Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim makes oliphaunts terrifying again

I thought I’d seen it all when it came to the great tusked battle-beasts. Yet another oliphaunt in combat? Ho-hum. But The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim proved me wrong. The new animated movie, directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus), raises the scare factor on the classic monsters by lowering the stakes.

The first glimpse of an oliphaunt we get in Jackson’s 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 wonder. In Tolkien’s own lore, established in the very book scene this movie scene adapts, the oliphaunt is a mythical creature of hobbit children’s rhymes.

But those oliphaunts are really just a teaser for Jackson’s The Return of the King, where King Théoden and Rohan’s cavalry face a charging line of them. Théoden’s men (OK, mostly men) have just beaten back the orcish horde. But when the beasts arrive, carrying troops of archers on their backs, their overpowering presence puts Rohan’s forces on the back foot just as swiftly.

Oliphaunt tusks, strung with barbed rope, take out multiple horses with each swing, while their feet trample any left unscathed. They take enemy arrows without flinching, until their legs and bellies look like pincushions, while the archers perched on their massive saddles retaliate with lethal skill. Even when Rohan’s archers manage to pick off an oliphaunt-riding Haradrim soldier, their own fighters can be killed by their enemies’ falling bodies.

It feels like it takes half of Rohan’s army to fell just one oliphaunt. Then its massive corpse becomes the backdrop for Théoden’s tragic fall and Éowyn’s iconic fight against the Witch King.

But then Legolas shows up and kills one single-handedly, with 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 does really undercut the menace of the oliphaunt. Legolas comes sliding down its falling trunk like he’s racking up a combo in a Tony Hawk game, and Gimli provides the comic-relief stinger “That still only counts as one!” And it’s certainly the most iconic oliphaunt moment to come of Jackson’s trilogy, if only because of the argument about whether his feat was cool or silly remains perennially popular among fans.

That’s why I approached The War of the Rohirrim not expecting much from its oliphaunts: The Return of the King sucked the scariness out of them. But The War of the Rohirrim wastes absolutely no time in putting it back in.

[Ed. note: The rest of this piece contains a few early spoilers for The War of the Rohirrim.]

The film’s first sign that there’s something truly rotten in the state of Rohan is when our hero Héra (Gaia Wise) is out on a casual ride with two of her retainers — her middle-aged lady-in-waiting Olwyn, and a kind of royal page named Lief. Olwyn and Lief, at least as far as we know, are not skilled warriors, so Héra’s cousin and buddy Fréaláf is along for the ride, as the nominal personal protection of the already-quite-skilled-at-combat princess of Rohan.

And that’s when they run into an oliphaunt. But not just any oliphaunt: a rabid one, foaming at the mouth, covered in open wounds, without a handler in sight.

And with a shock, even my jaded Rings fan brain engaged. How was this confrontation going to end? There were no gravity-defying elven warriors around. No army, no shelter, and nowhere to run. Two unsuspecting mounted warriors trying to protect two noncombatants against an oliphaunt with rabies? I won’t spoil how it ends, but things get even wilder from there.

Narratively, the real point of the scene is to tip the audience off that something is wrong in Rohan, and to put Héra in a particular pickle. There are any number of ways that the writing team on War of the Rohirrim could have accomplished that without an oliphaunt. But by making the first big action set-piece of the movie an oliphaunt action/chase sequence, writer Philippa Boyens and her co-writers set up for when oliphaunts recur later, in their usual martial mode.

Hey, Héra’s early encounter with the rogue oliphaunt says, think about how scary these things would be if you didn’t have a wizard or an elf around to handle them for you. When the beasts show up as part of an attacking army, Rohirrim viewers are primed to see them as the true threat they are to the mounted soldiers of Rohan and their isolated wooden-stockade holdings: towering, nearly indestructible siege weapons that can run as fast as a horse.

But with just one scene in The War of the Rohirrim — in the movie’s first action sequence! — Boyens and her co-writers use Middle-earth’s biggest monster to pull viewers down to their movie’s smaller scope. That’s a lesson many creators could stand to learn in our era of getting every last drop out of intellectual property licenses with endless prequels and spinoffs. There’s adventure in Middle-earth, even without wizards and rings and gods and big, flashy magic. Sometimes all you need for tension is a change of scale.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is out now in theaters.