While I couldn't manage to find it in a theatre near me, I finally got to see The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim and I loved it. This article contains minor spoilers about the lore of Middle Earth, which includes some well-known events that the movie also covers. If you want to see the movie with no knowledge of what you're getting into, skip this article, but do see the movie. It's good!
Being the studious Tolkien fan that I am, I literally had my copy of David Day's A Guide to Tolkien on hand as I watched the movie, so I could cross-reference names and places. If you're trying to internalise the lore of Middle Earth, this movie is a gold mine for connecting canonical names, places, and events. If you're just a fan of Middle Earth and would like to see a good story in the setting, then this movie provides over 2 hours of a tale you don't know anything about yet.
There's a severe blurring in this movie's story between canon (stuff taken from Tolkien's writings and notes) and non-canon (stuff invented by modern screenwriters notably NOT including, thankfully, the writers who made such a mess of The Hobbit). You have to be OK with that to enjoy this movie, and I suspect that not all LOTR fans are. I think I'd have been unsure, myself, but after playing the Shadow of Mordor video game, I saw the value of non-canon storytelling in the Middle Earth setting. I have no doubt it can be taken too far (and that's a measure of personal preference), but the non-canon content I've seen so far has managed to stay pretty true to what Tolkien "confirmed" as true and what we can apocryphally speculate about. For now, I'm comfortable with what I've seen of the respectful expanded universe developing around LOTR. (For the record, at the time of this writing, I haven't yet seen the Rings of Power TV show.)
Canonical parts
We know some events to be [fictionally] true about Rohan and the war of the Rohirrim. In 2510 of the Third Age, a people who would be come known as the Rohirrim ("horse masters") rescued an army of Gondor from orcs. After that, the Rohirrim developed a kingdom around Edoras, near the White Mountains, that was always ready to aid Gondor and Rohan, famed for their gleaming armour and strong cavalry.
Helmingas (called "Helm Hammerhand" by his people) was the last of the first line of kings of the Rohirrim. His kingdom was attacked by a Dunlending army (from Dunland), and he fought to defend his land and its people.
That's basically the history of the Rohirrim. It touches nearby Isengard, Rohan, Gondor, and Dunharrow. If those names are familiar to you, then this movie reinforces the relationships and events that happen to and between those locations.
Non-canonical additions
It's not possible to write a movie using just the elements from canon, because your movie would literally only have two characters: Helm and the baddie from Dunland (whose name I'm not spoiling in this article). The telling of this tale must include non-canon additions, or else the movie would only be 5 minutes, or however long it just took you to read the previous section of this post. So this movie adds characters into Helm's family, including a princess called Héra.
Honestly, Héra may as well have been written by Tolkien himself. She is absolutely not the heroine you might expect, in fact there's a strong argument that she's not the hero of this story. She does heroic things, but it's not because she wants to, nor that she's out to prove anything to anyone. Like many of Tolkien's best characters, Héra doesn't have a traditional Joseph Campbell "call to adventure". She makes some bold choices because chaos has descended into her world, and she wants to set things right, and to protect the people she cares about. But more than anything, I get the sense that she just wants to ride her horse like a true Rohirrim.
This took me completely by surprise, but Héra is not a character clone of Éowyn. She's wholly unique, and for much of the movie she's sort of a Merry or Pippin. She moves adjacent to a larger story, sometimes becoming the central character through no fault of her own, and other times simply serving as our window into the events of the war. In the end, of course, she has her moment, but it is just a moment. She's not written into the history books of Middle Earth (which is convenient, because she's not a canonical character). Instead, she's one of thousands from the Kingdom of Men that achieved great things during impossibly trying times, and then were forgotten as the world continued to turn and new challenges arose.
For want of a hero
The story's other "hero" is Helm Hammerhand himself. He's a good and complex character, but I don't think we're meant to particularly like him as a person. He's headstrong, he's not a good listener, he charges into battle and then has a mental breakdown when it turns out there are real costs of war. He's the ultimate tough guy until he busts his nose and sees blood, at which point he cries and wails and is convinced that the world is ending. He thinks that because in his own limited view, he is the world, so when his own weakness is exposed it's cataclysmic.
Then again, he is a tough guy. If you want barbarian rage, then Helm ultimately is able to provide. Watching him fight off a horde of Dunlendings, at first with his bare fists until he grabs a weapon off of one of them, in a blizzard, is one of the most thrilling moments in LOTR I've seen since the original trilogy.
But neither side of this war is particularly sympathetic. Helm is overbearing and self-important, and the Dunlendings are unreasonable and vengeful. I didn't care which side won. And I think that's a powerful story angle to deliver, because it's realistic. Unlike in most movies, in real life war is an exercise where nobody wins. One side might seem like it's got the moral high ground, but not literally everyone on even the "good" side are good people. Lots of people have lots of varying motivations, which is why in modern warfare we nominally make attempts to differentiate between civilian and military targets. In theory, only the people who explicitly signed up for the war game are meant to kill each other. Obviously that's not how it actually works, now or then, but we like to pretend that it does.
In this story, Héra is mostly neutral good. She sees that this war is actually between two warlords who happen to be upset at each other, for arguably no good reason, and all she can do is try to mitigate the fallout.
If anyone's the hero of the story, it might be Fréaláf Hildeson (Helm's nephew), who inherits the Rohirrim throne. He's a minor character, though, so he's only a technical hero.
Horses for courses
I was really looking to see how the connection between the people of Rohirrim and their horses was expressed. It's pretty subtle, which I very much admire. The horses don't act like dogs or cats, the way they might in a children's movie. They're horses, but there are two moments where horse and man have a discernible bond.
First is a scene in which Héra is attacked, and her horse does save her. While Héra is a trained swordsman, she's just not as physically large as the trained soldier who attacks her, and anyway she's unarmed at the time of the ambush(es). In the second attack, she's nearly defeated until her horse kicks her attacker. This gives Héra enough time to grab a nearby pitchfork and skewer the guy. It's a good scene because it demonstrates that Héra isn't immune from threats, but also it's a scene that does demonstrate allegiance between Rohirrim and steed.
The second is when Helm's son, Haleth or Háma (I forget which is which), has to choose a horse for battle. He's told to take Héra's horse, but he declines because he knows and trusts some-other-horse (I can't remember the names of the horses). Was it the best choice? Maybe not. Was it the right choice? Well, anyway it was the Rohirrim choice.
Obligatory callbacks that actually work
Modern movies tend to struggle with finding a balance in just how much they reference a famous property, so I was nervous going into this movie. Would Héra turn out to actually be a Baggins? Or would Helm's dagger end up being the dagger that would become Sting? The possibility for stupid and shameless tie-ins is endless. Luckily, there's none of that in this movie.
That's not to say there are no callbacks. There are a few, and admittedly a few are unnecessary. However, none effect the lore of Middle Earth. There are some familiar name drops, both of people and places. There are a few appearances of some familiar creature types. I enjoyed most of them, and I can shrug off the one or two I didn't need.
Bizarrely, Éowyn serves as the narrator for this film. Éowyn is one of my favourite characters, so while it's kind of cool to have the movie narrated by her it's also a little painful because the narration is 100% never useful. Aside from the introduction itself, every time the narrator said anything, it was a repeat of information we'd just gotten on screen. Had the narration added to the story, I'd have appreciated it a lot more. It's pretty sparse, luckily, so I was able to endure it, but the movie could have easily done without.
It's animated
I don't understand the choice to make the movie animated. Apparently the actors acted every scene out as reference anyway, so there was live production happening to some degree. There wasn't anything in this movie more complex than anything in LOTR, and probably in many ways it's a lot simpler. Most characters are ordinary humans, most locations are strongholds and keeps.
I don't know anything about business, but it seems to me that making the movie an animated movie guaranteed that a significant portion of casual moviegoing audiences wouldn't consider watching it. Obviously established LOTR geeks are going to go see it no matter what, but you don't end up with a hit movie by appealing to just the hardcore fans.
And frankly, for anyone who grew up in the 80s, I know that there may be some negative connotations between animation and Tolkien. As a kid, I tried making the best of the animated stuff we had available, but I never liked any of it. I did enjoy the soundtrack for Bakshi's movie, but that's a low bar.
The animation didn't put me off this movie, but I think I qualify enough as both a fan of Tolkien and anime for that to be expected. I would be lying if I said, however, that I wouldn't have preferred a live action movie. Then again, live action Tolkien at this point implies Peter Jackson, and after travasty that was The Hobbit, I don't want him anywhere near my Tolkien movies. Maybe animating it was the best way to keep Jackson and Walsh at bay.
Good Tolkien
In terms of a Tolkien story, this movie has it all. It's got big battle sequences, a seige tower, deep lore, some mysterious fantasy moments, just enough mystery to make you wonder what's magic and what's coincidence, and super-complex characters. I'm absolutely adding this to my LOTR rotation.
The Hobbit set the bar incredibly low for a good Tolkien movie. I think at the very least, you can watch War of the Rohirrim confident that's it's worlds away a better movie than The Hobbit. It may not have quite the epic scope of LOTR, but then again few things do, and not everything should. We need the ordinary stories of Middle Earth, too, especially because they contribute to the context of the political events in LOTR. This is a perfect addition to the lore of Middle Earth, and I highly recommend it.