You know you're knocking on a bit when you start to get nostalgic for your late twenties, but it's better than the alternative (at least as far as anyone knows). It's not even as if this was a particularly happy time in my life – seemingly trapped in a job that provided almost no fulfilment, no sense of my own purpose, no idea how to get some momentum back into my life. . . but there were positives, and not the least of them was beginning the earliest version of the collection of writing you have before you know.

If we're talking about films in the early years of the 21st century, then the conversation has to include the Lord of the Rings series, which remain a towering achievement by any sensible metric. Of course, as inevitably happens these days, some of the shine has perhaps come off Peter Jackson's masterpiece – I think even Jackson himself would admit that the trilogy of films he made based on The Hobbit were profoundly flawed, while the hungry beast of the entertainment industry has been sniffing around, searching for ways to (pardon my French) 'extend the franchise'.

Which brings us, of course, to Kenji Kamiyama's The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. This is a story that has been brought to the screen because everyone involved from the studio chief to the caterers truly felt a burning desire to share it with the world, they believed in it utterly and selflessly as something which, irrespective of profit, would improve the lot of the human race. Also, New Line Cinema were going to lose the Lord of the Rings rights unless they made another film pretty damn quick.

This is a story ripped from the pages of Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings (pp 1065-67 in the fiftieth anniversary edition), taking place two hundred years prior to the earlier (live-action) films. The setting is Rohan (pronounced Ro-han or Ro-hahn depending on who's speaking), where everyone loves their horse, and the king is Helm (Brian Cox), a fierce old patriarch.

Dodgy nobleman Lord Freca turns up one day proposing his son Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) marries Helm's only daughter, just to secure ties between the two families, but Helm declines (he has his eye on a prince of Gondor as a son-in-law). When Freca scorns him for this, Helm invites him to step outside and then beats him to death, because that's how they roll in olden Rohan. Wulf flees, swearing revenge on Helm and his dynasty, and forging an alliance with his Dunlending kin and darker forces from elsewhere. . .

Well, that's the story from the book, anyway (or at least the beginning of it). I wouldn't have said it sounded tremendously promising as the basis for a two-and-a-quarter hour movie, but what do I know? There is, I would suspect, a tremendous amount of nostalgic goodwill in existence for The War of the Rohirrim, which the film does its very best to exploit – early on in particular, lavish use is made of Howard Shore's magnificent score from the original movies, which had a powerful Pavlovian effect on me that I actually felt vaguely embarrassed about even at the time.

Certainly lovers of The Two Towers in particular will find a lot that is. . . well, kind of familiar here, and I don't just mean the designs for Edoras and some of the other familiar locations featured in the story. There is treachery in Rohan and dark forces are on the move; the people of Rohan end up having to abandon their capital and take refuge in a fortress on the edge of the mountains, where they are besieged by their enemies. . . is any of this ringing bells yet? Of course, there's nothing wrong with all this, but it would be nice if it were a little less blatant. (A few other iconic elements from the old movies also find their way in, because who doesn't love giant rampaging elephants.)

The film-makers would probably respond that this is all in the appendix, which to be fair is true (well, maybe not the giant elephants). Their fidelity to the word of Professor Tolkien seems to be a curiously selective thing, though. The actual main character of the story is Helm's daughter, who isn't even given a name in the appendix (something the film does allude to). Here she is Hera (Rohan must have been in its Icelandic period two hundred years ago), voiced by Gaia Wise, and she is – all together now! – a strong independent-minded young woman determined to follow her own path. There's nothing wrong with Wise's performance, but both visually and in terms of the scripting she somehow ends up as the most generic protagonist imaginable.

But I guess that's where the kids are at these days, and this is the kind of film which feels like it's been made with one eye on the fanbase: young people who most likely enjoy Japanese anime as well, and thus will like the style of this film as well as its story.

I don't know. Please feel free to come round to my house and burn me, but it seems to me that each of these creative decisions takes us a step further away from Professor Tolkien and more towards a strange international fantasy pudding –   Princess Mononoke of the Rings, maybe. I don't want to rehearse the case yet again that Tolkien was writing in a specifically north-west European milieu intentionally, but I do think (your mileage may vary of course) that while it's obviously very easy to rip Tolkien off, it's much harder to successfully mash Tolkien up with something else, which is what they seem to be attempting here.

But purism is out of fashion these days, I suppose, not that it was ever particularly chic. I will confess to not being particularly won over by the animation style here – most of the character designs are just a bit too clean and delicate, for one thing – but most of the vocal performances are fine, and they do sneak in performances from several of the original cast (even, somewhat eye-openingly, a contribution from someone who's been dead for years). And there is a level of artistry here which is impressive on a solely aesthetic level.

Nevertheless, as a film in its own right, The War of the Rohirrim is not especially impressive. It's rather like what might happen if you did an animated remake of The Two Towers but ran the script by a series of focus groups instead of just sticking to Tolkien's text and style. Some of the authentic texture and 'feel' inevitably gets lost in the process. This is essentially milky-tea Tolkien, but that's the kind that seems to be in vogue at the moment.

Also Showing (and Streaming). . .

. . . Aaron Taylor-Johnson takes his shirt off and runs around a lot in J. C. Shandor's Kraven the Hunter, the latest (and likely last) in Sony's series of Spider-Man cash-in films. A magic potion turns the son of a Russian oligarch (Russell Crowe) into the world's greatest hunter; he becomes a vigilante executioner and ends up having a fight with a Russian mobster who's half-man, half-rhino.

Really not as bad as you might expect given this is from the makers of Venom, Morbius and Madame Web   – the director spent most of the press tour pleading to be given a fair chance, and that this film was better than any of those – but I understand it has spectacularly tanked anyway. This is a shame as Taylor-Johnson is entertaining to watch and the action sequences are fun. But I can understand why people would be wary of this one and it's not what you'd actually call good.

. . . D. J. Caruso's Mary (on Netflix), a sensitive retelling of the story of the birth of Christ from the director of xXx: The Return of Xander Cage. This is what it would look like if Zack Snyder directed your local school nativity play.

Awix

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