Tolkien

Film Review: War of the Rohirrim

/ Peter Martuneac / 2 Comments

After a long wait, I finally got around to seeing the latest media entry into J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-Earth this Christmas season, the animated film ‘War of the Rohirrim’. My short, spoiler-free review is that the film was adequate. I kept my expectations low as the release date approached, having learned my lesson from Amazon’s ‘Rings of Power’, and that ended up being the correct choice.

The film is fine. No better and no worse than that. Now, on to the full review!

Spoilers ahead

The film is your typical high-fantasy fare: plenty of swordplay, orcs and other monsters make appearances, and a bit of magic. Hera, daughter of Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan, is propositioned by her father’s rival, a warlord who seeks the throne, to marry his son. Insults are exchanged, the rival is accidentally killed by the king in a fistfight, and the man’s son, Wulf, vows vengeance.

(By the way, I will note that agreeing to a fistfight with a man who is literally called Hammerhand was probably not this villain’s wisest decision)

You can probably guess the rest of the plot. Some have always seen this level of predictability in Tolkien’s stories and any works derived from his writing as a weakness, but there’s something to be said for the simplicity of it. Not every piece of media we consume needs to be a series of curveballs. Is it nice to be surprised sometimes? Sure, but as we’ve seen with Game of Thrones, eventually you’ve turned convention on its head so many times that the twists become tiresome and expected.

So yeah. War ensues, lives are lost, families are broken, but Hera eventually leads her father’s people to prevail with a little bit of guts, a little ingenuity, and a healthy dose of high-fantasy magic.

What did I like about the movie? For one, the music was excellent. It always set the scene nicely and helped keep me in the story. The voice acting was also terrific. Brian Cox plays Helm Hammerhand the King and stole the show, as far as I’m concerned. As a matter of fact, seeing his name in the casting was what got me excited for this movie in the first place, over a year ago.

Miranda Otto, who played Theoden King’s niece Eowyn in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, served as the narrator. I really appreciated that nod to the original trilogy and hearing her familiar voice first was like a warm welcome by an old friend as we returned to Middle-Earth.

Speaking of returns, the opening shot of the film has one of my all-time favorite transitions. It begins with live footage of a flyover of a hilly meadow and a rushing stream, possibly archived from the original trilogy, and as we get closer to ground the picture subtly swaps to the animated version. You almost don’t catch it, and it is beautiful.

Everything else was either fine or a tad disappointing. The animation was inconsistent: at times breathtaking and at others a little sloppy. One fear I had going into the film was that Hera would be your typical ‘Mary Sue’ character, inexplicably fighting off entire hordes of orcs on her own. Mercifully, she only engages in direct combat with enemy soldiers twice, and neither encounter crosses over into the absurd.

Some of the relationships seemed ill-defined, especially between Hera and Wulf, the main antagonist. They give almost no background to these two characters who are supposed to be childhood friends, so the emotional climax of the film doesn’t hit like the director intended.

Finally, I know I said I appreciated the nod to Peter Jackson’s original trilogy by bringing in Miranda Otto to voice the narrator, but there is such a thing as too many nods. Some of the dialogue for Helm Hammerhand was ripped directly from Theoden King in The Two Towers or The Return of the King, with only a word or two changed.

Come on, folks. You’re writing what’s supposed to be an impassioned speech and call to arms just before a battle. Are you really going to take this opportunity to plagiarize yourselves?

Also, Saruman the White is introduced at the end of the film, which was delightful, but moments later Gandalf the Grey is then mentioned. Apparently, he heard of Hera’s telling that she overheard some Mordor orcs discussing their master’s quest for magical rings, and he’s sent a letter requesting that she visit him.

This is wholly out of character for a guy known as the Wandering Wizard. When Gandalf seeks information, he does not send letters requesting that people come to him. He hops on his horse and arrives suddenly to demand an audience. I suspect they chose this route as a way to write Hera out of history. In Tolkien’s writings, she is not even given a name but she was made the main character for this story. How then to make it so that this heroine is not sung of in the annals of Rohan’s great battles? By giving the crown to her cousin, sending Hera off to meet Gandalf in a distant land, where, according to the narrator, she remained wild and free to the end of her days.

There’s more I could discuss but this post has already run long. All in all, as I said above, this film was fine. If you’re a Tolkien fanatic like myself, I highly recommend watching it, but only once. I won’t be adding this to my collection of Blu-rays.

Rings of Power: Season 2 Review

/ Peter Martuneac / 3 Comments

I was a week late but managed to avoid any spoilers online for Rings of Power‘s season finale, which I think is no small feat. However, I almost wish I’d seen a spoiler or two because the finale was deeply disappointing. Overall, this season was much better than the debut season last year, which suffered from poor writing and odd pacing. Then the finale came and it fell right back into those old problems.

(Spoilers ahead)

I’ve mentioned on my Twitter account before that I don’t like how Numenor is portrayed in this show, even as I accept that it’s largely due to the compressed timeline compared to the books. The decay and fall of Numenor took place over many centuries and obviously that won’t work when trying to make a show about all this. I get it, and I accept that.

What I refuse to accept is the infantile portrayal of Numenorians. In the previous episode, the rightful queen, Tar-Miriel, had passed what is essentially an ancient witch trial: jump into the sea and if the sea monster down there doesn’t eat you, then you have the Valar’s favor. The Numenorians in attendance cheer and accept her as their queen.

Fast-forward to this episode and Ar-Pharazon, the usurper of the throne, hands a committee of citizens called The Faithful a letter that says Tar-Miriel is in league with the enemy Sauron and based on this she is to be arrested. We never get to read this letter, all we get is the character saying, “Sauron?” after he glances at it for a second.

Worse yet, nobody questions the letter at all. Not one person wonders if maybe, just maybe, this convenient admission of betrayal was fabricated by a man who stands to lose everything if Tar-Miriel is installed on the throne.

The Numenorians are basically a race of demi-gods. They have seen the Valar, their very island was raised from the depth of the sea as a gift from the Valar for standing with the Elves in their war against Morgoth. But in Rings of Power they are stupid, fickle, cowardly, and worst of all, boring. Almost every scene set in Numenor is a colossal bore.

Which segues nicely into my next problem with the show. As aforementioned, I can deal with compressed timelines because it’s a necessity. But things wouldn’t have to be so compressed if the showrunners didn’t waste so much time on useless characters who add nothing. Isildur is given a short-lived love interest who added nothing to his character development. Both Theo and the elf warrior Arondir lost all use as characters when Theo’s mother, the only thing tying them together, was written off the show after Season 1, yet they receive vast amounts of screen time.

And the writing, which had been so much better, was just atrocious. If you’re going to shoehorn in not one but two names of the story (Rings of Power and Lord of the Rings), don’t put it in the same sentence. It wasn’t a cool moment as intended; it was just awkward. Galadriel also had a really dumb ‘go screw yourself’ line delivered to Sauron near the end of the episode that made no sense in the moment. And in another moment, one of the faithless Numenorians, instead of artfully deceiving Isildur about the state of affair back home, immediately revealed his evil intentions. What could have been a cliff-hanger of sorts was thrown away.

The storyline at Khazad-dum and the struggles the dwarves face is by far the best of the show, and I really have no complaints here. The casting is excellent, the sets and costumes are gorgeous, and the writing is brilliant.

In a climactic scene in the finale, when Durin faces his father the King who has been driven mad by the ring he received from Sauron, Durin tearfully says (I’m paraphrasing), “Remember when I was a wee lad and we would arm wrestle? You would let me push your hand down sometimes and I would think that maybe I had finally grown strong enough to beat you. Then in an instant, you’d flatten my hand back down. And I’d be reminded that no one and nothing was stronger than my father. Be strong for me again, Father. Take off the ring.”

Moments later, as the King prepares to sacrifice himself in combat with the awoken Balrog, he turns to Durin and says, “I never let you push my hand down, my son. Not for a second. You are stronger than you know.”

As both a son and a father myself, that really got to me. I grew up the same way, believing that no one and nothing in the world was stronger than my dad. Even well into my adulthood, when my dad had grown into his sixties and I had surely become the stronger man by then, I wasn’t sure I’d want to get in a fist fight with him. He was Superman to me as a kid, my own Man of Steel, and that image lasted for decades.

Sauron himself has also been a bright spot in the series. Charlie Vickers is brilliant as the corrupted Maiar, known in his deceitfully fair form as Annatar, the gift-giver. Vickers masterfully projects a subtle, malevolent aura, straddling the line between good acting and corny showmanship. It would have been so easy, I think, for a lesser actor to fail in this titanic role and come across as a Snidely Whiplash type of villain, but Vickers has nailed it, stealing every scene he’s in with a wicked gravitas. A sly look here, a carefully worded lie there, convincing others to do his bidding all while they believe it was their own idea, it all gives us just a glimpse of the unfathomable evil that simmers just below his surface.

There’s more I could say but this post has already run long and I wouldn’t ask you to surrender more of your time reading my complaints. I’ll conclude by saying that if there is a Season 3, I’m going to watch it. There was enough good from Season 2 to make me believe that the showrunners have at least a faint idea of what they’re doing. Their biggest crime of this season was, in my opinion, wasting our time with useless characters.

But man, that finale was a massive killjoy. It’ll take a while to rinse that foul taste from my mouth.

Rings of Power: My Season 1 Review

/ Peter Martuneac / 2 Comments

Season 1 of Amazon’s Rings of Power is officially in the books, and what a finish it was! Before I go any further, I must warn you that there will be spoilers ahead. So if you haven’t seen Episode 8 yet and you still want to, don’t read ahead.

Alright, on to the review!

To start, I want to say that the show itself is gorgeous. The sets are wonderful, very evocative of Middle-Earth, and the costumes are great. Some people tried to tell me, before the series aired, that the costumes looked cheap and terrible. I admit that some of the still images I saw showed bits of costumes that weren’t great. But this is a show, not a series of pictures. As I watched, I never noticed anything in what the actors wore that took me out of the story.

I also want to congratulate them on making the best orcs since Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy! Whereas The Hobbit made heavy use of CGI for its orcs and goblins, Rings of Power returns to actual actors in costume and make-up portraying the servants of Sauron. And they are truly terrifying depictions. They may even be better orcs than the original trilogy.

As for casting, I have few complaints. For some reason, some people are really down on Morfydd Clark as Galadriel, but I think she’s been wonderful. Easily my favorite character of the series thus far. Adar, an antagonist not in Tolkien’s works but created for the series, has really stolen the show. Almost every line he utters is quotable. I don’t typically like ‘morally grey’ villains, but I’m a fan of his portrayal and how his story interweaves with Sauron’s.

***MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD***

Speaking of Sauron, I knew it! At the end of episode 8, the identity of Sauron was finally revealed and it was the character I expected it to be shortly into the episode: Halbrand, supposed King of the Southlands.

I spent 7 episodes wondering who Sauron would be, first believing it was a prominent politician in Numenor, Pharazon, until realizing I’d erred in my remembrance of Middle-Earth lore (he was an actual politician in Numenor). I never suspected Halbrand until the end of Episode 6, when Mount Doom was induced to erupt and Mordor thus created; I had suspected Halbrand would be a key character in fighting against Sauron for rule of the Southlands, but once Mordor came into being he suddenly seemed like a wildly superfluous character.

That’s when I had my suspicion. Why give this king-in-exile so much screentime with the major players just to rip away any plotline he might have had? Then, in episode 8, he was transported to Celebrimbor, who just so happened to be in the process of creating rings of power. Then I remembered how Halbrand had suddenly become a master smith in his short stay at Numenor, which reminded me that Sauron was a master smith.

That was when I was fairly certain about Halbrand’s true identity, just as Galadriel began to suspect him as well.

***ANOTHER SPOILER AHEAD***

The Stranger was also revealed to be Gandalf. Or, well, a wizard. But I’m 100% certain it’s Gandalf. This one was easier to deduce and I guessed it in the first episode. He came to Middle-Earth and landed amongst the Harfoots, ancestors of Hobbits whom Gandalf adored, and showed an ability to wield fire, which Gandalf also had.

In episode 8, Gandalf defeats three cultists who believed he was Sauron and were practicing dark magic. Gandalf defeats them by telling them to “go back to the shadows”, which is what he told the Balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring. When he blasted them with light, they faded into nothingness and moths came from their bodies, moths being another creature tied to Gandalf when he used one to summon the Eagles in the trilogy.

Finally, as he and a young Harfoot lass embark on a new journey together, he tells her, “When in doubt, always follow your nose.” Which is almost verbatim what Gandalf told Meriadoc in The Fellowship of the Ring.

If he’s not Gandalf, I’ll admit that I’ll be upset. The clues that he is the grey wizard are so obvious and overt that, if he’s not, I’ll feel tricked and not in a good or clever way.

Anyway, this review has run terribly long. If you’re still here, thank you for reading! My final remarks are that Rings of Power is thus far a resounding success! I already cannot wait to see what’s in store for the next season. I highly recommend watching it!

Rings of Power: A Spoiler-Free Review

/ Peter Martuneac / 2 Comments

Long-time readers of this blog know that I am a complete nerd for The Lord of the Rings. I’ve read the trilogy numerous times, including The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and many of the histories of Middle-Earth written by Tolkien.

So when it was announced years ago that Amazon would be producing a show based on Tolkien’s world, I was immediately hyped. And last night, I finally got to return to Middle-Earth! It was a long expected return, and definitely worth the wait.

As the title says, you won’t find any spoilers here. This is a show you need to experience for yourself, and fast because I’m sure that by Monday morning it will be impossible to miss spoilers online. All you’ll get here for now are my impressions of the show.

Reports have said that Amazon has spent over $1 billion on this show. Yes, billion with a ‘b’. And so far that money appears to be well spent. I’ve heard complaints online about cheap sets, horrible CGI, and bad costumes, but I didn’t see any of that. The sets looked great, the CGI was barely noticeable, and the costumes? They were amazing, especially the orcs.

Holy cow, the orcs! The last time we saw orcs was in The Hobbit, when many of the creatures were pure CGI. In Rings of Power, the orcs are once again played by actors in costume and make-up, and they are terrifying. Stunning. They look like monsters created in darkness by a power of pure hatred and spite, exactly as they’re supposed to be.

The music was wonderful, just as always in a movie based on Tolkien’s work. Howard Shore, the composer for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit returned again, only for the show’s theme song, but you can absolutely hear his influence on the rest of the soundtrack. Gorgeous, haunting, intense, it’s everything.

Thus far the casting decisions seem to have been done well. I read a review that cast aspersions on the casting of Morfydd Clark as Galadriel and Robert Aramayo as Elrond, calling them ‘miscast’. I don’t get that feeling at all. Clark plays a majestic yet fierce Galadriel, merely a younger, more emotional version of Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel. And Aramayo’s Elrond is thoughtful, wise, and always calculating. Again, a faithful homage to Hugo Weaving’s Elrond but with a younger twist (Rings of Power takes place approximately 7,000 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings after all, a long time even for Elves and they can and do change after the passing of ages).

The fighting scenes were good, not over-the-top or silly as in The Hobbit. The dialogue is fantastic, and changes tonally between the races: when the Harfoots (distant ancestors of hobbits) speak, it’s a very plain, country-bumpkin kind of talking, dwarves speak with a Highland accent, speaking loudly and boastfully, while the Elves speak softly, thoughtfully, using old-fashioned words and sentence structures with a royal British accent when speaking English, though they also speak their native tongue Quenya, as well.

Last night was the premiere of the first two episodes, both an hour long. By the end of the second one, I was not quite as engaged as I had been when I started, and I’ve seen some people say that the first two episodes can get a bit heavy with exposition (I kind of agree), but I owe that more to the fact it was 11:15pm and I’d been awake since 5 that morning.

Either way, I’m looking forward to Episode 3! If you have an Amazon Prime account or someone who will let you borrow it, I highly highly recommend watching Rings of Power, whether you’re a bona fide Tolkien nerd or not! Don’t miss out!