SPOILERS
First let me start of by saying what I liked.
The visuals were incredible, especially
The landscapes, the armies, the animations, visually and audibly this is a gorgeous film.
I liked how visceral things felt, ie when someone got smacked up, you could feel it and you could tell they were mega dead.
Helm Hammerhand is a beast and his death was fucking sick and the sequence of psychological warfare with the enemy mistaking him for a wraith was very cool.
I liked seeing a cool female character, I liked eowyn in the movies but aside from killing the witch king which was sick I just felt like she whined a lot.
The siege sequence from start to finish was awesome.
Now lets get into the stuff I didn't like
The fan service
I felt like I watched the same siege 10 years ago when I first saw the 2 towers, but at least the 2 towers was fucking epic. This just felt weird. I would akin it to watching Star Wars episode 7. The plot is so similar to A New Hope its not even funny. Same shit here. Its like the same movie but with different characters.
The writing:
Idk if im biased because ive watched peter jacksons LOTR so much but I felt like the writing was totally off. Helm Hammerhand said to his daughter "you know nothing about war, youre not a fighter" [paraphrasing] and then she just somehow out the blue is a fucking ninja .
Some of the lines were just weird with very weird deliveries. Im not a huge fan of tropes and this movie had tropes for days.
The hero sacrifices himself
The main villain is an ultra coward and does the same shit multiple times when he tries to ice our heroin character.
You choose to be not afraid.
Who will call for aid? Who will answer? Rohan will answer of course! Silly!
It follows the hero's journey in a way but not really? I guess when she went to the eagle to ask for help and she put on the dress that was her rebirth? Unsure.
It also felt like so much was reused from Peter Jacksons movies [not the hobbit, fuck the hobbit]. I am a fan of Brian cox but when the charge sequences happen, Helm says FORTH EOLINGAS and it just does not hit for me, at all. Same thing happens at the end of the film, the nephew says it too and has this epic charge sequence and it just felt off. It felt like a downsized lord of the rings as far as writing goes.
Maybe I was spoiled by Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy, but I felt like this was rushed out and someone needed to go back through and run through the script like "is this really what we think these guys should be saying? Do we really think this is the best we could write?"
But they didn't rush those visuals. This is a fucking good looking film. Anyone who doesn't like the way this film looks doesn't like art.