The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

After watching it, I felt like I had drunk a bowl of broth that Éowyn handed to Aragorn. The ingredients were the same, but the taste was really not the same.

It is an unforgivable mistake to make the protagonist of Helm's daughter, who has no role in the original book and whose name is unknown (in fact, she is an original character). This is not a female power moment - it is equally bad to set this character as a princess who yearns for freedom, an unwelcome bastard, or a hobbit from the Shire, because it should not exist in the first place.

The consequence of this is that the sense of fate and heroism in Tolkien's works were directly destroyed, because the tragedy of the severance of the first line of Rohan became "just the death of the protagonist's relatives and friends", and the distant epic myth became a second-rate adventure animation.

So we can see that Hareth, who led the guards to defend Edoras until the last man fell, was a reckless man who was shot through the throat after showing off his strength after successfully fighting the mammoth in the movie. Another son, Hama, died by being captured alive and executed in public. The giant eagle that the Lord of the Rings was unwilling to give away can be fed by humans and help transport the nostalgic equipment...

These are nothing. The most ooc character is Helm the Hammerhand himself, who was deprived of the protagonist's position. The Rohan are martial but not stupid. Helm is praised first because he is a leader: a resolute leader who can withstand great grief and lead his people to survive in the desperate situation of a long winter, go out alone to kill the enemy until the opponent is terrified, and finally die standing on the eve of victory. So after the war, the Rohan people spontaneously called the Hornburg Helm's Deep. If it was the demented wild man in the movie who surrendered in public on the city wall, was devastated after the death of his son, and finally gave himself up at the beginning of the siege because he couldn't open a door (literally), I'm afraid the first people to overthrow Helm would be the residents of Helm's Deep.

In Tolkien's writing, the reason for the defeat in the Battle of the Fords of Isen was that Rohan and Gondor were invaded at the same time as planned, not because Helm was so stubborn and arrogant that he refused to ask Gondor for help as in the movie.

The setting of Hera and the short and shy attendant (I really can't remember the character's name) seems to be a replica of the princess and Merry in "The Return of the King", but the strength of the weak should be reflected in wisdom, courage and skills, rather than luck and logic.

The soundtrack, storyboards and Eowyn's narration earned me one star, but that's it. The ending song is very nice, but I'm very angry.

The review is just as the title suggests, because the entire movie basically has nothing that can gain the blessing of a cinema, whether it is immersion or visual spectacle.

Let's talk about the advantages of this film first, that is, the characters and plot style are basically the same as the Lord of the Rings series. The Lord of the Rings, especially its original work, has very flat characters, and the plot settings are relatively straightforward and rough. Many plots seem very "forced" today, and they are mainly unique in terms of world view and various immersive cultural and historical details, that is, they win by "background". This animation is the same in terms of characters and plots. You can't watch it with your brain. Everyone will know after watching it, and I won't complain about it specifically. In addition, the songs are okay, including Prince Hama's solo and the ending song.

The disadvantage is that it does not inherit any of the advantages of the original Lord of the Rings book and movie:

First of all, the fighting scenes are very bad, especially the horse battles. Either there is no long shot and the half-body is cut, and it does not change for a long time, or there are only a few horses running in the long shot. The only few shots of multiple horses charging archers on the same screen are obviously imitating the movie, almost copying it, but without the effect of the latter in mobilizing emotions. The horse's movements are mysteriously stiff, and the running feeling is even worse than that of Attack on Titan. The best ones are the flames, ladders, and snowflakes, which are obviously made with CG three-dimensional rendering. For example, the protagonist bids farewell to his father and brother before the battle, and the burning flames behind him are so delicate that they are out of place; for example, the ladder rising to the sky is very spectacular, but the visual effect immediately drops when it comes to the hand-painted part of the sergeant charging.

Secondly, it lacks details and immersion. The painting style is unremarkable, and all the equipment looks like plastic products, without the dirty and old feeling of the nomadic people in the movie version. The only cute thing is the heroine's white horse, with small eyes, a huge body, and a square shape like a box. It is also very calm. It can eat as if nothing has happened when it arrives at the enemy camp, without the sensitivity that a horse should have (maybe this is also a kind of drama. Judging from Ashley's white horse, it can choose its owner and can attack automatically, it should be very tempting to compare it with Gandalf's Rohan mount. But the image it creates is simple and strong, without the sense of elegance, agility and wisdom).

Finally, the background music is not good. The background music combines the main theme of the Lord of the Rings movie and the Rohan motive, but it is worse than the two original songs. It feels messy and muddy, and it doesn't fit the picture well.

In short, the whole work gives people a very assembly-line feeling, lacking sedimentation, ingenuity and its own characteristics, and has a strong plastic feel.

Finally, let me complain a little bit. Dunlending, formerly known as Dunlending, was the original inhabitant of the area. But after Middle-earth was colonized by the Numenoreans, Dunlending was assigned to the territory of the Kingdom of Gondor, but Gondor did not exercise actual rule. Later, Gondor formed an alliance with Rohan, and in view of its own declining strength, it simply gave this land, which it did not actually control, to Rohan. As a result, under the expulsion of Rohan, the original inhabitants of Dunlending became refugees in their own country and were driven out of their homes.

Therefore, the legal basis of Rohan's territory comes from Gondor's fiefdom. When the Numenoreans were at their peak and Gondor was invincible, the foundation of Rohan's founding was naturally very solid. Later, Gondor declined, and various forces that did not accept the rule of the Western King began to compete for the throne. Rohan, whose legitimacy originated from Gondor, naturally began to be questioned for its illegal acquisition of the country. It was inevitable that the half-blooded lord of the Dark Land would question the legitimacy of the King of Rohan's rule. So even in Middle-earth, the truth is still within the range of the catapult.

With the return of King Aragorn, the influence of Numenorian culture on the colonization of Middle-earth returned in full force, and Dunlún finally disappeared into history. Even if it appeared in later stories, it could only play the role of stupid, bad, barbaric and backward villains to contrast the uprightness of the Numenorians and their allies. No one remembered the tragedy of their being driven out of their homeland. But who told them that they could not control their own destiny and had no power to define what is "light" and what is "darkness"? The winner is the king and the loser is the bandit, and the backward are beaten. There is really no way to deal with this.

This Battle of Rohan is obviously a fan creation based on the worldview of The Lord of the Rings. It is an extension of Tolkien's bizarre imagination, and a story that is "re-sung" in the fantasy world of Middle-earth. Especially the ubiquitous voice-over, just like Homer's epic poem about the interweaving of ancient Greek gods and humans. When the audience is about to immerse themselves in the story and feel the joys and sorrows of the Helm family, the voice-over jumps out at the right time, destroying the "simulation" that the film and television works want to create, and reshaping the memories as a person who has experienced it, awakening another layer of "realism", a kind of "inner consistency of reality".

Or as Tolkien himself said, "If you plan to tell a complex story, you must draw a map first. Once the order is wrong, you will never be able to draw this map again." On this map, although the Middle-earth world is imagined, it still relies on the legends between the stories of the early Nordic nobles, so it is also a kind of "narrative inner" truth. Tolkien himself also mentioned that "I hope people will enter the story and at least feel it as real history."

However, history is not static. What I am talking about here is not "interpretation", but that after the map comes first, the history of events created can be "re-created" again in intertextuality.

In this film, intertextuality is rare, and what is presented more is in-one-world, a term given by cultural studies scholar Shi Chang in describing the essential attribute of cross-media narrative.

Simply put, co-occurrence means "that several stories based on various media take place in the same world, or several stories pointing to the same world are scattered across various media."

In "The Battle of Rohan", the stories of Helm's family, Hera's experiences when she was young, and her two deceased brothers Haleth and Hama (whose attributes are also bards) are based on the stories formed on the map of the territory of Rohan. The most obvious of these are the various place names that appear, Gondor, Edoras, Hornburg, Dunlarch, because as long as these capitals still exist because of the existence of this visible map, the stories can be played out from generation to generation, whether it is for the future (think about the stories of ancient gods and monsters in "Inhumans" living in modern times) or for the past - this is "The Battle of Rohan", the story hundreds of years before the trilogy took place.

Intertextuality is a kind of identification. It is not related to the story itself, but can still connect the audience's "distant imagination" with a small amount of information. In this work, there is a "finding Easter eggs" link, such as Princess Hera came out of the secret passage of the Hornburg and saw the orcs who were looking for the ring for Mordor; and the letter from Gandalf that appeared at the end of the story reconnected the story of Rohan with the theme epic.

But in fact, this connection has already been there in the first sentence of the movie, which is the voice-over I mentioned earlier - this is not just a voice-over, but it is in line with the characteristics of the Rohirrim people's consistent recording of the past, that is, "They do not record history in words, but record everything in heroic songs, just like the first humans in the Dark Ages."

This story of the Battle of Rohan is an adaptation of the last chapter of the epic poem about King Helm, a story completed in singing, an epic with quite subtle differences from the original story, and a secondary creation of "fantasy realism" (Schiller).

In this story, the audience can clearly feel that King Helm is like a "ghost that cannot be defeated", an almost eternal phallus.

His character is extremely "self-willed", to the point that it almost hurts the rationality of the plot. He can beat Wolfe's father to death with one punch, or open the gate of Hornburg that has been frozen for months with his hands - of course, he can also directly destroy the "internal reality consistency" of the story, and the narrative is torn from the "inside" to the "outside" - he can wander outside Hornburg in winter without clothes, and tear Wolfe's team apart one by one with the help of "rumors, rumors, and despair". In this rumor, King Helm seems to have borrowed the body of a taller Warcraft monster and completed a new epic chant by "accumulating layers" of the truth (Connor believes that the operating mechanism of cartography is divided into four types, namely wandering, accumulating layers, game platforms, and tubers).

Until Freyaraw finally appeared, he was wearing King Helm's armor and once again intensified the fear in the hearts of these mercenaries.

Woolf's appearance is the opposite. He is more like what Jenkins calls a text poacher, which is also the essence of this animated adaptation.

According to Jenkins, poachers are a kind of "use-it-for-my-own" culture: "poachers steal certain materials of media products, appropriate them, and create new meanings."

The same is true of Wulf's poaching. He wants to usurp the throne and become the new king of Rohan. He also wears a crown in the ruins, but this is not the "grand narrative" he really wants. What he wants to do in the entire animated film is a "small narrative" with Hera, which is a more personal emotional experience. Of course, we can call Wulf a "coward". After all, he has no wisdom and overall view of being a king, and he repeatedly refuses to persuade his subordinates; second, he betrays the "retreat" promised in person, and still launches an attack after losing the battle with Hera; third, he re-describes the rumors of Hornburg through "gold coin imagination" (which corresponds to the rumors of King Helm's soul); fourth, he is really an element of misappropriation. Whether it is borrowed mammoths or mercenaries, they are not his own followers in the Dark Land (in contrast, King Helm really has a royal guard).

But poachers cannot really replace the phallus. This is the embodiment of Hera's serial schemes that repeatedly expelled Woolf from the "mainstream narrative". It is also an ideological tool that the bards must inherently portray. The visible tool is the giant eagle that can understand the common language, a being from a higher plane. Its existence ensures that any text poaching will inevitably and inevitably return to the ontological narrative created by the map.

At first, I thought Jackson contacted Kamiyama after watching "Keeper of the Spirits", but later I found out that Kamiyama is already a frequent visitor to Hollywood IPs and has also filmed anime peripherals for Blade Runner... Once you discover this, you will enter a kind of emmm context, and the evaluation will fluctuate between "good job" and "tight cooperation".

It's hard to say whether the double surprise or shock of The Lord of the Rings and the Mountain of God. Although I immediately got into the mood after listening to the soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings 2, Hera always reminded me of Baltha in The Keeper of the Elves, and the scenery of Rohan in the camera was endless. There were many scenes that reproduced the scenes of The Lord of the Rings. The army rushed down from the mountains and the people retreated to the castle. Those scenes evoked too strong memories. But - but here it comes - it's still a bit weird. It feels like it's stitched together and it's hard to say whether it's good or bad. Maybe those who can get it will think it's good, and those who can't will be full of questions.

The voice actor of the second brother has a very Japanese style, with an androgynous temperament. I'm not sure if there is such a bard in the Lord of the Rings world. His ending is very Game of Thrones... Because the villain is also very Japanese and second-rate. I have repeatedly made up for the villain. The ancient world's happy revenge and stubbornness may be something that modern people really can't understand! The plot where the heroine's father suddenly turns into a berserker is as second-rate as the villain's motivation.

I just finished watching it. People in the same show were complaining about it. I was the only one who thought: Hey, it's OK. Although there are some flaws, overall, I still enjoyed watching it. Now I have begun to doubt my aesthetic level. I don't know if there is really something wrong with my aesthetic level, or because my fan filter is too thick. Although the production level of this movie is really worrying. It is so worrying that I don't know if the director took kickbacks. But I still have to say that this kind of work with Tolkien and Middle-earth as the foundation. That kind of lines, that kind of dialogue, it really has a classical flavor when it is spoken. This is rare nowadays.

Although this kind of movie, first of all, this Japanese comic style is already very out of place, and the production is particularly poor. Then it is rumored on the Internet that its cost is 30 million US dollars. This is considered the ceiling level in Japanese comics. It is really hard to understand, how did the picture become like this? Various missing frames. I really suspect that kickbacks were taken. At first, I was puzzled as to how the old king killed the lord with one punch, and I thought there was some conspiracy. But after watching the later part, I realized, sorry, there was no conspiracy. The main story was about an Asian superman who was born with supernatural powers. He was seriously injured at an old age in the snow and ice, but he tore the Japanese apart with his bare hands. His fighting power was outrageous.

And the old king's recklessness is embarrassing. When he expelled his nephew, I was like, "This is your traditional Rohan operation, right?" I think the death of the first and second princes is OK, including the old horse 🐴 not being able to run. I actually like this plot.

The production of this battle is so poor and crude, with all kinds of omissions and blank spaces, it's almost as if the word "I have no money" is written on my face.

The heroine duels in a wedding dress. Although it may seem like jealousy at first glance, I really like it because she is really beautiful. I love beautiful women. She is like an angel coming down to earth to execute punishment. Moreover, in the face of the usurper, she needs to delay time and tempt the villain by winning the inheritance from the legitimate heir, including wearing a wedding dress to stimulate him. It is still reasonable. I just don't like that the beauty is almost soft-hearted. She should still be kind-hearted and have the means to be a diamond.

The male lead was a clown throughout the whole story, so I am not surprised by his love-brained and brainless actions. It's a pity that the eldest and second brothers died, they were also handsome guys.

Maybe I didn't have high expectations at the beginning, but after watching it I found it quite good. 3.5 stars is ok, and with the fan filter I give it 4 stars⭐.