The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Rated PG-13 for intense fantasy violence

Review by Tom Johnson
(tomjohnson@thecinemasource.com)

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy supposedly began as one of the greatest cinematic gambles of our time. Financed at over 300 million, shot in one massive two year period and saddled with an unproven director and no A-list talent(at the time), it was quickly regarded as a brave, risky move on the producers’ part. That is, to everyone in Hollywood. For everyone else, the opinion was ‘duh, how could it fail’? Indeed, by casting a director with an unsurpassed passion for the source material, greenlighting all three epics at once and casting actual actors in the roles, the only revolutionary thing about the product was how un-Hollywood it all was. A built in audience was waiting, and capable talent was behind the wheel; a pretty straightforward formula, actually.

Now that Return of the King, the final film in the trilogy, has come, what’s the final word on how it all turned out? Well, let’s see: though now in retrospect, the films can hardly be considered terribly risky or brave ‘gambles’, the sum of their parts should be widely regarded as the greatest epic in film history. Given all they had going for them, nothing less would have been acceptable.

As a timeless literary masterpiece considered by some to be second only to the Bible itself, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy masterfully weaves Christian parables, environmental warnings and (despite Tolkien’s denials)World War II era history together, submerged in the most influential and fully realized fantasy world ever created. That said, there’s far too much exposition present for most casual readers(including myself). And while it enriches the books’ world to beautiful degrees, it drags them down in the early stages as well(what the hell is the deal with Tom Bombadil, and why does he take up hours of reading time?). As a result, Fellowship started off a little slow, Two Towers began to pick up the slack, and Return of the King finally launched the story into the soaring heights, with nary a sluggish moment. It’s a modern cinematic wonder that Jackson was able to craft such brilliant films out of the first two books(especially after moving most of the interesting developments of the second one into the third film). New fans who had never read the books had to be impressed by Fellowship and Towers, but nowhere near as much as some of the literary fans, who had to wonder: if this is how good the slow ones turned out, how @#$%!* good is the pay-off going to be? The answer is…..pretty @#$%!* good.

To recap for those with memory problems(or those too lazy to watch the essential, extended version of the TT DVD just released): Aragorn(Viggo Mortenson); the reluctant king-to-be, along with Gandalf(Sir Ian McKellan); the born-again wizard, Gimli(John Rhys-Davies); the inexplicably Scottish dwarf and Legolas(Orlando Bloom); ...