The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
I'm a big Lord of The Rings fan. I've read the Hobbit of course and the main trilogy and also listened to them in their Andy Serkis narrated audiobooks. I even read more than a hundred pages of The Silmarillion before giving up. And if you know The Silmarillion, that's pretty good. Hell, I even watched both seasons of Rings of Power and tried to like it. I want any Lord of The Rings content to be good. So when they announced an animated movie, I was cautiously hopeful. What we got was a pretty OK generic fantasy movie that could have been anything from LOTR to Game of Thrones. Almost nothing unique stands out about this animated epic.
The voice cast is totally fine, but that's it. No one gives any standout performances, but it's not like the script is set up to let them. It plays out very formulaically. You can see where this is going from miles ahead. No real, meaningful twists or turns. Which can be fine, I guess if you're having a good time, but there were quite a few moments when I just wanted it to hurry along.
The villain is the weakest part of the movie. His motivations boil down to being an extreme simp. A girl who was his friend as a child wasn't in love with him, so the reasonable reaction is to destroy everyone and everything in the land. Oh, and his shitty dad dies in a way that's 100% deserved and we aren't meant to feel an ounce of sympathy for him. That's not really a spoiler, it's shown in every single piece of promotional material for the film. But yeah, he had it coming. Zero sympathy. It can be hard to write villains with plausible motivations, I guess, but I would have accepted just that he was a heavily ambitious conqueror way easier than some kind of scorned little lonely boy. It just didn't work for me.
The heroin and main character is also way too weakly written. The narrator makes a point of telling us how wild she is, but it's only shown by her riding horses, and extremely ordinary thing for fantasy. She doesn't really rebel or standout in any way until she's forced to in the second half when suddenly she's an excellent warrior. It's fine, but again it just feels half baked. It's a shame to see it go down this way when literally all the women warriors of LOTR are written and performed better. Hell even in Rings of Power.
I just felt underwhelmed by the entire experience which hurts me so much to write, but it's true. The very few actual links to the LOTR history could be erased easily and it would be the exact same movie. So in the end, "generic okayness" is the best way to describe this movie that I doubt I'll ever watch again.
6/10
