I thought I had Olifaunts under control. You know, the giant war elephants of The Lord of the Ringsas it seems exciting in Peter Jackson's “Lord of the Rings” trilogy? Jackson's productions brought the creatures to life with terrifying power, making them the focus of one of the trilogy's most controversial action moments.
I thought I had seen it all when it came to the large, tusked fighting beasts. Another Olifaunt in the fight? Ho-hum. But The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim proved me wrong. The new animated film directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus), increases the fear factor of the classic monsters by lowering the stakes.
The first glimpse of an Oliphant we get in Jackson's Lord of the Rings is a quick look in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Sam and Frodo see a couple marching in the distance Haradrim armyand Sam reacts in surprise. In Tolkien's own lore, anchored in the very book scene that adapts this film scene, the Olifaunt is a mythical creature from Hobbit nursery rhymes.
But these Olifaunts are actually just a taste of Jackson's The Return of the Kingwhere King Théoden and Rohan's cavalry face a line of attack. Théoden's men (OK, mostly men) have just repelled the orc horde. But when the beasts arrive with archer troops on their backs, Rohan's forces are just as quickly pushed onto the defensive by their overwhelming presence.
Oliphaunt tusks strung with barbed ropes tear down several horses with each swing, while their feet trample any that are unharmed. Without batting an eyelid, they shoot enemy arrows until their legs and bellies look like pincushions, while the archers on their massive saddles retaliate with deadly skill. Even if Rohan's archers manage to shoot a Haradrim soldier on Olifaunten, their own fighters can be killed by the falling bodies of their enemies.
It feels like only half of Rohan's army will die one oliphaunt. Then his giant corpse becomes the backdrop for Théoden's tragic fall and Eowyn's iconic battle against the Witch-King.
Image: New Line Cinema
But then Legolas shows up and kills you single-handedlywith a single three-arrow shot to the back of the head.
I don't hate this scene – I look back on it fondly. But it really undermines the threat of the Olifaunt. Legolas slides down his falling trunk like he's setting up a combo in a Tony Hawk game, and Gimli provides the comical, relieving stinger: “That still only counts as one!” And it certainly is most iconic Olifaunt moment in Jackson's trilogy, if for no other reason than that Arguing about whether his performance was cool or silly remains increasingly popular with fans.
That's why I approached it The War of the Rohirrim I don't expect much from his Olifaunts: The Return of the King took away their fear. But The War of the Rohirrim wastes absolutely no time putting it back in place.
[Ed. note: The rest of this piece contains a few early spoilers for The War of the Rohirrim.]
The film's first sign that something is really fishy in the state of Rohan is when our heroine Héra (Gaia Wise) goes on a leisurely ride with two of her retainers – her middle-aged lady-in-waiting Olwyn and something like a royal page called Lief. Olwyn and Lief are, at least as far as we know, not experienced warriors, so Héra's cousin and friend Fréaláf is along for the ride as nominal personal protection battle-hardened Princess of Rohan.
And then they meet an Olifaunt. But not only any Olifaunt: a rabid man, foaming at the mouth, covered in open wounds, with no handler in sight.
Image: Warner Bros. Animation
And with a shock, even my jaded one Rings Fan brains busy. How should this confrontation end? There were no gravity-defying elven warriors nearby. No army, no shelter and nowhere to escape. Two unsuspecting mounted warriors try to protect two non-combatants from it an Olifaunt with rabies? I don't want to give away how it ends, but it just gets wilder from there.
Narratively speaking, the real purpose of the scene is to alert the audience that something is wrong with Rohan and to put Héra in a particular predicament. There are many ways the writing team can move forward War of the Rohirrim could have achieved this without an Olifaunt. But by turning the film's first major action set piece into an Oliphaunt action/chase sequence, writer Philippa Boyens and her co-writers set themselves up for the Oliphaunts to return later, in their usual fashion Battle mode.
HeyHéra's early encounter with the renegade Oliphaunt states: Think about how scary these things would be if you didn't have a wizard or elf to do them for you. When the beasts appear as part of an attacking army, My heart Viewers are prepared to see them as the true threat to the mounted soldiers of Rohan and their isolated wooden palisades: towering, nearly indestructible siege weapons that can run as fast as a horse.
But with just one scene The War of the Rohirrim – in the film’s first action sequence! — Boyens and her co-writers use Middle-earth's largest monster to draw viewers' attention to the smaller scale of their film. That's a lesson that many YouTubers could learn in this day and age where we squeeze every last bit out of intellectual property licenses with endless prequels and spin-offs. There are adventures in Middle-earth, even without wizards, rings, gods, and big, flashy magic. Sometimes all you need to create excitement is a change of scale.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is now available in cinemas.
