I thought I had dominion over the olifaunts. You know, the huge war elephants of The Lord of the Ringsas it excitingly appears in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy? Jackson's productions brought the creatures to life with terrifying power and made them the center of one of the trilogy's most debated action moments.
I thought I had seen it all when it came to large fanged battle beasts. Another olifante in combat? Ho-hum. But The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim He proved me wrong. The new animated film, directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus), increases the fear factor of classic monsters by lowering the stakes.
The first glimpse of an oliphant we get in Jackson's The Lord of the Rings is a brief glimpse in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Sam and Frodo see a couple in the distance, marching with a Haradrim army, and Sam reacts with amazement. In Tolkien's own lore, established in the same scene from the book that adapts this scene from the film, the oliphaunt is a mythical creature from hobbit nursery rhymes.
But those olifaunts are really just a preview of Jackson's film. The return of the kingwhere King Théoden and Rohan's cavalry face a charging line. Théoden's men (well, mostly men) have just driven back the orcish horde. But when the beasts arrive, carrying troops of archers on their backs, their overwhelming presence puts Rohan's forces at a disadvantage just as quickly.
Oliphaunt's fangs, tied with a barbed rope, eliminate several horses with each blow, while his feet trample those left unharmed. They receive enemy arrows without flinching, until their legs and bellies look like pincushions, while the archers perched on their enormous chairs retaliate with lethal skill. Even when Rohan's archers manage to eliminate a Haradrim soldier riding an oliphant, their own combatants can be killed by the falling bodies of their enemies.
It seems like it takes half of Rohan's army to fall. one oliphant His enormous corpse then becomes the backdrop for Théoden's tragic fall and Éowyn's iconic fight against the Witch-King.
Image: New Line Cinema
But then Legolas appears and single-handedly kills one with a single shot of three arrows to the back of the head.
I don't hate this scene; I remember her fondly. But it really undermines the olifante threat. Legolas slides down his falling trunk like he's racking up a combo in a Tony Hawk game, and Gimli provides the comic relief sting “That still only counts as one!” And it's easily the most iconic oliphaunt moment of Jackson's trilogy, if only because the argument over whether his feat was genius or dumb remains ever-popular among fans.
That's why I approached The Rohirrim War without expecting much from their olifantes: The return of the king It took away their fear. But The Rohirrim War You waste absolutely no time putting it back.
[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 truly rotten in the state of Rohan is when our heroine Héra (Gaia Wise) goes out for a casual stroll with two of her servants: her middle-aged lady-in-waiting, Olwyn, and a kind of royal page called Lief. Olwyn and Lief, at least as far as we know, are not skilled warriors, so Héra's cousin and friend Fréaláf accompanies them, as nominal personal protection for the princess of Rohan, who is already quite skilled in combat.
And that's when they run into an oliphant. but not only any oliphaunt: a rabid one, foaming at the mouth, covered in open wounds, with no one to control him in sight.
Image: Warner Bros. Animation.
And with surprise, even my jaded Rings compromised ventilator brain. How was this confrontation going to end? There were no gravity-defying elven warriors around. No army, no shelter and nowhere to flee. Two unsuspecting mounted warriors were trying to protect two non-combatants against an oliphant with rage? I won't reveal how it ends, but things get even wilder from there.
Narratively, the real goal of the scene is to warn the audience that something is wrong in Rohan and to put Héra in a particular bind. There are several ways in which the editorial team Rohirrim War I could have done it without an olifante. But by turning the film's first big action set piece into an oliphaunt action/chase sequence, writer Philippa Boyens and her co-writers prepared for when the oliphaunts reappeared later, in their usual martial mode.
Heysays Héra's first meeting with the rogue oliphant, Think about how scary these things would be if you didn't have a wizard or elf around to handle them for you.. When the beasts appear as part of an attacking army, Rohirrim Viewers are primed to see them as the true threat they are to Rohan's mounted soldiers and their isolated wooden stockades: imposing, nearly indestructible siege weapons that can run as fast as a horse.
But with only one scene in The Rohirrim War – in the first action sequence of the film! — Boyens and his co-writers use Middle-earth's biggest monster to take viewers to the smallest scope of their film. That's a lesson many creators could learn in our era of squeezing out every last ounce 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 generate tension is a change of scale.
The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim is now available in theaters.