I didn’t really know what to expect going into this movie, and the first ten minutes didn’t give me a lot of confidence. They came in leaning heavily on the ‘Not like the other girls’ trope, and even worse: a villain with a facial scar. Not a good start.

It did get better after that though, and I actually found myself quite enjoying it. The story doesn’t have any major surprises, and you can see several important plot events coming from miles off. This would have been a bigger issue for me if it was a ‘new’ story, but since it is working with the original source material from Tolkien, I was able to cut it some slack and just enjoy it for what it was.

With good music and beautiful visuals, it was enough to keep me awake for the whole movie, even though it ended well after my normal bedtime. You might think that that’s a low bar to set, but I can’t say the same for most franchise adaptations I’ve seen recently!

So overall, I would say I was pleasantly surprised. Except for the use of a scar as a mark of villainy. Come on people, we can surely do better than that!

I am not usually the type of reviewer to go too much into the background of how or why a movie was made or a book was written; after all, the reader or viewer is mostly interested in the end product.

In this case, I picked up the rumour online that The War of the Rohirrim was mostly made because Warner Bros. needed to release a Lord of the Rings-movie to retain the movie rights to the franchise.

Don’t quote me on this, I couldn’t tell you what deal they made with the rights holders. But it would make a certain amount of sense. Because walking out of The War of the Rohirrim, I did scratch my head wondering why this movie was made.

Before I dive into this, I want to say that I enjoyed my night watching this movie – honestly, it was mostly a relief that The War of the Rohirrim was not particularly bad. Lately, it feels like big franchises are squandering their name left and right, and The Lord of the Rings is among them. Against that backdrop, I’ll chalk up any entry that is at least decent as a win.

However, The War of the Rohirrim is neither original in its story nor in its design. It is based on just over two pages in Appendix A of The Return of the King, and mostly follows the traditional story Tolkien set out in broad strokes there.

The adaptation does deviate on a fair few of the sparse details that Tolkien does give, however. While some of the changes were clearly made to accommodate the new female protagonist, I do wonder why others were made. I would have especially appreciated it if they could have included more of the few lines of speech Tolkien gives Helm on those pages.

Moreover, if the creators of The War of the Rohirrim were going to deviate from Tolkien, they might haven taken the opportunity to add a couple of fresh takes and interesting details to flesh out the story and move off the beaten track just a little.

As it stands, it the story is a very generic tale of adventure with more action scenes than character development that probably would have been entirely forgettable if it had not been part of a larger franchise.

Perhaps The War of the Rohirrim’s most subversive moments were also its weakest. The movie does have a serious dose of Tolkien’s gravitas, but the anime style got the better of the creators on at least a few occasions: this movie features a Watcher in the Water eating a Mumak. I know.

That scene is a clear example of one the issues haunting the Lord of the Rings-franchise: all new things need to remind the viewer of Jackson’s trilogy (looking at you, Rings of Power). Another particularly clear example would be Meduseld, the Golden Hall of the kings of Rohan – even though (slight spoiler alert) it burns down halfway through the movie, it looks exactly like the one we see in the Jackson trilogy right from the start. I feel like it might have been a nice nod if it started different and was rebuilt in the style we know, but apparently it had to be recognisable all the way through.

While I love the Jackson trilogy and appreciate that The War of the Rohirrim, despite being an anime, has squarely placed itself in the same universe, I think it is clear that all the heavy lifting was already done by Jackson and Weta Workshop.

As a result, this movie feels a little like a fan fic: a not-like-the-other-girls warrior princess protagonist, and a mostly unoriginal story leaning heavily on the existing imagery established by its predecessors.

To reiterate a previous point: The War of the Rohirrim is not bad and made for an enjoyable night – but it is mostly just a mid adventure movie with a Lord of the Rings-sauce. You decide whether that is worth watching.

If there was something on my list of things that I didn’t expect to ever witness, I’d say it was an anime movie on Helm Hammerhand and his daughter. Even after Peter shared the news with me, the upcoming release of this movie was hard for my brain to internalize. And then, suddenly, it was here!

It’s strange to be a Tolkien fan in these recent years. There is more content than ever, but – as, for example, Rings of Power has eventually proven to me after I failed to finish its second season – it seems to be pretty hard to capture Tolkien’s magic in Middle-Earth adaptations.

As such, I was unwilling to form expectations in regards to The War of the Rohirrim. When it arrived, I had to see it though. That’s how it goes, and everybody knows…(once again many thanks to Leonard Cohen and his ever applicable lyrics).

Since I’ve read all the appendices of The Lord of the Rings as a child, the legend of Helm Hammerhand was one of the stories that really stayed with me, if simply for two very iconic scenes with Helm the legend himself. As such, when I heard of the premise of this movie, I thought it made sense they had chosen this aspect of the lore to focus on.

When I learned the protagonist would be Helm’s daughter (unnamed in the source material), I was intrigued. It seemed a clever way to explore the legend of Helm Hammerhand – as well as the life of a woman in Middle-Earth – without the danger of completely demystifying some of the more magic elements of the original story. Additionaly, telling the story in a frame narrative (with Miranda Otto as Éowyn recounting oral history) really helps to keep this legendary feel intact.

I would say The War of the Rohirrim contains a decent plot, but it’s strongest points are without exception the scenes directly taken from Tolkien’s writings. Everything the writers of this movie have invented to link Tolkien’s scenes together, however, range from common tropes and archetypes at best to mental exercises that require some solid suspension of disbelieve to make much sense at worst.

Tropes and archeypes aren’t bad per se, of course, but in the case of The War of the Rohirrim, I at times felt they undermined the strength of Tolkien’s world – cheap and unnecessary references to The Lord of the Rings-movies were not the way to save this, by the way. Admittedly, I don’t have enough experience with anime to confidently say what choices in the narrative were made to accommodate that format/genre.

All in all – apart from some eye-rolling moments I joyfully shared with Robin – I will say I’m glad The War of the Rohirrim exists. It was thrilling to hear Rohan’s iconic soundtrack again, the animation was pleasant to look at and the voice-actors did a great job in bringing the characters to life. Also, as an inhabitant of the Netherlands, I could appreciate Lief was really ‘lief’. Sometimes, it’s the little things in life.