MOVIE REVIEW

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King  (2003)

Starring: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Andy Serkis, Liv Tyler, Bernard Hill, Hugo Weaving

Rating: PG-13

Studio: New Line Cinema

Release Date: 12.17.03

Review Posted: 12.21.03

Spoilers: Minor

By Gregory L. Amato

A Good, But Not Great "King"

While it’s easy to appreciate the good things that The Return of the King has to offer, it’s also very easy to be so swept up in them and J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-loved story that some serious flaws are overlooked. Even at three and a half hours, the film struggles to keep parts of its story straight, and the changes from book to film made in the interest of time are usually also to the detriment of coherence. The film offers fantastic special effects and battles on a scale never seen before, but in trying to be a blockbuster, it falls short of being a classic.

Much of the first hour is fairly slow and familiar. ROTK begins with Smeagol’s (Andy Serkis) backstory, and the Gollum/Smeagol dichotomy continues to be fleshed out despite the fact that his two personalities have already been demonstrated at length in The Two Towers. Gollum wants the hobbits dead, Sam (Sean Astin) is onto him, and Frodo (Elijah Wood) doesn’t want them to fight. We get it. It’s almost a relief when they finally get to the lair of the giant spider Shelob just so the story can move on.

In Rohan the survivors of the battle at Helm’s Deep make brief visit to Isengard to find that it has been destroyed by the Ents. Though victorious against Saruman’s army, we find that the real threat is a great host from Mordor will soon threaten Gondor. Gandalf (Ian McKellan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) are soon off to Minas Tirith, and the muster of Rohan begins, as Theoden (Bernard Hill) collects every warrior that can be found to head to the aid of their neighbor. Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) faces his first challenge as a king, and must claim his birthright in order to enlist the aid of an army of restless dead and head off Sauron’s reinforcements. The last battles of the ROTK are fought at Minas Tirith as Sam and Frodo fight their own enemies (and in Frodo’s case, his demons) on the way to Mount Doom.

This hardly covers everything that happens in the movie, hence the extremely long running time.

Part of the problem with time may have been choices in the previous film, The Two Towers, which ended with much material from the book still left over to be included in ROTK. The acquisition and use of the Palantir, Gandalf’s flight to Minas Tirith, and Frodo’s encounter with Shelob, all these things had to be accounted for in addition to everything that happens in ROTK. The result is a mixed bag, and sometimes a leap of faith is required such as when Elrond (Hugo Weaving) suddenly realizes it might be a good idea to reforge Isildur’s sword and deliver it to Aragorn, or when Pippin finds Saruman’s Palantir for no apparent reason.

Once ROTK gets going though, it will be hard to remember any of those things because the battles are so incredibly overwhelming. Think of the fight with the cave troll from The Fellowship of the Ring combined with the battle at Helm’s Deep, multiply that by about a hundred, and you might have something approaching what happens at Minas Tirith—even shots of the city itself are awe-inspiring. This isn’t just row upon row of soldiers making an advance as in TTT though; siege engines so big they need to be pulled and operated by trolls, several of the Nazgul riding on more winged creatures, oliphaunts (giant elephants- also first seen in TTT), and an army of the dead accompany a host of orcs so massive it can scarcely be believed that it was pulled off, even with computer graphics. Plot holes and some silly dialog aside, ROTK is exciting even for those of us who know the ultimate outcome of every battle, and you will not want to miss even a minute of it.

As some of the few films of the fantasy genre, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and especially ROTK) deserves credit for its visuals and for the ambition of its massive scale. But for all the attention given to the special effects, it’s a shame that the same care wasn’t taken to bring Tolkien’s characters to life as well. They are there, mostly, but in some cases their on-screen personas bear resemblance to their literary counterparts only in appearance, and the rewriting of the story sometimes seems unnecessary and is almost always to the detriment of the film.

We get contemporary comic relief from Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), sex appeal from a manufactured Arwen (Liv Tyler), and a version of Legolas (Orlando Bloom) who can defy gravity as if his name were Neo. It is stunning as Theoden lines up his warriors and charges a row of oliphaunts, and in this case the special effects serve the film. Soon after, we are treated to the Elf-superman Legolas effortlessly hopping onto an oliphaunt, killing it, and then giving us yet another shot of him surfing in the midst of battle. In this case the film turns into merely a showcase for the effects, and they are truly silly and inappropriate ones at that.

After sitting on my seat for so long, ROTK takes its sweet time finishing up, featuring at least two or three spots when the film seems to be ending, but isn’t. But after nearly three and a half hours and many more hours from the previous two films, it seems only right that the end should spend a little extra time wrapping the story and characters since this is really the ending of an epic and not just one movie.

What legacy director Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy will have on the future can only be speculated right now. While the success of making the fantasy world of Middle Earth seem uncannily real is more than admirable, the inclusion of too much Hollywood cliché drags it down from greatness.

Rating: êêê1/2  (out of 5)

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