The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend War of the Rohirrim
I shall now damn this movie with the faintest praise I can give to anything.
It’s not as bad as The Rings of Power.
The story this is based on is in the appendices. Here is the quick and dirty. The Dunelendings were the descendants of swarthy men who had sided with Morgoth. Like all of his servants they served unwillingly but serve him they did which gave the Numenoreans a beef with them when they got that far East.
When the kings of Gondor made an alliance with the Rhovanion. The tribe was encouraged to settle on land vacated by the Great Plague and to beat up on the Dunelendings who were a perpetual nuisance. Which they did.
Fast-forward a few centuries, there was briefly a chance to calm things down between the two barbarian kingdoms when Chief Frecca proposed an alliance with King Helm of Rohan. Helm’s daughter would marry his son Wulf. This offer was received “poorly” by Helm who punched Frecca hard enough to kill him. Wulf was big mad about this and launched a huge war against Rohan. The king and all his sons were killed in the war but Helm Hammerhand became an absolute badass legend in the process. Finally, Wulf was killed by Helm’s nephew who became the new king of Rohan and is the ancestor of Theoden.
Nobody knows what happened to Helm’s daughter because she was so unimportant Tolkien couldn’t be bothered to give her a name.
Now, she’s got a name. A completely non-canonical and soon to be forgotten again name: “Hera.”
Hera is absolutely a girl-boss but she’s nowhere near as obnoxious about it as Amazon Galadriel which I guess is something. It doesn’t mean this show is worth watching unless you are on an airplane. It’s okay then I guess. I mean it’s certainly not worth walking out on under those circumstances, and I can’t say the same for the Rings of Power.
Since this is an animated feature we should start by looking at that. My own view is that art design is good, it’s very much in keeping with the aesthetics of the Jackson movies. I’m fine with the anime stylistics, largely because the very first Tolkien adaptation I ever saw was Rankin Bass’ The Hobbit which was made by (proto) Studio Ghibli.
However, the animation itself is awful. It’s so choppy and herky-jerky it’s hard to keep track of the action sequences when they start and it’s fairly distracting the rest of the time. There were better than 60 different studios trying to get this thing out on time and at the end of the day, making its release date the only thing that ever mattered with War of the Rohirrim.
This film was trying to get by on callouts, flashbacks, and memberberries. Even Warner Brothers has admitted (as I’ve been saying all along) that this thing was started strictly as a rights retainer. If it made money, good but if it didn’t who cares because its only real job was to meet the retention terms of the contract signed with the Saul Zantz Company in the 1990s. Which it has done for good or ill. Warner Brothers will be hanging on to the rights of the actual Lord of the Rings.
The film does give Helm his bad-ass scenes from the appendices, which is nice of them but they gave Hera so many more ass-kicking scenes it becomes vaguely absurd that there were “no songs sung of her deeds.” I’m not going into them.
Something to keep in mind here. Hera could have prevented a war that destroyed her entire family and devastated her father’s kingdom if she had agreed to marry Wulf. Granted Helm Hammerhand was against the match but if Hera had said, “Yes” to Wulf, Helm would have gone along with it. But because she had to be strong, independent, and empowered, living her best life, Helm and all of her brothers died horribly. But Hera got to ride off with her middle-aged female “traveling companion” so that makes everything okay. Basically, Hera was coded as a lesbian.
I am reasonably certain that royal lesbians have married men for the good of their kingdoms out of duty and honor and I respect all of them far more than the obnoxiously entitled Hera.
Anyway, this isn’t as bad as The Rings of Power but that sure as hell doesn’t mean it’s worth watching. So. Do. Not. Do. That.
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend War of the Rohirrim (1.9 / 5)
