Review - The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024)

         Hey guys, Chuck here. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a recently released anime film from director Kenji Kamiyama, who is best known among anime fans for his work on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Blood: The Last Vampire, and at least one of the shorts from Star Wars: Visions. 

        The movie is set one hundred years before the War of the Ring, and tells the story of a conflict over the control of Rohan, where Helm Hammerhand, along with his sons, Hama and Haleth, and his daughter, Héra, must fend off the ruthless Wulf and his army of Dunlendings at the fortress of Dunharrow, which later becomes known as Helm's Deep. 

       Okay, so this movie has been getting slammed online, with many calling it "fanfiction" and referring to Héra as a "self-insert girlboss." However, while I don't wholly disagree with such criticisms, I do think that such criticisms are misleading and incomplete. For instance, the plot itself is drawn from one of the Appendices from Return of the King, and thus the plot itself does come directly from Tolkien. The screenwriters, however, had to flesh out the story in order to form a cinematic narrative for it. Secondly, I don't know how some folks define a "girlboss," but Héra doesn't completely meet MY personal definition of the term "girlboss." Now, granted, she is a very headstrong and free-spirited woman, who has no desires to merely be married off to a man. BUT, I view a "girlboss" as a woman who doesn't need rescuing or help from anyone else, and this doesn't apply to Héra, as she's getting rescued and bailed out repeatedly throughout the movie. However, I will concede that many of her personality traits were crafted by the screenwriters of the movie as Tolkien never fully gave her much of a character. 

       All that being said, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, as I got into some genuinely important backstory regarding Rohan, the origin of the name of Helm's Deep, and a few other things. The animation was phenomenal, and the voice acting from the likes of Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Luke Pasqualino, and so forth was fantastic. The action was really cool, and the film did lend itself really well to the anime style. But, let's not get it twisted. This movie exists predominantly to allow New Line Cinema to retain the film rights to the Lord of the Rings series. But, I am glad that this exists within the world of the Peter Jack's film series, and has no connection to Amazon's streaming series The Rings of Power. I'm going to give The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim a rating of 4/5. 

       Okay guys, this is Chuck signing off, and I'll see you guys next time. 

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