As I said, I skipped a number of movies that came out in the past few weeks because my girlfriend wanted to see them, and it’s fun to watch things with her. Our first such “catch up” is this animated Lord of the Rings movie. There’s a good reason for that: it was only playing about once a day in one of the local theater’s smaller screening rooms, so there’s a good chance it won’t be there much longer. Furthermore, she’s a huge fantasy genre fan, more so than I am, and I enjoy those stories too. So really, this was an easy first choice as the other things she’s looking to see with me don’t look like they’re going anywhere right away.
That said, neither of us are that knowledgeable of Tolkien’s extended work to know much of anything about this story before we sat down to watch it.
Set 200 years before Bilbo Baggins found a certain ring, the movie is narrated by actress Miranda Otto, apparently reprising her role of Éowyn from the Peter Jackson-directed trilogy, according to the closing credits. The story itself is about Héra (Gaia Wise), the youngest child and only daughter of King Helm Hammerhand of Rohan (Brian Cox, the one big name actor in the main cast). Héra is a tomboy, an expert rider, and someone who is fascinated by riding fast and checking out the Eagles as they fly around. Her life gets turned upside down when an errant lord shows up in court and proposes Héra marry his son Wulf (Luke Pasqualino). Though Wulf and Héra were childhood friends, Héra is not much interested in marrying anyone while Helm finds the offer insulting as it is likely a ruse for Freca (Shaun Dooley) to take the throne for himself. However, a fistfight outside the meeting hall ends when Helm kills Freca with his first punch, an accident as Helm possesses great physical strength.
Wulf doesn’t take this very well, and he finds himself banished from Rohan. Time passes, and Wulf returns with plans for war to not only avenge his father, but also to claim the throne over the lives of Helm and his two sons. Despite calmer advice from his nephew Fréaláf (Laurence Ubong Williams), the headstrong Helm rides out to do battle and things would have gone very badly had Héra not recognized signs of something worse. The result is Héra, Helm, and the people of their city go to a rather familiar-looking fortress while Wulf has his forces lay siege to the place. With limited supplies, no way out that anyone can see, and winter on its way, can Héra be the leader her people need in a time of turmoil?
OK, this movie’s probably not going to surprise anyone too much in the grand scheme of things. What you think is going to happen in a story like this one is more or less what does happen. If anything, it may be a bit more graphically violent than the older movies are. That said, the appeal here should be the animation, and that certainly looks good for the most part. The characters have a hand-drawn look, but backgrounds look more like photographs, something that is occasionally distracting, but it tells the story well enough. To that end, the movie does basically give me what I wanted from it. I’ll even give the movie credit for using, for the most part, lesser-known actors in the cast, many of whom seem to do a good deal of professional voiceover work.
However, a funny thing happened: after exiting the theater, my girlfriend and I started talking about what we’d just seen, and while we both liked the movie and were glad we saw it, we found ourselves nitpicking numerous moments that happened over the course of the plot. For example, an early scene has a young servant, Lief (Bilal Hasna), reading off the various sigils for the different factions and forces in Rohan, and he gets to one for some shieldmaidens. The concept of these women still being around after stepping in to fight during a war many years earlier suggests there aren’t any around anymore to the point where someone suggests removing their banner from the great hall, but instead, it turns out that Héra’s older handmaiden Olwyn (Lorraine Ashbourne) is, in fact, one of these shieldmaidens, and this was not a secret. These little things started to add up after a while, and it did affect my enjoyment of the movie. We did discuss how this is an animated fantasy film, so maybe some of these things, like how strong Helm is or whether or not Héra possessed certain skills, can be dismissed as a fantasy element, but we then decided that fantasy has to be even more careful about sticking to the rules. Tolkien established a lot of them for Middle-Earth well before Peter Jackson adapted anything. Moments like this won’t kill the movie, but they don’t help either.
Grade: C+
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