The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirim
Animated Lord of the Rings spin-off movie, directed by Kenji Kamiyama who worked on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and not very much else.
War of the Rohirim follows a war... of the Rohirim, as Wulf, Lord of the Dunlending swears revenge against king Helm Hammerhand and his daughter Hera for respectively killing his father in a duel and rejecting his proposal for marriage.
You know, Lord of the Rings doesn't quite get as much criticism for this as the Star Wars series, mainly because it's not as egregious about it (yet), but it sure is piling up material that seems to be made out of a sense of obligation alone. This can be added to the same pile as the Hobbit movies and Rings of Power, a piece of underwhelming fanfiction that brings nothing new or interesting to the table and has practically nothing going for it aside from some token attempts at fanservice.
I dunno, I'm not opposed to the idea of an animated movie set in Middle Earth but this just doesn't do anything worthwhile. In a series where the stakes are as high and scope is as epic as Lord of the Rings, making this about about a petty tribal squabble instigated by a guy who couldn't get over a woman rejecting him just feels silly. Maybe the writers thought this premise was shakesperean and tragic but it really just comes off as a bloated melodrama where the primary motivation for just about everyone seems to be hurt pride. If you go for that sort of thing, which I maintain this universe, in particular, isn't the right place for, you really need to make sure the characters are strong enough to carry it and I really didn't think they were.
We are meant to think of Helm Hammerhand as this badass warrior king but he really just comes off as a meatheaded idiot who acts rashly and puts his people into harms way. We are meant to think of Hera as an archetypal heroine who has to prove her mettle in a world where everyone is underestimating her and rise up to be a leader to her people but really, she spends just about three quarters of the movie accomplishing fuck all and even by the end feels mostly like a side character in her own movie. And then we get to Wulf who, between his comically petty motivation and almost farcical edgelord mannerisms almost feels like a parody of an anime villain. I just found none of this any interesting or engaging, it fails at being good drama, even good melodrama, because it's too contrived to take seriously and no one's relatable enough to root for.
So, are the visuals or the action any good? I didn't really think so. It has some pretty backgrounds but the animation's kinda choppy, the CGI looks jarring, even by the standards of anime and the climax is effectively just a worse retread of the battle of Helm's Deep. None of it stuck out to me as being particularly well framed or choreographed. And speaking of CGI there was an object factoring into the climax of the movie that looked so jarring compared to the background that it made me wonder if it was supposed to be a homage to the artstyle of the Ralph Bakshi movie. You'll recognize it when you see it.
I'm gonna be honest, Lord of the Rings is slowly but surely raking up a pile of pretty questionable spin-off media and it's hard not to feel cynical about it. Trying to expand on material without involvement of the original author is almost always a fools errand and... well, straight up, I don't think this would make old J.R.R. very proud. Nor would anything else based on his world that was made in the last 15 years. The universe of Lord of the Rings is a very rich one but it can't sustain this sort of tangential, iterative apocrypha that neither manages to capture its original appeal nor bring anything unique and idiosyncratic to the table. I don't want to stress the Star Wars comparison too much, but it's starting to fall into the same trap of "Not earnest enough to be a sincere tribute, not bold enough to qualify as a reinvention" so all it ever aspires to is the lukewarm comfort of familiarity, which it still somehow falls short of.
Straight up, I feel this is pretty bad and not even in an especially interesting way. It's a movie that exists for the hell of it and some will defend it more than it deserves and some will hate it more than it deserves but in most people, I imagine, it won't inspire any particular passion one way or the other. And honestly, how could it? It's a pointless story brought to life with mediocre animation to add some low density fluff to a property that's over and done with. Tolkien isn't gonna rise from the grave and write more material and the Silmarillion doesn't lend itself well to being adapted unless they really got creative with it, which seems to be the exact opposite of what anyone wants to do with this series.
This wasn't any good and if I may be so bold, I'm gonna go out and predict that that Gollum movie and whatever else they have in development won't be either. I gave this a fair chance and was left very unimpressed. Everything suggests that we'll never see the end of this series and I'm already tired of it. It's not something I'm looking forward to.