The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – a rushed animated money-grab

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Get our The Life Cinematic email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy The days of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy feel as innocent now as those little hobbits frolicking, unburdened, in the Shire – three films adapted with sincerity, before the disastrous Hobbit prequels, and before the modern resuscitation of the franchise. Andy Serkis is directing The Hunt for Gollum, which is scheduled for 2026, and this week we have Kenji Kamiyama’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime film that takes place 183 years before Frodo Baggins. Every possible callback seems jammed into The War of the Rohirrim’s crevices: a piece of archival audio of Christopher Lee as Saruman; a beast of the same tentacled, squid-like species as The Fellowship of the Ring’s Watcher in the Water; orcs hunting for rings; the Great Eagles, who famously do not like to impose on the narrative; the Haradrim, the walking Orientalist tropes, and their elephant steeds, the Mûmakil. I am no man: Gaia Wise’s Héra in ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ And, while it’s certainly nice to see a new Lord of the Rings film with a heroine at its centre, its steely, grunting parade of warriors have lost the tenderness and emotional sincerity that screenwriters Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens originally teased out of Tolkien’s text, and granted to men and women alike.