The new animated Lord of the Rings installment is a ‘Peter Jackson presents’ project directed by Kenji Kamiyama, best known for his anime features Eden of the East and Ghost in the Shell. So there’s a lot of provenance working in our favor, and it’s been a full decade since the last full-length feature film from the franchise - The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies was a 2014 release. So you know there are legions of LOTR/Tolkien enthusiasts waiting for this new iteration.

The premise for the film itself caused ambiguous reactions. Set a full two centuries before Frodo even existed, the tale was plucked from one of the appendices that Tolkien provided, and the heroine still needs to be named. So, from one perspective, you can say that the writers had a lot of freedom in creating the lore, and one wouldn’t get critics bashing about how it deviates from the source material.

The basic plot is how, in Rohan, King Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox) is at odds with bitter rival, the avenging Wulf (Luke Pasqualino). As events play themselves out, it is left to Héra (Gaia Wise), Helm’s headstrong daughter, to try and save her people. There are no Elves, Dwarves, or Hobbits in the film, which may disappoint the LOTR faithful. Instead, we are given a storyline that seems more at home in Game of Thrones or as a minor Shakespeare historical drama.

As it’s an animated feature, I had two sons who admired the genre and grew up on the LOTR franchise; they assessed the film and gave me their opinions. For them, the iconic strains of the Howard Shore score in a packed SM IMAX theater were something to get excited about.

There are cool animated sequences of battles peppered through the film, but both felt there was an oversimplified script hindering the potential of this film to be so much more than a war spectacle. It gets stuck between wanting to be pleasing to the younger audience, appeasing the older fans, and having on board an anime Director who wants to stretch the genre but is being restrained.

The most interesting character would be Helm, and having Brian Cox voice this character was genius. He elevates the material as more significant than life, and you’ll sometimes wish there was more of him in the story.

And perhaps there lies the issue: we’re returning to Middle-earth; but we’re also stuck in the Middle of Earth. When we could have soared or gone magical, we only get one creature scene, three Orcs, and a giant eagle that makes random appearances. It’s almost as if the producers thought we had those battle scenes coming up so we could slack on the storytelling details. It reminds me of what we experienced in Gladiator II with lazy writing. Is Hollywood in need of better writers?