Warner Bros. Pictures
In the realm of the Elven-kings under the sky, the Dwarf-lords in their stone halls, and the Mortal Men doomed to die, brace for a spoiler alert if you haven’t seen “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.”
The Legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien is brimming with larger-than-life characters who attain mythic stature through incredible feats of strength that defy divine beings themselves, such as Eärendil, Hurin, and Fingolfin. Simultaneously, it’s a world inhabited by whimsical characters like Tom Bombadil.
Until now, most of the greatest, most legendary deeds have been confined to Tolkien’s books. This is primarily because these actions are so grandiose that they are difficult, if not impossible, to translate into a TV series or film. How could one accurately portray the magnitude and sheer audacity of Ecthelion defeating Gothmog, the Captain of the Balrogs? Despite its shortcomings, Prime Video’s “The Rings of Power” promises to bring to life some truly mythical events in Middle-earth history, including Númenor’s catastrophic fate.
This is where “The War of the Rohirrim” truly shines. While our own Jeremy Mathai was less enthusiastic about the animated film in his review, criticizing it for feeling less epic and necessary than other Tolkien adaptations, there’s no denying that the medium of animation is ideally suited to bring fantastical and impossible imagery to the screen more easily than live-action.
To illustrate, only an animated project like “The War of the Rohirrim”, specifically one produced by anime studios accustomed to creating incredible, physics-defying visuals, could do justice to one of the coolest characters Tolkien ever penned: Helm Hammerhand.
Helm Hammerhand: A Ghostly Enemy Haunter
Warner Bros. Pictures
The movie’s high point comes when the Rohirrim have been driven back and forced to seek refuge in The Hornburg to escape from a Dunlending army led by Wulf. At this point, Helm, having lost his two sons, is overwhelmed with grief. Besieged by both a wildmen army and a harsh winter, Helm overcomes his wounds and uses the fortress’s secret passages to sneak out and single-handedly decimate the enemy army in the most ghastly ways. Essentially, Helm becomes Batman.
This is conveyed through the narration delivered by Miranda Otto’s Éowyn, as if it were a ghost story told around a campfire, revealing how the Dunlendings began spreading rumors of a ghost, a spectral being, a wraith. They believed that he would emerge in the middle of the night, dressed in white and stalking his prey as if he were a Snow-troll with the corresponding strength. The Dunlending army quickly lost all morale and began to soil themselves (figuratively, but also quite possibly literally) at the mere thought of the ghost of Helm Hammerhand killing them with his bare hands. Interestingly, they refer to Helm as a Wraith, just like the Nazgûl, given that the character was reimagined as one of the Ringwraiths in the game “Middle-earth: Shadow of War.”
Helm, of course, was no wraith, but simply channeled his inner Batman and began instilling fear in his enemies’ minds, becoming a mythical figure in their minds. They even started to believe that he was consuming the corpses of the men he killed. It’s a brilliant adaptation from what is otherwise a very brief description in the Tolkien-penned source material for the film:
“The dread of him alone was worth many men in the defence of the Burg. He would go out by himself, clad in white, and stalk like a snow-troll into the camps of his enemies, and slay many men with his hands. It was believed that if he bore no weapon no weapon would bite on him.”
Helm Hammerhand: The Strength of an Anime Character
Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s a fantastic moment, but it’s also thanks to the film’s animation that Helm Hammerhand transitions from being a guy with some innovative ideas for scaring his enemy to a larger-than-life titan with the strength of a god.
We first glimpse Helm’s prowess (and why he’s called Hammerhand) near the start of “The War of the Rohirrim” when he battles a Dunlending lord named Freca and kills him with a single punch. In Tolkien’s source material, Freca succumbs to his injuries after a short while, but here it happens instantly, as if Helm was All Might or another ultra-powerful anime character with incredible, superhuman strength. It’s the most anime thing in the movie, and it works precisely because it’s an anime feature. In live-action, it would either look ridiculous or fail to leave much of an impact. Here, however, Helm is permitted to actually look and act like the legend being spread about him.
During his winter crusade, Helm confronts two orcs and a troll, killing the former with ease and breaking the horn off the latter with a single blow. Through animation, even the size scaling changes with nearly every scene. At some points, especially in his last stand, Helm appears to be over seven feet tall, towering over the Dunlendings he destroys with his hands.
In the end, all of this serves to transform the character into an epic hero of legend and justify the telling of this story. In Tolkien’s books, there’s nothing particularly special about the character other than being one of many ancient heroes who have some large fortress or monument named after them. Furthermore, Helm’s heroic exploits as recounted by Tolkien are likely heavily exaggerated, as much of his writing is intended to evoke the tradition of oral history and legends of the British Isles’ history. In “The War of the Rohirrim,” thanks to the power of animation, we see Helm as the Batman-like legend he is believed to be, and he rules.
“The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” is now playing in theaters.
Credit: www.slashfilm.com
