The Return of the King (2003)

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: 2003, dir. Peter Jackson. Seen at Gateway (Feb. 7).
[warning: review allegedly contains plot spoilers.]
Note to self: call sister today and tell her I finally saw the damn movie so she’ll stop pestering me and my boyfriend about it. I think she’s seen it three or four times herself, but she does have that little obsession with Orlando Bloom-as-Legolas.
Second note to self: I haaaaaate seeing movies at Gateway. Must write frothing rant about loud/migraine-inducing commercials and trailers later.

We may have been the last people in the US to see The Return of the King, although there were plenty of people in the theater. Perhaps they were seeing the movie a second or third time, which is why they thought it was fine to keep their cell phone ringers on, and to bring noisy children with them. Yeah, yeah, I said I’d rant about all of that later, and write about the movie itself right now.
I had heard plenty of mixed reviews about The Return of the King, from outrage that none of the actors were nominated for Oscars, to surprise that anyone would possibly like such a confusing movie with too many different story threads that leapt all over the place and made no sense whatsoever, to accusations that the whole thing was a load of steaming racist violent crap. I hadn’t been so much in love with The Two Towers that I rushed out to see this one, as you can see.
But I quite enjoyed The Return of the King, and I used to be the kind of Tolkien geek who would reread all the books once every year or two, and as a little girl I even liked the Rankin-Bass TV thingy that no one says anything nice about anymore but was an acceptable introduction to Tolkien if you were a kid trying to wade through all the bits in Book Five with the interminable battles.
This is not a stand-alone movie, though. If you haven’t seen the first two movies or read the books you are going to be lost. And how do you count that against a movie, when you are judging whether it is a good movie or not? If you are voting for awards or rating the movie for a publication, how do you factor this in? I’m glad not to be in that position. But I can say that I thought it was a very good movie, and I would have paid night prices instead of matinee prices to see it, except that the night showings tended to begin at 8 pm or later and that wouldn’t have worked on weeknights. In fact a big reason why it took me so long to see this movie was the difficulty in arranging for a four-hour block of time, usually starting at an odd or inconvenient time of day.
One of my favorite parts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy has always been the subplot with Eowyn (yeah, surprise surprise) and I thought this was handled wonderfully in the movie. In some ways, I liked the movie’s treatment better than Mr. Tolkien’s, although of course no one is supposed to say things like that. I do wish there had been a way to show what happened to her after the big battle scene, but I can’t imagine how they would have fit that into the movie without breaking up the action.
In fact, one of the things that impressed me about The Return of the King was the way in which the writers compressed the storyline. My boyfriend said he thought the movie had one too many endings, and I laughed and told him he should have seen how many endings there are in the book. I don’t see how they could have ended the movie any faster, really. I did miss a few small things, like the aforementioned Eowyn-Faramir bit, and the Houses of Healing, and the scene in which the Mouthpiece of Sauron brings out Frodo’s things and everyone is convinced he’s in the hands of the enemy, but the pacing of this movie was quite good and I think most of these sequences would have been a distraction at best. I also missed Christopher Lee (as Saruman), I would have liked seeing just a peep of him in this movie, but again, it might have interfered with the pacing.
After watching the other two movies, I thought that I would like to see the extended versions, that bits were definitely missing and it showed. In the case of The Return of the King, I think an extended version would only drag the film and would not improve it at all.
I did think some of the music was a bit overwrought, and Pippin’s singing seemed unnecessary and a little showier than it should have been. Also, the movie had entirely too much plummeting. I did not realize Peter Jackson was so fond of a slow-motion, gorgeously filled plummet, but they do occur throughout. In some cases, the plummet was entirely for show and not from the book at all, namely Denethor’s fiery plummet. Gollum’s plummet was waaay too threatrical as well. And the first time we see Eowyn in this movie, she is standing outside with the wind whipping through her hair and clothes in a very artistic way at sunset—the movie didn’t need scenes like this, which were almost silly. Still, these were minor quibbles and did not detract from the movie.
I was pleasantly surprised by The Return of the King, and think it is the best of the three movies. It’s a shame you have to sit through seven hours of lesser-quality film to get to this one, but the other two films do have some advantages over this one. This third movie relies on the first two for a lot of character development, and in fact some characters come close to getting short shrift in this movie (Legolas and Gimli particularly). Arwen, well, the less said about Arwen the better, and Galadriel is reduced to being a puppet-like face with a very weird smile. And one sequence I did miss that I think could have been slipped into the film without losing anything was the sequence in which Sam has the ring. Instead, the writers chose to employ a cheap gimmick where maybe we think maybe the Enemy got it, and the only difficulty we see Sam having is in giving Frodo back the ring.
In short, I think The Return of the King was the best written and edited of the trilogy, and did not find it at all confusing or choppy or awkward. However, again, I did see the other two movies and I know the books very well. So … does that keep it from Best Picture status? I can’t say. And don’t particularly care.