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.
But thanks to the magic of legal negotiations — Warner Bros. needed to produce another big-screen instalment to retain the property's film rights — J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth is back in cinemas, albeit in the guise of an anime-style prequel.
Entitled The War of the Rohirrim (presumably 'The Securing of the Rights' didn't test well with audiences), 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.
"'Do not look for tales of her in the the old songs," says the film's narrator, Éowyn (Miranda Otto, reprising her role from the Rings trilogy). "There are none."
In other words, the screenwriters made her up, which will likely irritate more than a few Tolkien purists, though it does make a fair enough point about the historical erasure of women.
A kind of cross between Brave's Merida and Miyazaki's Nausicaä, the flame-haired Hèra (voiced by Gaia Wise, daughter of Emma Thompson) is headstrong and feral, running wild on the plains of Rohan in search of adventure.
Meanwhile, her father Helm (Succession's Brian Cox) is threatened by the ambitious Dunlending lord, Freca (Shaun Dooley), who demands that his son, Wulf (Luca Pasqualino), be married to Hèra to form a union between his people and the Rohirrim.
In an ensuing brawl, Helm kills Freca, and Wulf — cast into the wasteland, where he marshals a disgruntled army — vows bitter vengeance upon Rohan.
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.
Director Kenji Kamiyama, a veteran animation artist who started out working on the likes of Akira and Kiki's Delivery Service, brings a handsome anime classicism to proceedings, splitting the difference between the visual language established by Jackson and a fantasy art world that's distinctly Japanese.
Among the Sturm und Drang of the film's battles, he delivers a series of standout sequences that tilt the movie towards the realm of the fantastic, including a duel between a deranged oliphaunt (Middle-earth's multi-tusked pachyderm) and an octopus that might have taken place on Skull Island, and a snow-drenched fight among a gang of trolls who are out hunting for the Dark Lord's precious rings.
These sequences are a blast to watch, in a Saturday-morning-cartoon kind of way, and they're jazzed by an often-ravishing visual design.
It's a shame, then, that the screenplay — credited to Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance), along with Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou — is such a generic slog, leaning on all the usual tropes of destiny and self-empowerment while offering characters little in the way of memorable personality.
Spurning marriage and determined to buck the ruling patriarchy, Hèra could fit the mould of any number of interchangeable Strong Female Leads from the past decade. This lack of complexity does her character — like so many thinly written 'badass' women and gender-swapped leads — a disservice.
Even Cox, a master of playing besieged patriarchs, seems vaguely enervated here.
At the same time, the action, while beautifully animated, struggles to stand on its own in light of its towering predecessors. Much of the film comprises a long, gruelling siege at the Rohirrim stronghold of Hornburg, and if it feels overly familiar, well, that's because it's the future Helm's Deep — and the battles tend to play as replicas of those in The Two Towers.
You have to wonder, of all the possible backstories nested in Tolkien's multivalent world, was this really the one that stood out to be told?
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.
Here, the presence of the Great Eagles, and passing references to the Ring, only serve to remind you of the magic that's missing.
And when Hèra ultimately becomes another footnote in the inevitable tease of the Lord of the Rings, the filmmakers end up both proving their point — that the women of Middle-earth are often forgotten — and playing right into it in the process.
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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is in cinemas now.
