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: 01.08.04

Spoilers: Minor

By Matt Sienkiewicz

Final Chapter "King" Kong of Trilogies

First some ceremonial praise-showering:

What a monumental task this whole endeavor was. There is so much at stake, so many places to go wrong. And yet Peter Jackson and company braved it out and somehow pulled it off. While I had my doubts at various points during the trilogy’s first two installments, I’ve got to admit that in the end there’s little question that these films comprise a significant and worthwhile addition to the history of cinema. The fact that a story of this scope gets told and looks good would probably be enough to qualify as a success. But Jackson goes far beyond that, weaving his story with eloquence and dexterity and perhaps most importantly, allowing his films’ staggering production values to enhance the product but never get in the way.

In the end, everything blends into perhaps the most complete and complex fictional world ever put on film. And the pay-off is both aesthetic and narrative, as the fullness and vividness of the story-world allows all the silliness and outlandish story-telling to seem real. Plus there’s a scene with ghosts that’s just great. These kinds of examples go on and on.

There was a bit of a temptation to double the “on and on,” letting you know all the things that are impressive, unlikely and great about The Return of the King. But really, that’s been done enough and it’s fairly obvious why the film is good, once it’s been accepted that it is. Also, I’m no fan boy and I don’t have much privileged information on the production, so I don’t feel qualified to discuss the film’s minutiae. So I’ll take the rest of the review to look at the one piece of criticism that I think perhaps ought to be levied towards the film. Otherwise my review would just take too damn long. Or so it has been said by the few looking for something to complain about; including myself, I suppose.

To begin, this is a long film. It is a full hour longer than your average drama. Following this train, ROTK appears to be an hour longer than itself. And regardless of source material, that’s an issue worth taking a critical look at. Yes, there’s no reason a feature film needs to be two hours, but there is a reason why most are, something to do with attention spans, and even if there weren’t, the convention is strong enough that it causes a problem for those breaking it.

So, the real question becomes, what do we get for the 201 minutes we devote to watching the film, and do we have the right to pointlessly demand a few minutes of time back from it? Without doubt, this film features a lot of story. It’s a film epic to rival any other, featuring dozens of central or near central characters and spanning a giant space, both temporally and geographically. But just the same, it must be kept in mind that we’re dealing with a piece of cinema, not literature. And one of the true strengths of this particular art form is the ability to take a lot information and put in as little into the script without compromising the story. As they say, a picture is worth a 1000 words. 500 page books are routinely pressed into two hour features, and the success of such projects rarely rests on this condensation as much as other factors. In other words, a filmmaker’s ability to allow his medium, moving pictures, to tell his story with speed and grace is an important factor in determining said artist’s skill.

So, while freely heaping loads of praise in other areas unto Mr. Jackson, let’s consider whether he deserves a demerit for this flaw or not. On the one hand, Jackson faced a unique and more or less unfair obstacle in producing this picture. Between the dorkiness of the books’ fans and the reverence given to it by various literary circles, it was a near impossibility for Jackson and the other screenwriters to change or edit anything significant from the source material. As an exercise in adaptation, that makes the film a true challenge. No screenwriter wants to be stuck with all of a book’s characters and locations, let alone each plot movement. Some ideas just aren’t very cinematic. Working in thousands of pieces that were crafted for another medium can often spell disaster. Jackson succeeds in making everything work for him, but it’s just too much material. Scenes that don’t advance the story or do so at a decelerated pace are all over the place, and that’s a good bit of the problem.

Perhaps most notably, the film goes on for a half hour after its climatic event has taken place. We follow almost every character into the rest of their lives and see how they’re doing. Quite a few of the characters, however, are doing just as one might figure, and as such probably needn’t be attended to. It’s not awful cinema, but it is terribly anti-climatic, seeing as you’ve watched eight hours building towards an event, and the last 30 minutes watching little guys drink beer and the like. But, that issue is a forgivable sin. Throwing in a few more scenes at the end of a two hour film and it’s a disaster, but, considering all that’s gone on in ROTK, a little wind-down is acceptable if not ideal.

However, throughout the film, Jackson does display a curious lack of restraint in his editing patterns. He consistently holds shots a few seconds beyond the norm and often uses two or three images where one would get the point across just as well. This is particularly true in scenes of emotional import between two characters. For example, Frodo (Wood) and Samwise (Astin) are constantly fighting and reuniting, and each time they do we seem to be staring at them as they stare at each for much longer than necessary. I appreciate the epic feel the film is providing, but I think Jackson needs to trust his actors more. When his highly CGI film has moments of real acting, he ought to let the performances tell us what’s important, not how long he holds the shots for.

Granted, I’m certainly not looking for a Michael Bay or X-Men style cut pattern, but, especially in a film with so much work to do, a brief, rhythmic pace is almost never a bad thing. And in this instance, the end result is probably an extra ten or twenty minutes of film to go along with the occasional loss of flow. The film’s cast is solid and Jackson does a good job with them, but he does tend to put style ahead of performance occasionally, providing more when less would suffice.

In conclusion, given the project’s scope, I don’t feel the previous sentence to cause the film a major drawback, but it does stand out as one the few noteworthy flaws in an otherwise stellar production. Basically, I’d say Jackson did a 1,000 things right and missed just a bit on only a few. That’s not a bad average. I never thought I’d say it, but I’ll miss Frodo and the other characters a year from now. And oh yeah, the film is most likely to win the Oscar for Best Picture this year and it turns out they very much deserve it, so the voters are off the hook. Good work, Pete.

Rating: êêêê  (out of 4)

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