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December 17, 2003"Lord of the Rings" wrap-up: The Law of Diminished "Return"s
This has not been my year for movie trilogies. I saw “The Return of the King” at a midnight screening last night, and I must admit, it was something of a disappointment. There will be spoilers aplenty in this entry, so consider yourself warned.
Before I go into why the movie disappointed me, let me “set the stage” for my comments, so to speak. I’ve read the LOTR trilogy twice, but not recently. I get a little turned around on some of the non-fellowship character names, and I can’t keep Merry and Pippin straight to save my life. I was perfectly content to buy the regular DVDs for both of the first two films, thus denying myself the extended versions, the Gollum bust, and all the other little LOTR trinkets that were packaged with the later DVDs. I cheerfully admit to skipping a goodly chunk of the Elvish poetry in the books. However, I really enjoyed the first two movies, and was looking forward to how the third film might cap off the trilogy. As you can gather, although I’m not the most ardent LOTR fan to walk the earth, I’m no Johnny-come-lately, either.
Of the 133 reviews linked to at Rotten Tomatoes, all but three of them were positive. Granted, some of those categorized as positive reviews were only lukewarm, but for every middle-of-the-road positive review, there were at least three or four reviewers who shouted from the journalistic mountaintops that this was the best movie—or movie trilogy, at least—ever made.
I just don’t get it.
The fighting: Although the scope of the battles in “The Return of the King” clearly dwarfs that of the besieging of Helm’s Deep in “The Two Towers,” it’s the same old thing. For all the countless man-hours spent on programming CGI armies to beat the ever-lovin’ snot out of each other, I was still most impressed with the minor skirmishes in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” where the fights were on a small enough scale that you could actually see what was going on, and be impressed by it.
Ringwraiths: Boy, did they ever get short shrift in the second and third film. They were terrifying and active in “The Fellowship of the Ring”. In the last two films, all they do is ride around on their Winged Beasts. And while on the subject of said creatures, there’s a world of difference between the Ringwraiths themselves doing scary/cool/etc. stuff, and their Winged Beast doing scary/cool/etc. stuff. That’s great that the steeds can pick up huge clawfuls of soldiers and/or horses, but that doesn’t serve to make the Ringwraiths themselves any more frightening as foes. And whose idea was it to give the Witch-King the Winged Beast with the crepe-paper neck? Aowen’s sword cut through it like a hot knife through butter.
Witch-King: Neat pseudo-Greek tragedy mask notwithstanding, he never got a chance to be intimidating.
Character development: Nope, sorry—not in this installment of the trilogy. Everybody does what they were destined to do, which leaves them static. Sam’s devotion to Frodo comes to a head in this film, since Frodo’s in a worse way than he ever was before. Everybody else is pretty much on auto-pilot.
Saruman:
Peter Jackson: “We’re cutting Christopher Lee from the last film.”
Faceless Underling: “Hey, Mr. Jackson. Won’t the audience want to know what became of Saurman?”
Peter Jackson: “Um…nah.”
Seriously, that was a bad move on Peter Jackson’s part. To read this article, it doesn’t sound like they went about notifying Lee in the proper way. C’mon, Jackson. Christopher Lee is an 81-year-old LOTR-loving film veteran. Give him his damn screen time and give us one less war-elephant sequence.
Galadriel’s gift: Showing its presentation is a flashback was unnecessary. Jackson could have spent the extra thirty seconds in the first film and had the giving of the phial to Frodo fall in sequential order. Not only that, but it would have thinned “The Return of the King” out by another half minute. At three and a half hours, it could have used whatever trimming was possible.
Multiple endings:
Peter Jackson: “Let’s use ‘em.”
Faceless Underling: “Hey, Mr. Jackson. Won’t the audience be unnecessarily confused by the fact that you keep fading to black with the end of each scene near the conclusion of the movie?”
Peter Jackson: “um…nah.”
Gimli: In the last two films (“The Return of the King” especially), he’s nothing more than an incidental source of comic relief.
Legolas: Chicks dig that Aryan look, so we don’t have to give him much to do this time around.
It’s a good thing I’ve been so unimpressed with the first two “Star Wars” prequels. If it sucks, which I fully expect, at least I won’t go through the shock and heartache that accompanied my opening night jaunts to “Matrix Revolutions” and “The Return of the King”.
Posted by patrick at December 17, 2003 04:36 PM
CommentsHaven't seen LOTR:TROTK yet, but I share your disappointment over The Matrix Revolutions. As I put it to a friend as the lights came up, "Too many Ewoks. Not enough Luke." (And I mean, I said that. I wasn't putting it to a friend as the lights came up. Although...)
But it already looks like LOTR:TROTK is the film that all the critics, awards folks and the like are going to spend the next three months cumming all over. And I really don't get it. The first film was okay, the second was lame. As for the books, I made it as far as half way through The Hobbit before I said, "Well, this is pretty silly and twee." So I put that book down and never went back.
Posted by: Jon Bastian at December 18, 2003 09:32 AM
I saw Return of the King on Christmas Eve, and loved it. And that was having gone in expecting it to suck, so the filmmakers had a lot to work against, but they caught me in the opening and never let go. And, dammit, the movie brought me to tears near the end -- that "You bow to no one" scene in Minas Tirith. I have to admit that I started crying like a little girl.
Ohmygawd -- I can't believe you and I finally disagree on something. And I take back all my LOTR comments in my last comment. (As for Revolutions, I recently rented and re-watched Reloaded, and realized that things in that film I'd forgotten really did set up the third film. So maybe it wasn't as bad as my first impression. Now I'm going to have to watch the three back-to-back.
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