War of the Rohirrim revives everything great about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings

About 25 years ago, the production team on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy put out an open call for any able-bodied horse rider willing to truck themselves and a horse out to a remote New Zealand shoot to become an extra in the legendary cavalry of Rohan. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but the production did not expect the volume of women who volunteered for the assignment.

So you could say that Peter Jackson’s Rohirrim were associated with women taking up unexpected roles even before Miranda Otto’s cry of “I am no man!” in The Return of the King. Those legendary riders return triumphant in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated movie that places a defiant shieldmaiden of Rohan in the central role.

Director Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) takes on the task of making an animated Middle-earth that feels like part of the same tapestry as Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. This attention to detail and reproduction is the movie’s greatest strength — The War of the Rohirrim looks and feels like Jackson’s LotR in the best way. It’s packed full of sword-swinging adventure, kingly drama and riveting monster mayhem. Unfortunately, it also reproduces the aspect of the Jackson movies that has aged most poorly.

Rohirrim ensures its fidelity by borrowing a number of the great conceptual talents of Jackson’s Middle-earth films directly. Producer (and Jackson trilogy co-writer) Philippa Boyens brought on original concept artists Alan Lee and John Howe, and made sure Kamiyama’s team had full access to Wētā Workshop’s archives as visual references. This Middle-earth will be intimately familiar to fans, right down to each relief on the carved columns of Meduseld, the Golden Hall of Edoras. Miranda Otto is even back to voice Éowyn, narrating the film. And that’s all in service of a story co-written by Boyens, based on a little piece of fictional history Tolkien put down in the back matter of The Return of the King: the legend of Helm Hammerhand.

The “Vikings, but for horses” vibe of the Riders of Rohan is apparent even from a brief look. More than any other culture in Middle-earth, the Rohirrim expressed Tolkien’s love of (and academic expertise in) Scandinavian languages, mythology, and medieval poetry, so forcefully and joyfully that by the time Théoden’s riders make their final charge before Minas Tirith in The Return of the King, Tolkien’s prose starts breaking into alliterative verse in the middle of paragraphs. In his brief, lightly elucidated story of Helm Hammerhand, last king of the first line of Rohirric kings and the namesake of the Helm’s Deep fortress, Tolkien gives Rohan its own Epic of Beowulf.

Nearly 200 years before the Ring Quest, Helm Hammerhand, king of Rohan (Brian Cox), is an aging but respected ruler, his legacy secure in his two forthright sons. Our real lead, however, is his adventurous daughter Héra (Gaia Wise), who befriends the giant eagles of the wilds and doesn’t want to marry anyone.

This wouldn’t normally be that big of a problem for her, as the third royal child, until the ambitious Lord Freca (Shaun Dooley) calls for her to be betrothed to his son, the warrior Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), who was also her childhood friend. Helm sees Freca’s request as entitled, and from this dispute between lords spirals a multi-generational conflict that — well, I’ll avoid spoilers for this story, even though it was first published nearly 70 years ago. Suffice to say, there’s a reason Helm was the end of his dynasty.

For any worried that the transition to animation would get in the way of the kind of indelible performances that marked Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Rohirrim’s voice cast, particularly Cox and Pasqualino, bring the whole thing home. Cox steps into the “tragic Rohirric king” shoes that the late Bernard Hill filled in Jackson’s movies, and he shows Hill isn’t the only one who can roar “Forth, Eorlingas!” and make a theater full of people sit up in their seats.

The War of the Rohirrim’s script, credited to Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins, and Arty Papageorgiou, is equal parts adventure and tragic royal drama. Great beasts stalk the land and menace merely human warriors, endless winter ravages a besieged fortress, sons watch their fathers cut down before them, and cut down their enemies’ sons in return.

But there’s still room for that old Boyens, Jackson, and Fran Walsh screenwriting hallmark: thrilling monster-attack action sequences. War of the Rohirrim’s oliphants, in particular, make a stunning return. They’re honestly more terrifying here, under Kamiyama, than they ever were in the live-action trilogy. Rohirrim’s background art is stunning as well, appearing nearly photorealistic in places.

Admittedly, in some of the most creatively shot action sequences, the detailed backgrounds tend to make the characters look like they’re hovering over a green screen drop-in. But most of the time it works, and when it does, it’s gorgeous. Kamiyama set out to make an animated film feel like part of Jackson’s live action trilogy, and he succeeded.

Where Rohirrim fails, regrettably, is in repeating the mistakes of the Jackson trilogy. It’s a movie where all the bad guys are darker-skinned and darker-haired than the good guys, and wear more raw animal materials — adapting, with little change, Tolkien’s Orientalist worldbuilding.

This might seem a small nitpick: I hear the cry There are two token brown good guys! going up from apologists. But we live in an era in which right-wing billionaires unironically name their companies “Sauron” and “Palantir,” and both the Italian far-right and the “postliberal right” vice-president elect of the United States claim The Lord of the Rings for their own. For every triumphant, nostalgic blare of the Howard Shore-inspired score in my theater, I felt an inaudible minor note: This story, about a war that started when a good white father didn’t want a bad brown man as his son-in-law, is gonna be a softball pass to some of the worst parts of Tolkien fandom.

Tolkien himself was livid over the Third Reich’s adoption of his favorite arena of fantasy for supremacist propaganda. In a long letter to his son Michael in 1941, in which he expresses many wartime worries and a general malaise of impotence in the face of oncoming horror, he also takes the time to air a more personal grievance.

“I have in this War a burning private grudge — which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler […]. Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.” And I think that if we love Middle-earth and all that’s derived from it, we owe it to that very bond to interrogate what in it appeals to white supremacists, and mitigate that in adaptation when we can.

Sitting in the theater, my little Lord of the Rings-loving horse-girl heart was thrilled to watch a movie about a horse-girl princess who picks up a sword and leads her people through hell. I just wish that the only thing on my mind could have been how happy I was to watch a new, thrilling, expressive Middle-earth adaptation.

Many things have changed since Jackson’s trilogy first came to screens, not least that there are a lot more Middle-earth prequel projects floating around. (Heck, we even have a Middle-earth book!) War of the Rohirrim sets itself apart with its confidence in the human drama of Tolkien’s stories. It’s a Lord of the Rings movie with no rings, no Dark Lord, no wizards, not even a hobbit. Even so, it has more than enough fantastical tragedy and epic adventure to go around.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim hits U.S. theaters on Dec. 13.