El Señor de los Anillos: La guerra de los Rohirrim

I am a long time (40+ years) Tolkien fan, and arguably fall into the category of being hard to please. I saw this film on IMAX and I must say that it looks pretty nice, with the scenery being exemplary. The animation style might put some people off, depending on preference, but I think it holds up. In summary, overall production value is up to expectation for me (picture, sound, voice acting etc).

Now, where it falls short is definitely on the script side, and I join the (growing) crowd who has a hard time understanding why they decided to change the storyline from the book instead of just building on it. I get the motive and all, but it is still a mystery why they decided to go in this direction, despite the fact that they know EXACTLY what will happen when it hits the Tolkien fandom.

Filmmakers could easily have done more or less the same story, including the Hera perspective, but without tampering with the source material and they would have gotten through this in a much better shape.

I guess it is a sign of the times. Sadly.

The good thing is: animation is good and buitifully made.

All the rest is awfull. The plot is unbelievebly stupid and predictable at evey turn. It lacks any coherence and depth, grown man behave like five-years-old, the authors do not posses the essential minimum understanding of medieval warfare to make the audience take the battles a bit seriously.

The pratagonist is a Mery Sue to the extreme, she is the smartest, the fastest, the bravest and the strongest, she always have the best solution to any tactical or political problem. Well, actually her ideas are naive and shallow, but all the rest on the set are so incredibly dumb that hers seems to pass.

The movie is a waste if time, it comes nothing near the original and just rides on its name.

What can you do when you have Lord of the Rings, having a crossover with anime cinema, and exploring a new era in its universe?

This new Lord of the Rings movie is still, in some ways, an adventurous movie: it's exciting, colorful, tense, and engaging. Sola Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation provides a colorful, adventurous design and presentation there with some well-constructed character designs and battle sequences. Many of the sound designs and action sequences are bright and tense, for LOTR's thrill standards, it still sells out what the world is like. The world J. R. R. Tolkien has created is large and ambitious, there are many approaches and styles that can be explored to see many different aspects about their world and setting.

However, instead of making a wonderful and classic narrative and world of what made Peter Jackson's Lord of the Ring approach. War of the Rohirrim is the definition of a beautiful mess, a mess that still both impresses and fails to impress me at the same time. It suffers from what both modern Anime cinema and Hollywood suffers. Crafted with static colorful animation, ambitious concepts, and great action sequences, but phoned in with the cliche bad aspects of character development and engagement, uneven writing, and phoning the tiresome anime tropes that run the well dry. It lacks what made Jackson's LOTR amazing, because unlike Jackson's approach, many of the characters are not interesting and you don't connect nor remember them on an emotional level. Almost as if it repeats some of the worst aspects about The Hobbit Trilogy.

It's a shame because the beautiful character designs and background are breathtaking, despite some use of poor CGI. The voice performances are all pretty good, alongside the musical score and thrill moments. With the concepts and world, things could have been approached pretty well. But for a LOTR narrative, it doesn't really feel like a LOTR story. You can name it anything else and I would have believed it was something new and different from LOTR.

But let me say this, nobody asked for anime and LOTR to become a thing. Yet it happened. I do applaud the studio and filmmakers to actually do it.

The War of the Rohirrim unfortunately feels like it was made 30 years ago.

We'll start with its biggest negative, which to me is the animation. I knew what to expect, having seen the trailer, that they'd opted for a simplistic style as the source material is around 80 years old, but that is no excuse.

Scenes like riding were poor, facial animations non existent, groups of men running just a faceless mass, but even how they chose to build each scene felt lazy to me. There is one scene for example, where our lead is being chased by a mumakil (giant elephant), where instead of showing our character running with the elephant gaining pace, they opted to have a close up of our characters feet with the noise of the elephant getting louder. It truly just felt like they didn't have the budget to show what they needed to show.

And on top of that, our story is just ok, nothing special, but a lot of the lines were very cheesy, with many unnecessary callbacks to the original trilogy. The middle act felt a little stretched out too, they probably could have shaved 20 minutes or so off.

Helm Hammerhand was a great character, our lead was your stereotypical strong female, no problems there, with no other characters particularly standing out.

It's positive for me was the music, but as they reused the scores from Howard Shore, it's almost something they couldn't get wrong,

It's a shame really, I love LOTR, both the films and the books, so to have something which feels generic and lazy, feels so far gone from the usual love that goes in to making anything based in Middle Earth.

What I would love, is a film using top of the line animation like Arcane for example, and I just hope this film doesn't stop future projects like that coming together,

Overall, worth a watch, but do not expect to be blown away.

Story is good. I mean its Tolkien. But animation is so bad. So many problems where they mix 2D and 3D. Textures are horrible. Fake Depth of field, characters floating in the air while walking. Directing mediocre. Voice acting mediocre. Such a shame for such good story. All in all solid 6. If it appeared 20 years ago would be 8 probably. But as Art Director my self I cant over look such rookie mistakes regarding art style, cutting corners by reducing action of a characters and there movement. Comparing to modern Japanese anime this is super bad. As someone who does art, and review art in daily bases this is amberesing for such big budget movie.