In the middle of a very busy end-of-year movie blitz I took time out to see The War of the Rohirrim because I can’t say no to Tolkien content—I'm such a Tolkien nerd that I've been making my own Middle Earth Connections puzzles—but this animated film was quite boring.
The War of the Rohirrim follows a very cool story in the history of the Kings of the Mark (in the first appendix to The Return of the King), although the film's version of this story been altered a good deal to invent a heroine who is the new central figure of the story (she doesn't even have a name in the original book). All of that is sort of fine. It's explained by the narrator that this is a version of the tale you won't find in the story books. But then the execution of this reinvention doesn't quite work. The animation is strange—two-dimensional figures running around in three-dimensional scenery—and the focus of the film seems off at all times, as if the screenwriters were trying to work more into the story than needed to be there. To my mind, the screenplay is really the problem here. For me, the emotional moments just didn’t land, and the whole thing felt stilted.
But if you want to do a Middle Earth Connections puzzle, try one of these. I think I've gotten better at it, so X is probably a lot better than I. Maybe start with X:
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