Since 2000 we’ve had 56 video games (including expansions), 1,215 minutes on the big screen, 16 TV episodes, and whole host of board games and card games. With such a huge shortage of adaptations you can understand why New Line Cinema felt the need to plug such an obvious gap in the market.
Joking aside, content is big business – “content is king”, as they say – so we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that this film is testing the waters ahead of more live-action films in the coming years.
This film promises to tell the story of Helm Hammerhand, of “Helm’s Deep” fame, the King of Rohan and his troubles with the Dunlendings. Readers will rejoice that aside from some faux-lore – such as saying Héra has the “Blood of the Ancients” – this story is pretty accurate to the known details of the story as Tolkien sketched for us in Appendix A. But Tolkien only gave us about one-and-half pages of detail, so there are a lot of gaps to fill in… and fill in they try.
The story blandly tells of men squabbling over the future of a woman’s life. A rival lord (Freca) wants his son to marry the King’s daughter; the King refuses and kills the lord; the lord’s son (Wulf) goes to war for revenge. This sounds relatively straightforward, and yet shoehorned into the film are eagles, the Watcher in the Water, Mûmakil, Saruman, and even obligatory references to Rings. Despite the producers promising at the London première that this film needed to stand up on its own, they need to reflect on the fact that Warner Bros. felt they couldn’t sell tickets without making heavy use of imagery from The Two Towers (and even that has failed to get bums on seats).
If you are a lover of the music and scenery of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, you can bump up the rating below. There is a fair chunk of nostalgia going on here: Edoras and Helm’s Deep appear exactly as they do in the films (albeit in animated form), the score is – sadly – derivative of Howard Shore’s rousing themes, and a whole chunk of characters and actors from the original trilogy have been inserted for good measure. Increasingly, viewers are left wondering if this film is designed to satisfy Millennials who only want to reminisce about Jackson’s original trilogy.
Unfortunately, another nostalgic element is the run-time. We’ve all remembered slogging our way through the two trilogies, and so this film sticks to tradition by feeling like butter scraped over too much bread. Why this needed over two hours is entirely unclear. It certainly wasn’t done for character development or progression of the storyline, so presumably was down to just poor editing. The film isn’t bad or wrong, it is just very “OK”.
It is genuinely pleasing to see Tolkien’s Middle-earth represented in a different medium, but it is a shame the film-makers weren’t bolder in choosing different designs. That aside, the backgrounds and the scenery are gorgeous, colourful and thrilling to see on the big screen. Sadly, the animation of the characters is stilted and awkward. By virtue of the style, there were times where the characters appeared to be operating on a different plane of reality to the backgrounds – on a couple of occasions it felt as if the characters were floating (look out for them on stairs, in particular).
Ultimately, this film will be entirely forgettable to all but the most ardent fans. The characters are flat, the storyline is thin and the animation style slightly jarring – this film will make very little impact on the world, and do very little for encouraging kids to read Tolkien. It is all just very average. And that’s where this lets the Professor down: Tolkien was so much better than average.
Score: 2.5/5
Lore Score: 4/5
Positives
- Faithful adaptation of a Tolkien story
- Beautiful scenery and pleasing soundtrack
- Nostalgia-fest for lovers of Jackson’s original trilogy
Negatives
- No character development whatsoever
- Jarring animation style that sometimes feels unfinished
- Bland story that lasts far too long
