LOTR: War Of The Rohirrim

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

 

Bit of a surprise package for next Christmas lined up: an animated LOTR movie about Helm Hammerhand (who gave his name to Helm's Deep.) No hobbits, lotsa horses, and Brian Cox playing a king. Again. Because he is one. What do we think?

[Techwright]

I'm down for it, as long as it doesn't receive the Amazon abuse treatment.

 

I've gotten a bit rusty on my lore, so I turned to Nerd of the Rings for a refresher on Helm Hammerhand (spoilers in the video).  Helm Hammerhand is obviously the man who gave name to "Helm's Deep".  As to the rest what I find interesting is...

Spoiler

That the time of Helm Hammerhand is right before Smaug's assault on the dwarves of the Lonely Mountains.  Helm ascends the throne in Third Age 2741, and his story plays out over the next 17 years, while Smaug conquers the Lonely Mountain in Third Age 2770. The story is interesting because it is largely a human story.  Unless the movie changes things, the other races do not feature prominently, and indeed the human nation of Gondor itself does not feature much in the story.  This is clearly a story of the Rohirrim themselves (and the Dunlendings, their opponents). Helm is a remarkable individual with an almost Batman-like quality to him.  I realize the movie may have to fill in many literary gaps, but as long as they stay true to the source material, this should be a great work.

 

 

 

Edited December 15, 2023 by Techwright
added detail

[TheOtherTed]

Cool.  I was passively looking forward to it, but had honestly given it up as... whatever the cinematic version of vaporware is.

 

But that narrator, though.  Sounded like AI.  Clueless, try-hard AI with a smoker's voice no less.  Some favorite bits:

 

Saruman pronounced as sa-ROO-mun

Edoras -> e-DOOR-as (with two s's)

Meduseld -> me-DOO-seld

 

And, finally, the point at which I stopped watching:  "The film exists within [Peter] Jackson's universe."  ...whoa, what?  Whose universe?

 

For all that, I'm glad to hear the project is still alive and kicking.  Here's hoping they get a human narrator for the next update, though.

[Techwright]

6 minutes ago, TheOtherTed said:

And, finally, the point at which I stopped watching:  "The film exists within [Peter] Jackson's universe."  ...whoa, what?  Whose universe?

 

It actually makes sense, if under-acknowledging Tolkien in the process.  Peter Jackson, Wita, and New Line Cinema made several...adjustments...to the Tolkien stories.  These have created a close, but definitely not identical, story to Tolkien's.  Some of these...adjustments... were done due to film limitations of time, such as the complete removal of The Old Forest, The Barrow Downs, and all of the Tom Bombadil/Goldberry storyline. They changed the tree attack of Old Man Willow to an unnamed, angry tree in another forest.  Some of the other...adjustments...notably the ones in The Hobbit trilogy, were done to heavily pad out the story, creating two wholly new main characters, new scenes, and dramatically adjusting existing scenes resulting in the length of a third movie to what should have been two. So many changes exist in fact that Christopher Tolkien angrily dismissed the LotR movies as not his father's work.  So referring to the product as "Jackson's universe" makes sense.  It's akin to the Joss Whedon and Zack Snyder versions of Justice League.

[TheOtherTed]

25 minutes ago, Techwright said:

So referring to the product as "Jackson's universe" makes sense.

From what I can tell, the only link to Jackson will be the fact that Miranda Otto will be playing Eowyn again, as a storytelling narrator - unless that's changed and Wikipedia hasn't been updated.  Aside from that, I can't really see how the HH story could or should vibe with the Jacksonverse.  Much of the story will have to be made from whole cloth, given that we just have a quick blurb and a handful of names, and I'm guessing that animation will have very different needs from a live action production.

 

That said, I get what you mean about Jackson's "alternate universe" Middle-Earth.  It's always fun to read the books and immediately follow up with the relevant movies (except maybe those Hobbit monstrosities).  I still get that feeling of "....ohh, THAT's why he did that" from doing so.

 

Mainly, though, I was just kvetching about the AI-seeming voice-over in that clip.  It's just a matter of time before AI takes my job.  Probably all of our jobs.  It's bad enough that I have to compete with underpaid postdocs and unpaid undergraduate students these days.

[Techwright]

Bit of an update, published two days ago.  Seems the film is set for a holiday season release this year, rather than releasing April 12, which was the date published two years back:

 

https://comicbook.com/anime/news/lord-of-the-rings-the-war-of-the-rohirrim-2024-release-date/

[Techwright]

Another bit of an update:

 

20 minutes of the film were shown at the Annecy Film Festival, and I've read that it was very well received.  There's a spoiler-laced synopsis at Fellowship of Fans.  Note that whomever composed that report could have utilized a proofreader. Seriously.

 

What I've read in that summation is closely in line with what I've learned of Helm Hammerhand and his story as told by Tolkien.  Let me continue in a spoiler box, though I'm just summarizing:

Spoiler

Tolkien wrote of Helm Hammerhand as one of the greatest of the kings of the Rohirrim.  As mentioned earlier in the thread Helm's Deep, the fortress where most of the fighting took place in The Two Towers, is renamed for Helm (it had an earlier name), and much of Helm's story takes place there, or in the surrounding area.

 

During his days, Rohan had a serious problem with evil men of Dunland, The land is located past Isengard (the tower where Sauroman eventually settled), northwest of Calenardhon, the current homeland of the Rohirrim, and its name means "Dark Land". The men were swarthy and dark haired.  Descriptions of their lives sound almost Iron Age and Pictish.  Dunlendings have a serious desire for the lands of Calenardhon, and over the centuries have tried repeatedly to take over, sometimes with limited success. 

 

Helm Hammerhand holds that nom de guerre for having a habit of disarming himself before attacking foes one on one.  He sees it as unsportsmanlike otherwise.  His fists are so powerful he can kill a man, and over the course of his life, he'll hunt enemies at night this way, leading to some rather terrified enemy groups who find many men dead in the morning. 

 

The 20 minute film clip seems to deal with one of the major events in Helm's life as written by Tolkien.  Helm has trouble with a western clan of Rohirrim whom it is believed have intermarried with Dunlendings, producing heirs that use their Rohirrim status, while feeling they are more Dunlending.  One of these arrogantly approaches the king and demands that Helm give his daughter to their grandson, effectively passing the throne's control to them.  Helm basically says "Let's take this outside" and deals with it.  However, this result also fuels an already hostile environment, and war will come in its wake.

 

[Techwright]

New trailer released:

 

 

This one...set me back in my opinion.  Until now, I'd been of the understanding that the central character was Helm Hammerhand.  Although he's present in this trailer, it's clearly all about Hera, a character not even named by Tolkien.  Her name was picked for this film (and it is Greco-Roman, too, not Anglo-Saxon).  Her portrayal here doesn't come off like strong-of-heart Eowyn, a character I greatly admire, but more like Wonder Woman. 

 

Not ruling it out.  A trailer can be skewed in perspective as opposed to the whole, after all, but my hopes for a proper Tolkien tale will be dashed if the character he wrote most about takes a back seat to yet another largely concocted character.

[TheOtherTed]

Two things hit me.  First, the animation has a "slide show" feel to it, to the extent that I could almost count the frames in each scene.

 

The second, seemingly trivial, is that "Hera's" hair is a strange color.  If they were going for something in the "redhead" spectrum, I think they kind of missed.  With the possible exception of her first appearance, her hair seems to be "Roman red" in color - very unnatural, and I doubt it would have been dyed that color.  Unless, maybe, she combs blood into her hair and lets it congeal.

 

However, I fully acknowledge that both nitpicks may be due to the fact that I've never been a fan of anime.  Remaining open-minded, though - I mean, hey, it's Helm freakin' Hammerhand.

[Techwright]

4 hours ago, TheOtherTed said:

Two things hit me.  First, the animation has a "slide show" feel to it, to the extent that I could almost count the frames in each scene.

 

The second, seemingly trivial, is that "Hera's" hair is a strange color.  If they were going for something in the "redhead" spectrum, I think they kind of missed.  With the possible exception of her first appearance, her hair seems to be "Roman red" in color - very unnatural, and I doubt it would have been dyed that color.  Unless, maybe, she combs blood into her hair and lets it congeal.

 

However, I fully acknowledge that both nitpicks may be due to the fact that I've never been a fan of anime.  Remaining open-minded, though - I mean, hey, it's Helm freakin' Hammerhand.

 

Huh.  I did not pick up on the "slide show".  I'll double back to focus on that.  I, too, am usually not a fan of anime (though I do like a few), but I'm cutting it much slack because it is supposed to be Tolkien.  (The 1977 The Hobbit animation was quite odd at times, but I still cut it slack because for decades, it was the only version of the story on screen.) Personal preference would have been to see Tolkien animation in the style of season 7 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, or the recent Star Wars: The Bad Batch.  I don't know if that style has a name yet, but I find it very effective for storytelling.

 

I chuckled at the hair color comment.  I'm a natural auburn, or at least was until I aged.  We reds are portrayed all over the color spectrum in animation, and there are certainly worse ones out there.  This one looks a bit like they were attempting mahogany but seriously amped up.  Had I advised them, it would have been to darken it with a brown.  But I chalk it up entirely to the limited color pallet they've chosen for the entire picture.  

[TheOtherTed]

9 hours ago, Techwright said:

Huh.  I did not pick up on the "slide show".  I'll double back to focus on that.

I suppose some of it could be chalked up to slow motion takes, especially early on, but at the 38 second mark where Helm raises his hammer, it's more noticeable, and, once seen, cannot be unseen.

 

Granted, It could be a side effect of using a 12-year old monitor with a three-year old computer, or it could just be crappy vision on my part.  I'm an old man; my legs are grey, my ears are gnarled, my eyes are old and bent.

[Techwright]

YouTube channel The Nerd of the Rings has an excellent breakdown of the trailer using his almost encyclopedic knowledge of all things Middle Earth.  It contains a few minor spoilers to the Tolkien writings on Middle Earth in this in-story time period, nothing dramatic.  The breakdown reinforces a thought I've had: that the creators largely have a remarkable attention to detail, yet suddenly veer off from it at a few certain points that don't seem to make a lot of sense.  It's a curious weave.