Movie Review: Once more to Middle Earth, before “The Lord of the Rings,” “The War of the Rohirrim”

“The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” is a dull placeholder pic rolled out by Warner Animation to keep the company’s intellectual property rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth current in the public’s mind.

Streaming series aside, it’s been years since Peter Jackson turned over his entire career to Gollum, Gandalf, Galadriel and the gang. So why not a fresh animated addition to the canon, a prequel to the books and films built out of asides, references and footnotes from Tolkien’s fertile efforts to flesh out this simulated ancient history of an ever-so-English fantasy?

Kenji Kamiyama, a veteran of Japanimation — Japanese animated TV series such as “Ghost in the Shell,” “Ultraman” and “Blade Runner: Black Lotus” — was commissioned to turn in a modest-budgeted ($30 million?), colorful and striking but somewhat under-animated visit to this universe.

The ancient lands of Gondor and Rohan have long struggled to get along, and to force themselves to come to each other’s aid in crisis. The alliance has been tested since even more ancient times, Tolkien wrote. Here’s an earlier clash.

A few familiar voices from the Jackson films — Miranda Otto, the late Christopher Lee (wizards really are immortal), Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan — turn up, sometimes as the long-lived characters they played in the many “Rings” and “Hobbit” films.

The action starts out brisk.

But I have to say, the sizzle has gone out of this series of projects. As someone who used to drive cross-country listening to CDs of BBC/NPR series based on Tolkien, who recorded for broadcast a friend’s symphonic poem based on “The Silmarillion” and who is old enough to have seen the beautiful but abortive Ralph Bakshi attempt to animate “The Lord of the Rings” for the big screen, most of what’s come along of late has left me cold.

And a deritive, character-cluttered (in the Old Testament Tolkien style), exposition-heavy and voice-over narrated to death anime (ish) treatment of events ever-so-similar to all that transpired in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy seems more cynical than inspired, more exhausted than fresh.

A couple of hundred years before a hobbit came upon “the one ring,” King Helm (Brian Cox) of the Rohirrim finds himself pressured to marry his princess daughter Hera (Gaia Wise) off to a prince of Gondor to ensure the security of his realm (Rohan).

But an opportunist at court, Lord Freca (Shaun Dooley) of the West Marches wants his lad Wulf (Luca Pasqualino) considered as a suitor, angling the family’s way to the throne. Princess Hera and Wulf used to play together as children. Maybe even “play house.”

That disagreement leads to a trial by combat that is the film’s first monumental let down. One combatant kills the other with a single punch.

Alliances crumble, schemes erupt and Rohan — its wooden palisaded strongholds and ancient stone fortresses — is threatened. The headstrong king won’t listen to nephews who beg him to “light the beacons, call for aid from Gondor.” And disasters strike.

There are kidnappings and cavalry charges, betrayals and battles, and giant sentient eagles, giant four-tusked war elephants and an even larger tentacled swamp monster figure in the proceedings.

None of it moved me, or moved the needle.

Once you get used to the anime style and color palette, beautifully rendering the ruins of ancient Gondor’s Isengard, scaling the icy peaks of winter in Middle Earth and the like, there’s little to grab hold of and embrace as visually “new” or “expanding the canon” or for that matter moving or entertaining. Comic relief characters aren’t funny, potential romances aren’t romantic and the action beats are jumpy and jerkily animated and not immersive at all.

“The Lord of the Rings” is classic fantasy literature, and there’s a richness to the detail and emotional connection with the characters that leaps from the page to whatever other medium this saga moves to.

But “The War of the Rohirrim” is narrated to death because it has to be, otherwise it would be impossible to follow. And it’s dull and simplistic as narrative, more of a “comic book” take on Tolkien than an actual adaptation of anything Tolkien would have allowed to be published.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: The voices of Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Lorraine Ashbourne, Benjamin Wainright, Bilal Hasna, Miranda Otto many others

Credits: Directed by Kenji Kamiyama, scripted by Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou, based on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. A New Line/Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 2:14