The Return of the King

Thursday I went to see The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, once again on my employer's dime (how nice!). Now, RotK has certainly gotten plenty of publicity, with mentions of a Best Picture Oscar, and gushing praise from many fans and on-line journallers.

But y'know, frankly I don't think it was as good as either of its predecessors, The Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers.

The failure, I think, is ultimately thematic: RotK ends up being essentially a sequence of impressively-rendered battles punctuated by moments of angst or human frailty, but I think the best themes of Tolkein's novel are lost.

Spoilers for the film!

Much has been made when talking about the films of how the book is essentially about a war between nature (as championed by the Elves and Hobbits) and industrialization. I've never felt that this was a central theme of the book, nor is it the most compelling element of the story.

To me, The Lord of the Rings is mainly about the end of an age. An age of wonders and terrors, and it's coming to a final, unambiguous end: The elves are leaving, the dwarves are retreating to their mines, the great evil of the age is defeated, and men and Hobbits will carve out the world's destiny from here on out. While it was impossible for director Peter Jackson to entirely escape this theme in the films, it does feel considerably played down.

In the book, our victorious heroes return from the south and find that remnants of the evil forces have taken up residence in the Shire. Sam, Merry and Pippen demonstrate how much they've grown by leading the rebellion to cast out these forces, and who go on to become not just great leaders of the Shire, but ambassadors to the world outside. (This sequence, "The Scouring of the Shire", is sorely missed in the film.) Bilbo goes to the west, but Frodo lingers for some years, finishing his chronicle, and feeling ever-more out of place. And it's his passing which truly marks the end of the age, a fact which is felt deeply because of the time spent showing how things are changing. Sam's final word in the story lack the deep resonance of a great door closing that they have in the book.

Also, a friend of mine remarked - having not read the book - that he found it strange that in the end Frodo's strength fails, and the destruction of the ring is almost an accident. My take on this - which I think comes through more truly in the book - is that the story is more truly that of Sam (and Merry and Pippen) than of Frodo. Frodo plays a crucial role, but it's really Sam who makes the journey possible: His loyalty, courage and craftiness allows the pair to complete their mission.

This outlook makes sense, I think. Frodo, as the ring-bearer, more truly belongs to the age that is passing, and thus us goes into the west. Gandalf, Legolas and Gimli also represent the dying age. It's Sam, Merry, Pippen and Aragorn who represent the new age.

In any event, I think this characteristic is largely lost in the films. Too much is sacrificed to the special effects and the film is the worse for it.

I found the battle scenes at times hard to swallow. I didn't really expect Sauron's forces to display a whole lot of intelligence (they are Orcs, after all), but Denethor's abject stupidity combined with it apparently filtering all the way down his command structure was hard to take. (Is Denethor this thick in the book? I can't recall. I know he's not an admirable character, but I thought he snapped only after all seemed lost, not that he did his best to hasten along the fall of the White City.)

Beyond that, though, I just don't think the battles make for an especially interesting film in any way except to dig the special effects, and I'm not sure there's any way around that. In a book, the narration can gloss over the details of the battle save for those moments which are truly important (such as the death of the Nazgul chief). In a film, where the battles are portrayed as so crucial to the ongoing war, you just have to show them, but it's very difficult to make a battle interesting in a larger sense, and especially difficult to do so given how many battles the trilogy has shown us so far. Saving Private Ryan made its battle scenes interesting by focusing on the objectives of the battles and a huge effort at verisimilitude. The battles in RotK are much murkier, and focus on implausible and rather self-indulgent scenes such as Legolas scaling an Oliphaunt to bring it down.

(I'd also say that none of the battles here are as good as the battle at Helm's Deep in TTT.)

Though I can understand the need to show all the battles at great length, it seemed like there was a lot of stuff which could have been cut or downplayed. Such as: The Faramir/Denethor stuff was pretty tedious (it's not that memorable in the book, either). The majestic but unnecessary lighting of the beacon to summon aid from Rohan. The seemingly-unending scaling of the Stair of Cirith Ungol. And the endlessly tedious hand-wringing by Arwen with respect to Aragorn (Arwen's story arc ran through the whole trilogy and produced exactly one powerful scene - Elrond's prophecy of Arwen's outliving her beloved; what a waste of screen time). A lot of this could have been re-worked or expunged and spent on expanding the book's themes.

All of these elements gave the film a feeling of being muddily paced, certainly of being less deftly arranged than the previous two films.

Okay, now the good stuff.

There's very little to complain about in the special effects, of course, which are as state-of-the-art as they come. Man, remember when Terminator 2: Judgment Day represented the state-of-the-art in special effects technology? How simple it looks compared to RotK. Thousands of funny-looking orcs and other creatures. Massive war machines. Epic backdrops. The armies of the dead. It really is the effects more than anything else which brings Middle-earth to life in these films.

The acting is also very fine. Ian McKellan steals almost every scene he's in. Orlando Bloom looks every bit an elf to the very end. Elijah Wood is fine as Frodo (which, frankly, isn't a role with a whole lot of range by this point in the story), and Sean Astin is outstanding as Sam. And of course Gollum is a masterwork of special effects, and Andy Serkis' voice fits is just about perfectly.

This film is not, I'll say, boring. When Aragorn shows up with the armies of the dead, it is a well-staged and powerful scene (and I'm a sucker for scenes like that). The slaying of the Nazgul king is also very well done. There are many other well-staged scenes, and the grand music helps too (though I find it not quite as memorable as the music from FotR). I also appreciated the end credits, with a lovely song performed by Annie Lennox, and some great visuals.

If you haven't read the book, you might enjoy it more than I did. I was just quite disappointed at some of the stuff that was left out, and some of the stuff they chose to replace it. But I enjoyed the film quite a bit, in much the same way that I enjoyed the original Star Wars trilogy: It's fun, it looks purty, it drags you along through its universe and makes you appreciate being there.

On balance, I think Fellowship is the best of the three films. Maybe because that book had more material which could be cut without harm (the Barrow-Wights, say), and it seemed to have a better sense of character and was overall just more skillfully put together. (It also doesn't hurt that my single favorite sequence from the whole book - travelling through the Mines of Moria - occurs in Fellowship and is very well done.) And I'd say there's no question that the films are not nearly as good as the book.

As for RotK, I enjoyed it, make no mistake. But the things I enjoyed don't give me a lot to write about. It's the elements of the book which made it worth considering afterwards and revisiting which I felt were absent.