution, War of the Rohirrim’s choices to step off the trodden path seem too timid or unsure of where it might go next. This wavering quality could fall on the script, which has nearly half a dozen writers credited. The dialogue is flat, and the reliance on rote declarations of emotions thick. Occasionally the script even awkwardly repeats famous lines from Lord of the Rings or otherwise with minor alterations (“I am bride to no man!” Hèra cries in one scene, and “winter is coming… on” an underling warns in another). Still, the film itself seems to struggle between the impulse of recreating moments we loved about Rohan and Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers—complete with some of the great battle shots from that movie happening more or less the same way, only the time of day and weather has changed—and fitfully standing on its own.

It never fully succeeds at following either instinct, and thus feels like so many other spin-off stories adapted from popular brands whose glory days were decades ago: a serviceable extension whose differences and similarities from the mothership IP just highlight how much better the original thing is.

Hèra is a promising character well voiced by Wise and painstakingly animated as a great shield-maiden warrior by Kamiyama’s team. But The War of the Rohirrim’s ballad for her sounds unfinished and too derivative of better tunes we’ve already heard. If I want to relive the valor of Éowyn and a shield-maiden riding as the horns of Shore’s Rohan theme boom, I’d just as soon put on that original 2003 magic, which this film never fully recaptures.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is in theaters on Dec. 13. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.

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