After spending almost nine hours (don’t ask) watching “Return of the King,” TWICE, all I can say is “thank god,” the long three year nightmare known as the “Lord of The Rings” trilogy is over. Put a fork in it, it’s done! As someone who has never read the books, I can honestly say that director Peter Jackson has accomplished a great deal in bringing this trilogy to reality, and if nothing else you have to admire him and the crew for the ambition, vision, scale, and passion that obviously went into the creation of these films, and he certainly deserves an Oscar for his accomplishment.
I disliked “Fellowship of the Ring” because of its plodding pacing, artificial length, and the repetitiveness of the entire thing. My major issue with “The Two Towers” were those damn, fake looking “H.R. Puffinstuff” trees, and Gollum. Everything else about “The Two Towers” was pretty darn good, but those two elements dragged the film down. I know people love the Ents, and think Gollum is the “bestest” CGI character EVER, for me they slowed any forward momentum that the film was gaining down to a crawl.
Sure I “stood up” and took notice at the scale of the picture, the sweeping vistas, the landscapes, the dramatic music, etc. The first few times I saw middle earth, I was stunned, it was gorgeous, breathtaking, blah, blah, but at the end of the day, you still have to tell a story and a story is about characters, situations the audience can grow to care about.
There are two main reasons why this trilogy doesn’t work for me, and probably never will.
The first being the fact that I simply never bought into the basic premise of the film, that somehow this little “Gold Ring” was the “embodiment” of all evil in middle earth and if you destroy it; all will be good and right with the world. The concept of the main big bad being a spirit that we can’t see may work well in book form, but in the film, I never felt a true sense of danger or consequence in “Return of the King.”
In the first two films the good guys never died, sure we got some moments when we “thought” they were dead, but after watching two films where the major characters supposedly “die” only to turn up again a few minutes later, and this is repeated time and time again, I started to feel manipulated and just annoyed.
An example of both above points is in the beginning of “ROTK,” when Pippin (Billy Boyd) – who a friend refers to as “dumb ass,” discovers the crystal ball that Saruman had in the first movie (more on him later), apparently this crystal ball is a direct connection to Sauron. Needless to say, “D.A.” is drawn to the dark object, when he gazes into it, he starts writhing around the floor in pain, because the Eye of Sauron sees him and “dies.”
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The scene looks so goofy that it’s hard to take the effect seriously, and we all know that he’s not going to die, so it falls flat. When your heroes are faced with 10,000 Orcs and the odds are 1,000 to one, yet they still win the battle, without even getting a scratch, you start to believe that everyone is invincible.
I was never emotionally connected to the plight of the situation. Don’t even get me started on talking Orcs who had high-pitched cockney accents. In the Two Towers, Peter Jackson’s climatic battle, while totally unbelievable, was truly a visual feast for the eyes. After hearing for a year about how the “Battle of Helm’s Deep” was “nothing,” I walked into “ROTK” expecting to see the battles to end all battles.
Instead we get the annoying “Gladiator” style battles of pushing the camera in up close and giving us a lot of frenetic shots. In “ROTK” it seems like the scale and scope of the battle was scaled down, designed to draw the audience “in,” we don’t get the epic feel that was left after the battle of Helm’s Deep. There are a couple of quick wide shots that looked strangely “hollow.”
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Speaking of battles and bad guys, where the hell was Saruman (Christopher Lee)? When last we saw him, he was starring dumbfounded, and doing nothing as the talking trees destroyed his city. Peter Jackson’s decision to leave the final confrontation between Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and Saruman for the eventual ROTK Extended DVD totally cheats the audience.
Instead of giving us this confrontation to start “ROTK” with, it opens with a sequence telling us Gollum’s (Andy Serkis) back story YET AGAIN! I would think after two films and six hours of story telling, that the audience already knows who Gollum is! Do we really need another retailing????? Do we really need to see Gollum staring into the water, having a conversation with himself, rehashing his plan to betray Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin)? The first 50 minutes of “ROTK” is a pointless rehash of the “Two Towers,” and is essentially the “Gollum” movie.
The acting in the film was all top notch with a couple of exceptions, one being Elijah Wood’s annoying presence, whenever he was on camera he looked “constipated.” If he held out the ring one more time, I would have shot someone – hey, maybe the ring is evil. “ROTK” really belongs to four people. Sean Astin’s Sam was truly powerful, out of all the characters in this trilogy he was the one I cared most about. His quiet, never wavering loyalty to Frodo was truly touching.
There’s a great line in the film where Sam says “I may not be able to carry your burden – but I can carry you.” Astin truly deserves an Oscar Nomination for his performance, his presence made watching “ROTK” a memorable experience.
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Merry and Pippin also grew tremendously in “ROTK,” we really see these two come into their own in this one. Eowyn (Miranda Otto) has this great “Hollywood Moment” that I can’t talk about because it would spoil it for you; I loved and hated this scene at the same time.
While watching “ROTK” you can’t help but think there is stuff missing, and you wonder if it was done to sell the eventual extended DVD. The editing of “ROTK” just felt strange. At almost 3 1/2 hours, “ROTK” still felt thin, like there were major moments, and transitional bits missing.
This brings me to my second major problem that I have with the trilogy and ROTK specifically. The movie is fraught with basic structural problems, when “ROTK” works, it is simply brilliant, emotional and breathtaking. But whenever one of these moments occur, and I start to really care what’s happening on the screen, it cuts and goes to something else, or there’s an editing decision that ruins an otherwise powerful scene.
There are moments in the film where the sense of time and distance seemed off to me. Like when Frodo is fighting that goofy looking Spider and Sam is at the bottom of this humongous hill. In the beginning I’m thinking it took them a long time to get back up that hill, but when Sam falls down and looks up at it, we get a wide shot that shows just how steep a mountain he has to climb.
There’s just no way he could get up that hill in enough time to save Frodo from the Spider, unless you are supposed to think that Frodo was fighting with that Spider for at least an hour – because there is no way Sam could climb that huge ass mountain in a few minutes! This scene would have been believable if Jackson didn’t give us the wide shot in the first place.
And then when “Minas Tirith” is attacked by the Orcs, they kept cutting to Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and Theoden (Bernard Hill) confabbing about raising an army and how it would take at least 2 days to get to MT. I was confused about the timing in that entire sequence because it would have seemed to me that MT would have fallen by the time they got there.
We start with this pitched battle about to take place and then cut away for 20 or 30 minutes.The entire stuff with Denethor (John Noble) was just bad – bad acting, bad writing, bad motivations, just bad. We all know that he’s crazy and not all there, but there’s no real explanation for his behavior. Sure he is upset that his son was killed, but it felt like I was missing a vital part of his story arc. There is a powerful moment in the film, where Denethor commands his son, Faramir (played with a quiet dignity by David Wenham) to send his troops into a battle that everyone knows will bring certain death.
They build this moment up, make you care about it. When Pippin sings his song of despair and they cut to Faramir and his troops riding off. I’m there with this film, I’m connecting with it, really caring about his fate, I’m getting goose bumps, but the scene is totally ruined by two editing choices, one where they cut between Faramir, Pippin singing (great), and then to Denethor EATING! I couldn’t help but laugh during this otherwise powerful moment.
It was a perfect moment ruined by a stupid, stupid, STUPID, editing choice. And then the worst part, they cut away from this to go to something else for 15 or 20 minutes (we don’t get to see the battle), so any emotional momentum built is totally lost.Howard Shore’s musical score is breathtakingly beautiful – within the context of the movie, the score ads emotional depth to everything that happens on the screen. It’s the perfect blend of imagery with sound and really sucks you into the entire experience.
After the ring is destroyed, the film has this perfect “Star Wars” ending moment where I was really feeling what was happening, I would have left the theater happy, but instead the film goes on and on and on for another 30 minutes, and has five or six different endings that destroys any emotional attachment or feeling that I had for the movie.
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t hate this trilogy of films, I think they are good, I can appreciate the scale and epic nature of them, and they actually get better with repeat viewings – primarily because I can skip over or ignore everything that I dislike about each film, but they are still seriously flawed pieces of work that are missing that certain element called “believability.”
It’s visual eye candy without the chocolate center, or a feast without the flavor.
Final Grade C
EM Film Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally Posted 12/17/03