I’m disappointed.

The first trailer for the new, animated Lord of the Rings movie just dropped and it looks – quite terrible.

Now, I can’t claim to have had super high expectations for yet another Lord of the Rings spinoff. The Hobbit trilogy was poorly made, and yet it is miles above this new Amazon series “The Rings of Power.”

So by the time they announced another movie, entitled The War of the Rohirrim, I didn’t think it could be amazing.

But the fact that it was focused around Rohan, which has always been one of my favorite kingdoms in Middle Earth, and was a dedicated movie – rather than a potentially endless show (from Amazon of all places) – gave me some glimmers of false hope.

I will admit, I may be far from the target audience for this kind of movie, given that I rarely enjoy anime – and enjoy this particular style of anime even less.

But, given that I am a fan of Tolkien and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, I think I should fall into the intended audience for this movie.

And, theoretically, bringing a story from Tolkien’s appendices to life could be really fantastic, but this just looks bland, cliché and cringe-worthy. While the basic events of the story may have been sourced from Tolkien’s writings, what we see in the trailer completely falls short of the high fantasy epic which Tolkien’s legacy deserves.

And, that’s probably due to the fact they did not actually draw on Tolkien’s writings very much. Instead, they intentionally decided to focus on a character whom the author left unnamed, so that they could make up as much of it as they wanted.

I will no longer pretend to have any hope for future adaptions of Tolkien’s work – and frankly, I wish they would leave his work alone and stop trying to create a “Middle Earth Cinematic Universe” franchise.

Watch the full video here: