134 min | PG-13 | December 13, 2024 | Warner Bros. Pictures
An animated Lord of the Rings film tells the origin of Helm’s Deep two hundred years before Frodo. The battle sequences are impressive. The characters are not.
Helm Hammerhand is the King of Rohan. A lord named Freca proposes a marriage between his son Wulf and Helm’s daughter Hera. Helm refuses. The refusal escalates to violence. Freca dies. Wulf flees and swears vengeance. He returns with an army of Dunlendings and drives the Rohirrim into the fortress that will one day be called Helm’s Deep. The siege lasts through a brutal winter. Hera must defend her people while her father descends into grief and rage. Kenji Kamiyama directs an animated prequel that draws from Tolkien’s appendices to tell a story the author sketched in a few paragraphs. The expansion is uneven. The battle sequences justify the theatrical format. The characters between the battles do not.
Gaia Wise voices Hera with determination that the script does not fully support. Hera is positioned as the protagonist but the film cannot decide if her story is about leadership, love, survival, or all three. Brian Cox voices Helm Hammerhand with a growling authority that gives the character weight. Helm is the most compelling figure in the film because his descent from proud king to berserker ghost is genuinely tragic. Luke Pasqualino voices Wulf with a rage that the film sympathizes with more than it should. The romance between Hera and Wulf that the film invents has no chemistry. Miranda Otto returns to voice an older Eowyn as narrator and her presence connects the film to Peter Jackson’s trilogy with welcome familiarity.
Kamiyama brings an anime-influenced visual style that clashes with the established aesthetic of Middle-earth. The character designs are flat and generic. The backgrounds are more successful, with sweeping landscapes that evoke the grandeur of Rohan. The battle sequences are the film’s strongest elements. The siege of the Hornburg is staged with scale and brutality. Arrows fly in formations. Siege engines crash against walls. The animation of large-scale combat is fluid and legible. The score by Stephen Gallagher incorporates themes from Howard Shore’s original trilogy. The sound design during the battle sequences is immersive. The quieter scenes between the action lack the visual ambition of the set pieces.
The film exists in an uncomfortable space between Peter Jackson’s live-action trilogy and its own animated identity. It borrows liberally from Jackson’s visual language while unable to replicate its emotional depth. The story of Helm’s Deep is worth telling. The fortress is one of Tolkien’s great locations and seeing its origin has inherent appeal. But the characters invented to populate that origin are thin where Jackson’s were rich. Hera is a creation of the film, not Tolkien, and she does not have the depth to carry the narrative. The battle for the Hornburg is thrilling. The people fighting it are not interesting enough to make the victory meaningful.