(ANALYSIS) The news cycle hasn’t been kind to “Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim.” The film made headlines as the lowest-grossing (and worst-reviewed) entry in the Peter Jackson series. The film made a paltry $5 million on its opening weekend, finishing fifth at the box office and earning a 52% on Rotten Tomatoes.

But none of it really matters because the point of this movie was never this movie. Let me explain. As Warner Brosthers laid out in a public statement: “‘Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim" was fast-tracked to ensure New Line Cinema did not lose the film adaptation rights for Tolkien's novels while the ‘LOTR’ trio — Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens — worked through a creative vision for the next live-action movies in the ‘LOTR’ series of films.”

This should be a surprise. Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav spoke about “Lord of the Rings” in these terms just last year as a woefully untapped resource for the company: “One of the other real strengths of Warner Bros. is we talk about the great IP that Warner Bros. owns.

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But, for us, the challenge is that our content, our great IP — ‘Harry Potter,’ DC, ‘Lord of the Rings’ — that content has been underused. … We haven’t done anything with ‘Harry Potter’ for more than a decade. We haven’t done anything with ‘Lord of the Rings.’”

That is the reality of what “Lord of the Rings” — that masterwork of literature and myth by the legend J.R.R. Tolkien — has become. It is now somebody’s intellectual property, which means that they are leaving money on the table if they don’t make more movies about it. That is why more stories will be told, not out of genuine love or because there’s another story to tell, but because there’s big bucks to potentially be made.

Now, I don’t mind this. Lots of great works of art have been made because there’s more money to be made. And as an old-school superhero fan, I’m used to the original creator passing the torch to another generation to reinterpret the characters and the brand beyond the original creator’s work. Stan Lee stopped writing Spider-Man decades ago, and there have been many writers since then to tell the story of the web-slinging hero. Some good, some great. And also lots of terrible.

But this means that “LOTR” can start to enter a post-Tolkien conversation where we ask, “What does it mean to be faithful to Tolkien?” Does this writer capture the essence of the story, the characters and the world such that we will accept it along with our love for the originals? And what does the way these writers interpret it say about the future of how these writers will handle a post-Tolkien ‘LOTR’ and his other works?

‘War of the Rohirrim’ fails

This is particularly true for this movie. With “War of the Rohirrim” being the first genuine “LOTR” film not focused on any of the characters, storylines or anyone else from the lore we know and love, we’re getting what is — in many ways — the first truly original project from this franchise. 

To that end, I’m sorry to say that “War of the Rohirrim” fails to capture Tolkien, because it doesn’t capture his faith. We’re getting a picture here of a post-religious “Middle-earth” imagination. And it's a highly overrated place to stay if it stays that way.

“The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” is set 200 years before the original trilogy. It follows the King of Rohan Helm Hammerhand and his independent-minded daughter Hera as they defend their homeland against Wulf, an old friend and local warlord who is seeking vengeance for the death of his father and Hera’s rejection of his hand in marriage. The war becomes a legend which forms the basis on which Helms deep was named.

The basic plot is taken from Tolkien's telling of the events in his famous "Lord of the Rings" appendices. While elements of the story are expanded — including greatly enlarging Hera's role, making her the protagonist — the film is faithful to what he did include.

In some ways, it’s hard to see why people are so underwhelmed by this movie. In other ways, it’s not hard at all. The animation and the writing are of solid quality. The characters have great designs that look like part of the Peter Jackson world, the animation is beautiful to look at. The writing dialogue is solid, the story, for the most part, holds up. And it feels like something that would come out of a Tolkien world.

There are aspects of the film that are actually better than Season 2 of “Rings of Power.” The film’s dialogue between the characters is closer to Tolkien’s voice. It has more gravitas and poetry, less clunky, on-the-nose dialogue, and cringe lines. The characters’ balance of nobility yet propensity to corruption, is closer to the way Tolkien portrays his characters. Unlike “Rings of Power,” where all the characters acted shady or annoying from the get-go.

It even handles its female characters better. While both shows make warrior women the protagonists, Hera still acts like someone who existed at a time of traditional gender norms the way Tolkien wrote them. Hera has a gentility that balances out her fire and makes her more of a nuanced character. She feels like she has much more in common with someone like Eowyn than Galadriel from “Rings of Power.”

Tolkien’s religious voice disappears

What “Rings of Power” excelled in — capturing the themes of Tolkien’s work — is where “Rohirrim” is weakest. “Rings of Power” — for all its flaws — faithfully addressed the ideas in “Lord of the Rings” of noble people fighting against the darkness when the biggest threat to the darkness was their own temptation to join it.

“War of the Rohirrim” doesn’t seem to address any ideas from Tolkien’s books or any overarching themes at all. We see the events of the war that gave us Helm’s Deep, but there’s never an overarching statement about human nature or life that says, to allude to Scott McKee's book, “This is something the story means.”

Beyond just themes, there seems to be nothing about it artistically that stands out. The animation is good ,but standard. The story is generic high fantasy. There isn’t anything that the film seems like it’s trying to add to the world, no central idea, no aesthetic goal, that says “this is why I believe this deserves to exist.”

Here’s where Tolkien’s Christian faith comes in. One of the biggest distinctives of Tolkien from simple fantasy is his religiosity. Tolkien’s Middle-earth stories were always self-consciously absent any traditional religious trappings. As Catholic critic Steven D Greydanus explained: “Neither among hobbits, dwarves, elves or men do we see priests, temples, sacrifice, liturgical rituals, or other religious behavior. From The Silmarillion we know that Middle-earth was created by Eru Ilúvatar, but no one in The Lord of the Rings prays to him or invokes him.”

Tolkien didn’t think it would fit with the kind of story he wanted to tell, set far before Jesus came to mankind. “The Lord of the Rings,” like the whole Legendarium, is set in a pre-Christian and even pre-Abrahamic mythic past — one that is also a world apart from the primeval mythic history of Genesis. It is a world of pre-Christian European myth redeemed and shaped by Catholic imagination.

This presented Tolkien with a dilemma regarding any possible developed religious system (and, world-building obsessive that he was, had he started to build a religious system, it would have to be a fully developed religion with creed, code and cult). Such a developed religious system would necessarily do one of two things. It would either present tensions and problems regarding Catholicism. Otherwise, it would transparently be a cipher or allegory for Catholicism. Tolkien wanted neither. Instead, he wanted a world that was both. On the one hand, completely consistent with (and imaginatively informed by) Catholicism and also, on the other hand, not identifiably or transparently Catholic.

Even so, the religious underpinnings of the original stories — and the subsequent movie adaptations — are plainly obvious. Tolkien’s notions of the sinfulness of man and the providence of God as an intelligent force working toward the good in the world are everywhere.

One of the most famous lines in the books (and movies) is Gandalf and Frodo’s exchange in “Fellowship of the Ring.” Here is an excerpt:

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”

The idea that there is someone who is good who intends good to happen, who can then will those things to come about, is all throughout the books and movies, into the climax. Everywhere you see people struggle with sin, it always promises them power and always makes them pathetic.

This is actually stronger than if it had been explicitly Christian. It says that what the Bible claims about reality is true everywhere you go — even if you take out the trappings. Jesus came at a particular moment in time. What he says about reality is true in all times and all places. Even in Middle-earth.

‘Generic high fantasy’

“War of the Rohirrim” is the first Tolkien property I’ve seen where religious underpinnings are completely absent. There’s no discussion of a force for good driving events. There’s no mention of the Valar or anything of the sort. But a strange thing happens in the absence of faith in Middle-earth. When “War of the Rohirrim” takes away these themes, it simply becomes generic high fantasy. There isn’t anything about it that sets it apart as distinctly “Middle-earth” besides the minute details.

And yet, it’s perhaps inevitable that modern people would start taking religion out of the series, without even knowing what they’re missing. I noticed that people would constantly quote the aforementioned Frodo and Gandalf exchange. Particularly when something bad would happen in the culture. But they wouldn’t quote the whole thing. They would only quote this part:

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Now, I get it. Taking just this part makes it more universal because it doesn’t bring up extra characters like Bilbo or Gollum. Yet it’s also not lost on me that in a secular age, the part that people are going to resonate with most — that’s going to inspire them — is going to be the part that emphasizes our action.

And why not, I find that inspiring, too? 

But it also takes out the action of providence and makes it all about you. That is completely antithetical to what Tolkien believed. After all, if you remember the end of the story, the heroes fail.

It’s also fitting that a fundamentally secular Tolkien doesn’t have a “point” or a “theme.” As Dr. Jonathan Haidt pointed out in “The Anxious Generation,” it used to be that we got shared meta-narratives that put our lives in the context of unifying themes from church. But in modern society, we splinter off into individual stories without a shared story.

As we continue to disintegrate from shared stories into individualized ones, how long will we still be able to write stories with themes? Will we be able to write stories that take individual events and give them a unifying meaning and context? It’s something worth thinking about as we enter a new year.

We will probably never go back to the days when “The Lord of the Rings” was merely literature. But we may get great stories told by great storytellers in those spaces paved by legends like Tolkien. Time will tell how worthy those stories are of the giants — and their faith — upon whose shoulders we stand when we tell them.  

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.