The War of the Rohirrim is the first Lord of the Rings film in a decade, but can it compare with the originals?

Once a staple of the pre-Marvel multiplex, The Lord of the Rings universe has been missing from movie screens for an entire decade, ever since series director Peter Jackson wrapped up his painfully distended adaptation of The Hobbit in 2014. Entitled The War of the Rohirrim, it's set nearly two centuries before the One Ring found its way to Bag End, and centres on an attack upon the people of Rohan — the horse-riding warriors who helped fight the forces of darkness during The Two Towers's Battle of Helm's Deep. Executive produced by Jackson from a story co-written by his longtime collaborator Philippa Boyens, the movie draws upon one of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings appendices, which tells of the fearsome Rohan king, Helm Hammerhand, his warrior sons, Hama and Haleth, and an unnamed daughter — who the filmmakers have now dubbed Hèra. This isn't the first animated adaptation to be set in Middle-earth, of course, and there are moments in The War of the Rohirrim — which mixes 3D modelling and motion-capture into its traditional 2D animation — that echo the look and feel of Ralph Bakshi's singular, if ill-fated, 1978 take on The Lord of the Rings. The series' producers have said that at one point they imagined a whole slate of spin-offs set in Middle-earth, but — like the ever-expanding Star Wars universe — the War of the Rohirrim proves there's a limit to the spell a franchise can weave without the spark of its creator's imagination.