Despite several attempts to recapture it across multiple media, it’s clear that Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy was lightning in a bottle. Not that it’s stopping the people who greenlight big-budget projects from trying, and Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim is the best-case scenario for that effort: A visually striking, self-contained adventure bringing a new perspective to one of the linchpin tales contained in the Appendices to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels, combining cutting-edge Japanese animation with the audiovisual language established by Jackson’s original trilogy of films.
The film is ostensibly about Helm Hammerhand, one of the great horse-master kings of Rohan, and the tribal feud against his Wildling rivals that eventually costs him his life. That feud started a war that created a legend, and set the stage for one of the pivotal skirmishes in the War of the Ring, the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Except that War of the Rohirrim is mainly the story of his previously unnamed shieldmaiden daughter, Hera, whose jilted hand in marriage is the catalyst for Helm’s war. Tasked by Helm to stay behind and help protect Rohan in the king’s absence, Hera steps up in the name of her people, protecting her land, looking after her family and all the families of Rohan, and, yes, riding out to meet every prevailing threat without hesitation or fear.
There’s a lot of Miyazaki Hayao’s Nausicaa in the film’s visual language. We’re made to feel Hera’s smallness in the great vast expanses of Middle-Earth, so that her ferociousness in battle is that much more impactful. That sort of power is a specialty of director Kamiyama Kenji, a veteran whose career goes all the way back to Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira, but who came into its own with his work on Blood: The Last Vampire, Eden of the East, and as showrunner on the phenomenal Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Here, we see Helm Hammerhand cement his legend—and his wintery standoff at the gates of Helm’s Deep is portrayed in all its glory—but it’s Hera getting her hands dirty that the film is genuinely obsessed with.
Even when full-on war comes to Hera’s doorstep, it’s not those trademark Peter Jackson sweeping shots of legions riding against evil that the viewer is meant to invest in, but an epic, breathtakingly choreographed one-on-one fight with husband-to-never-be Wulf. Indeed, it’s the tale that lives in the soul of her progeny, Eowyn (Miranda Otto), whose beautifully reverent narration lends even more power to an already powerful heroine’s journey.
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