“The Lord of the Rings – War of the Rohirrim” is the first film of this 2025, and it is also the first clear disappointment. There were high expectations for what New Line Cinema, Warner Bros and Sola Entertainment would bring us with this prequel/spin-off set more than 180 years before the War of the Ring. Directed by Kenji Kamiyama, created entirely in Japan and with a Japanese soul that goes beyond the mere visual dimension, “The War of the Rohirrim” is however far too disconnected from Tolkien’s world and above all from the film saga.

“The Lord of the Rings – War of the Rohirrim” – the plot

“The War of the Rohirrim” takes us to the Kingdom of Rohan, at the time when it was ruled by the charismatic and very unmoderate Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox). Powerful, often angry and impulsive, he had three children: Hama (Yazdan Qafouri), Haleth (Benjamin Wainwright) and the young Hera (Gaia Wise). The latter in particular stands out for her spirit of independence, rebellious character and the desire not to be tied to any man, but to go on adventures. Too bad that the King of Dunlendings Freca (Shaun Dooley) is determined to marry her to his son Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), a move whose basis is not love but the desire to get closer to the throne of Rohan. Helm’s refusal, followed by Freca’s death, will start a war that will bring death, destruction and mourning on both sides, and which will forever change that corner of Middle Earth. “War of the Rohirrim” is directed by Kenji Kamiyama and bears the signature of Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou in a screenplay that saw the light four years ago. The goal? Not to lose the rights to Tolkien’s works from New Line Cinema, but also to break away from Peter Jackson’s saga and try something different. All this despite the presence of Philippa Boyens (screenwriter of the two film trilogies) as producer. But if you think that this means being faced with something even vaguely connected to those two universes, you are very wrong.

“The War of the Rohirrim” right from the start it has an animation in which the legacy of two monuments of the Japanese seventh art, Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, is evident on a visual, script and character characterization level. However, it is not wrong to also look at a contamination that Ralph Bakshi tried to give us in 1978, a glorious failure which however returns here in more than one element of world building. However, “War of the Rohirrim” suffers from an excess of verbiage from the beginning, as well as an atmosphere that, linking to films such as “Princess Mononoke”, “Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind”, ultimately diminishes the his Tolkenian soul. The gloomy, violent and dark atmospheres, the raging of a Shakespearean atmosphere in which revenge, betrayal, sacrifice and the fight against evil reign supreme, do not help to find a defined identity. In short, “The War of the Rohirrim” it would like to be many things in a harmonious way, but what it does is above all to confuse us between the lines of an artificial story, with a very discontinuous aesthetic and the constant sensation of a product created in a hurry. “The War of the Rohirrim” above all suffers from a truly surprising lack of imagination and creativity, especially if you consider that the original text offered some ideas, apart from (obviously) the expanded role of Hera, yet another tribute to the constant feminization of the market. But, as on other occasions, here too the impression is that all this could have been done without and that this supposed desire for renewal is a betrayal of Tolkien and what he conceived, with the various themes, characters and creatures used to the millimeter almost to save himself in a corner.

A totally unbalanced film and too distant from the Tolkien universe

“The War of the Rohirrim” has its weakest point especially in Hera, the protagonist, which is quite surprising if we think about it, given that there had been so much talk and discussion about how the film would have managed to give her centrality, since Tolkien he had dedicated yes or no a few lines. Well, she is neither an Eowyn (Miranda Otto acts as narrator), nor an Arwen, essentially she seems to have emerged from another universe, another world, which doesn’t have much to do with Tolkien. In the meantime, however, here she is, wandering around with a constant overpower, in line with everything that the audiovisual market has decided to give to every female character over the last ten years. However, the most serious fault is how his characterization is never fully developed, how the sensation of a mere extra overwhelmed by events remains. The biggest problem in “The War of the Rohirrim” is the fact that the script fails to make sense of it, is not balanced and coherent, looking for a grand finale that feels like it has already been seen from a mile away. It doesn’t go any better with Wulf, his antagonist, who starts out very well, could be a character halfway between light and shadow, but then is changed to be the classic chauvinist villain to be despised. What is missing, however, is above all the ability to use the creatures, the symbolism, in short, to go beyond a derivative operation covered in paint to make it seem new and captivating. Modernizing Tolkien in this way is the most awkward, wrong and ultimately annoying thing that could be done, it is a real sacrilege.

“The War of the Rohirrim” almost seems not to care about the need to have a minimum connection with what the two cinematographic sagas were, for goodness sake it is still more appreciable than “The Rings of Power”, but it shares its sidereal distance with this which has always been Tolkien and his fiction. To be honest, it seems like an animated representation more suited to the world of TV series like “The Kingdom”, “Game of Thrones” or “House of the Dragon”, with its world of grudges, secrets and violence. But there is no heart, there are no moments that go beyond the spectacular. The only moments in which it really works is when paradoxically it embraces its Japanese soul to a minimum, which in reality simply serves to cover the underlying marketing of an operation designed for the overseas public. There is not a trace of a ramified structure in which causality dominates everything and everyone, the epic is painted with an awkward hand and also for this reason “The War of the Rohirrim” ends in a sad and predictable way, the homage becomes paper coal, even if a central character from the Tolkien universe reappears. But it is precisely this that makes the public understand how distant from those atmospheres this attempt to cross multiple styles and multiple universes was. In the end, the feeling is the same as that felt in recent years when faced with the disasters of Sony Pictures with its cinecomics: a film made simply for production and legal reasons, to preserve future operations, certainly not to donate something artistically relevant . In conclusion, this is an animated film all appearance and little substance, which could also have been avoided.

Rating: 5