Movie Review: The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) (2025)

Anime? The seminal fantasy franchise? Brian Cox, but not that Brian Cox? What the hell is this? Well, let’s take a seat and talk about it.

Ladies, gents, and non-binaries… “Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim”.

When the kingdom of Rohan gets attacked by a vengeful outcast (Luke Pasqualino), the king of the Rohirrim (Brian Cox) must gather his forces to try and fight back the hostile armies. The story of “The War of the Rohirrim” is painfully fine, featuring a strong premise and really compelling ideas, with occasional glimmers of light, but never really reaches its full potential. The storytelling somehow feels both rushed and overlong, thin and dense at the same time, never really allowing moments to breathe, trying to get through as many different moments as possible, which means I never really felt anything, even as it presented a scene that, on paper, should be really compelling. I wasn’t ever bored by what was going on, but it feels so underdeveloped that it became hard to muster emotions stronger than “Alright, I guess” at most points.

The characters in this are… alright, I guess. They suffer from the weak script, no time to develop them properly, give us time to truly get to know them. Sure, facts and backstory details are mentioned about them, but it’s all so brief and delivered with the gravitas of your friend saying he bought a new pen. I see their potential, I see the ideas for them, but they’re not expounded on enough to make the characters as great as they could be. What I can safely say though is that the voice cast is great, with everyone delivering some top shelf work. Brian Cox is mighty and commanding as Helm Hammerhand, Gaia West is great as our POV character Héra, and Luke Pasqualino (who I mistook for Matt Ryan at times) is suitably menacing as Wulf. And the rest of the cast, containing people like Lorraine Ashbourne, Shaun Dooley, Benjamin Wainwright, Yazdan Qafouri, Michael Wildman, and more all round out the cast with great performances.

The score was composed by Stephen Gallagher, and it is genuinely great. At times it borrows some of Howard Shore’s motifs from the early 2000s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and his own tracks obviously hearken back to the style of those, but he imbues it with enough of his own energy that it doesn’t feel like a lazy copy of what came before. It’s sweeping, rousing, and emotional, and it arguably elevates parts of the movie where the narrative or character let it down a bit. It’s so good.

Based on a particular bit in a particular chapter within the Appendices of J.R.R. Tokien’s “Lord of the Rings” books, “The War of the Rohirrim” was directed by Kenji Kamiyama, the man directing every episode of the really good “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” series. He’s skilled as an animation director, but I’m not entirely sure his inclusion 100% paid off here. The animation is uneven, sometimes featuring some damn good motion and impact in certain one-on-one battles, but other times has this weird mish-mash of styles, blending hyper detailed, borderline photographic backgrounds with simplistic 2D characters, creating a visually distracting clash. Obviously Kamiyama and the animation crew put in a ton of work, and there are times where this movie looks damn good, but I also wonder what the process was like here, because there almost seems to be little consistency in the art direction. Obviously there’s a lot of skill behind the scenes here, and when it comes together it can look gorgeous and feature some damn good action, but it is also very inconsistent in that regard.

This movie has gotten some very mixed reception at the time of writing (December 2024, and I’m too lazy to edit, dear future reader). On Rotten Tomatoes it has a 48% positive rating. On Metacritic it has a score of 54/100. And on imdb.com it has a score of 6.6/10.

While “War of the Rohirrim” doesn’t reach its full potential, I still somewhat enjoyed it. It has an okay story, middling characters, great performances, great music, and pretty good directing and animation. Time for my final score.*Ahem*. My final score for “War of the Rohirrim” is a 6.01/10. So while heavily flawed, it could still be worth maybe renting.

My review of “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” is now completed.

Will I ever review the Jackson movies (I hear no one asking)? Nah. As I sort of grew up with them, I have formed too strong of an emotional attachment to give them a proper shake here. There’s only so many ways you can say “THIS IS INCREDIBLE, I AM BAWLING”.

Movie Review: The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) (2025)

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