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THE RETURN OF THE KING
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What is the point, one wonders, of writing a review that will make not the slightest difference in anyone's moviegoing? If and only if you've seen the first two LOTR movies, you'll see the third, regardless of what I or anyone else says. It's similarly odd going to a movie you have never seen but nevertheless having a literary precognition of what you are going to see, for director Peter Jackson is doubly trapped by his own fidelity: to his own vision as staged in FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING and THE TWO TOWERS, and to Tolkien's oddly structured and dramatically repetitive plot lines and story telling.
Tolkien geeks (we know who we are) will, in secret moments face down in an ale tankard, admit that when they reread LOTR they skip large chunks of text. For me it's all the Groupo-Frodo sequences. Once Gollum shows up, we have a repeating sprocket loop of the same unresolved skit: Frodo and Sam walk warily through sludge; Gollum soliloquizes; Gollum schemes; Frodo or Sam angrily slaps Gollum upside the head, Gollum cringes and pleads; Sam or Frodo (whoever didn't rage) prevails on the other to spare Gollum. Lather, rinse, and repeat until Crack of Doom (roughly page 260 in the paperback edition).
Meanwhile, back at the orcs (cue breathtaking zoom out to fly over spectacular New Zealand scenery – yes, the cinematography is every bit as awe-inspiring, if not as unexpected) …
RETURN introduces only one new character, Denethor the morose and miserly steward of Gondor, and then fails to use or change him, fixing him in one facial expression: bile. In this he joins our by-now-familiar set of monofaces: Frodo anxious, Sam stolid, Aragorn resolute, Gandalf wry, Legolas serene, Gimli chortling, Theoden flinty, Arwen vacant. You could print their mugs on Elvish currency.
Almost everything in KING is simply a larger-scale reprise of TOWERS: big battles before besieged bastions, rugged Rohan riders roughly rescuing. Only four characters show any genuine breadth:
Unlike Frodo and Aragorn and Gandalf, these four (not a man among them, and that too is significant in the Tolkien psychodrama) are people whom we can understand, and who each show courage: doing what terrifies them because they know it is right. They, not Frodo and Aragorn and Gandalf, are the film's true heroes.
Therein lies the rub. RETURN has scaling and staging problems: all of Tolkien's fine moral detail, his nuanced reflections on power and class and technology (for instance, Denethor and Smeagol: two faces of illegitimate regency, a college English thesis), are lost in the film. The events are too grandiose, the set-piece battles too sweeping … and the movie is too long, not so much in its elegiac serial dispatching of characters to the Grey Havens (faithful to Tolkien) as in its interminable buildup to what everyone involved knows is coming. When RETURN comes out on VHS and DVD, everyone at home will fast forward to the moments that Tolkien describes like this (spoiler alert, as if you didn't know):
And far away, as Frodo put on the Ring and claimed it for his own, even in Sammath Naur the very heart of his realm, the power in Barad-Dûr was shaken, and the Tower trembled from its foundation to its proud and bitter crown. The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door that he had made; and the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash, and all the devices of his enemies laid bare. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him. For he knew his deadly peril and the thread upon which his doom now hung.
From all his policies and webs of fear and treachery, from all his stratagems and wars his mind shook free; and throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired. For they were forgotten. The whole mind and purpose of the Power that wielded them was now bent with overwhelming force upon the Mountain. At his summons, wheeling with a rending cry, in a last desperate race there flew, faster than the winds, the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths, and with a storm of wings they hurtled southward to Mount Doom. (RETURN, page 275)
THE LORD OF THE RINGS is a magnificent tale of myth-making rendered memorable not only by heroic mythopoetic characters but also by impeccable philology and linguistics, yet mired in absurd battle tactics, inept plotting, and distracting storytelling. To it all Jackson is faithful. I can't imagine anyone normal sitting through all ten hours, back to back to back, but I can easily imagine many folks, including myself, coming back again and again to the heart-stopping scenes. FELLOWSHIP was phenomenal, TOWERS was outstanding, and RETURN is merely good, but in whole – as Tolkien wrote it and as Jackson shot it – RINGS is filmmaking whose like we have never seen before.