What up, 3.5 hobbits? BQB here with a review of the latest LOTR joint.
This anime tells a tale set in LOTR world 183 years before Bilbo Baggins’ famous journey. While there are many fantasy races in Middle Earth, this film focuses on a war between humans – specifically, the Rohirrim or horse-lords, those residents of Rohan known for their skills in cavalry.
When a fist fight goes awry, it’s all-out war between the clans of young and vengeful Wulf and bad ass old King Helm Hammerhand. Brian Cox lends the only recognizable voice to the flick, though the other talent are top notch. While Helm and his sons and nephew fight bravely, Hera’s willingness to fight goes largely unrequited. But ultimately, through a series of events that I won’t explain as to avoid SPOILERS, Hera ends up being the Head Girlboss in Charge when her clan is trapped in a long abandoned, secluded stronghold as enemy forces lay siege.
The good? Stunning visuals. Great soundtrack. Relatively low budget of $30 million that has already seen a return of $12 million in the first weekend. Back in the day, when George Lucas made his three Star Wars prequels, he continued the fun for the franchise’s number one fans, children, with a series of Clone War cartoons. Fun animation was cheaper than live action, meant the characters could do more and weren’t limited by the bounds of live action and the plots could be simpler.
Personally, I think everyone involved in LOTR should have taken a page out of Lucas’ playbook way earlier and I wonder if they are now. Amazon has spent over a billion dollars on a live action LOTR prequel series that most fans universally agree has all the charm of a refried pile of moldy dog poop. Meanwhile, this animated film is solid, will likely earn a good return on its investment and is something everyone can enjoy.
While I’ve never been a fan of anime (this style where everyone is drawn with huge eyes and moves that open enormously wide has always been silly to me), this film does tone dawn some of anime’s worse tendencies (i.e. there’s no one with wide open pie holes as I just described) the visuals were great and look better on the big screen. Hollywood has gone all in on 3D animation, but this movie reminds us that 2D can still look great, that advancements in film make it look even better and creatives should explore it more.
The bad? The plot is pretty simple though I don’t necessarily mind that. So many films unnecessarily complicate things to the point where I feel like I have to break out a flowchart and a slide rule to figure out where it is all going. Here, you can easily guess the direction it is taking, though there are occasional surprises.
Also, though the fans who live and breathe this stuff might disagree, IMO as a casual observer, there’s not much connection to the LOTR franchise. There are occasional red meat references but by and large, this could have just been called “The Random Fantasy World War Movie” and still made sense but not as much money.
Overall, I think cartoons would be a great direction for LOTR to go in and maybe even Star Wars should consider it again. And 2D should be given more consideration. While 3D, when it is done well and a lot of money is spent on it, looks fabulous (i.e. Moana for example), many cheaply produced 3D shows look like crap so why not just go the 2D route?
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Unpopular opinion: the LOTR early 2000s movies were very overrated and just a product of their time. Peter Jackson was a CGI master and brought audiences sights they had never seen before but ultimately those films have never been something I wanted to go back and watch again and again. I’ll doubt I’ll ever want to rewatch this film again, but I did enjoy seeing it the first time as I did the original LOTR films back in the day.
SIDENOTE: Yes, horror of horrors, it is a girlboss movie in a time when the largely male fan base of action and fantasy movies are male nerds. If you boil the movie down enough, its mostly about testosterone crazed brutes who won’t stop fighting over who a woman is going to marry and had they bothered to ask her, all the fighting would not have been necessary. (You know, that old fantasy world trope.)
While there are a few eye-rolling scenes where Hera bests a foe twice her size, overall she’s more believable since she walks through proverbial fire to learn her girlbossing skills as opposed to most girlboss movies where the girlboss is just born a girlboss because girls are bosses. And to the film’s credit, it takes a realistic approach to fantasy world dark age era thinking – i.e. all the dudes scoff at the idea of a girlboss whereas Netflix would just have a girl bossing all the dudes around in ancient times and no one ever questioning it.
Still, I have to remind Hollywood, if you want young men to grow up to be strong, chivalrous and protective of good values, you’ve got to give them a young male hero they can look up to and you haven’t done that in a long time.
Bookshelf Battle 