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Title: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Date Viewed: 12/19/03, 12/31/03

Details:

Sean Astin

Orlando Bloom

Billy Boyd

Bernard Hill

Ian McKellen

Dominic Monaghan

Viggo Mortensen

John Noble

Miranda Otto

John Rhys-Davies

Andy Serkis

Liv Tyler

Karl Urban

Hugo Weaving

David Wenham

Elijah Wood

Director: Peter Jackson

Score: Howard Shore

Score: +1/2

The Review: Return of the King is the capstone of Jackson's trilogy, a rousing finale to a bold and intensely comprehensive vision of Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" (LotR). The scope of the series has been immense, and all the threads left to dangle in the previous Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers are deftly woven into the finale. For me, the most chilling highlights were the lighting of the fire beacons, and Pippin's song "Mist & Shadows" (poignant counterpoint to the disastrous return to Osgiliath).

Excellent ensemble cast throughout. And anyone who, after Two Towers, still thought of Gollum as a computer-animated and artificial creature, will have their mind changed here.

Kudos are deserved for a consistent and well executed conceptual design by Alan Lee and John Howe. One of the reasons why I was originally reluctant to support any film version of LotR was my closely held, intensely private, internal vision of the setting and characters that I had developed on multiple readings. This attitude held true in a lot of aficionados (and friends) of the time. However, production qualities, budget, and trust in the state of the art in SFX eventually changed my mind, and I am happy to have been rewarded by a compelling rendition, glorious cinematography, and a vision without cognitive dissonance. Well, I cannot honestly say totally without dissonance, as any reader of the original will attest; but it was a creative dissonance.

Superb special effects in this installment, particularly (as most pundits note) the battle scenes on the fields of Pelennor, and the Paths of the Dead (and their inhabitants). In addition, if you were intrigued by Legolas' maneuver in Two Towers where he mounts a speeding horse from underneath, you will have much more to awe you in this episode.

At the close of the trilogy, now's the time to compliment the screenwriters for at least some of their modifications to Tolkein's saga, in particular their resolution of the "puzzle of Arwen." It doesn't require a spoiler warning to point out that in Tolkein's original novel, Arwen appears obliquely in but a few sentences in Fellowship, not at all in Two Towers, and then magically appears out of the woodwork (stonework?) in Return to become a significant player. For those who actually read Tolkein's appendices, this puzzle was resolved, because there is an entire section of Appendix A devoted to a "Part of the tale of Aragorn and Arwen." The scriptwriters have folded this appendix into the narrative, and helped a new generation of viewers understand what's going on. But one of the consequences of film timing and the vagaries of rewriting is the counterpoint creation of the "puzzle of Eowyn" -- after the fields of Pelennor, she disappears until she is seen, smiling, at the side of Faramir. For one of Tolkein's few strong female characters, this is a disservice.

However, while what follows may be mere quibbles, I am unable to give full marks to this film. The pacing of the first third was slow and sleep-inducing. Admittedly, much of the narrative thrust is in support of Frodo's journey, but the constant cuts back to Frodo and Sam, from the midst of otherwise flowing narrative streams, were sometimes jarring and dissonant. And much though it seems to jolt many readers of the novel, the penultimate "Scouring of the Shire" was an essential stage in both the plot and the character's growth (so much so that Tolkein himself felt obliged to justify its inclusion); its lack is a small but troublesome void in the story.

In background drawings underlying the final credits, the style appears to be by Alan Lee; these are a welcome reward for credit mavens. And if the theatrical release was 3h20m, imagine what the DVD extended edition will be!>/p>

Excellent, overall; enjoy!

(11-Jan-04)

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