Ah, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is over. No more films that you can guarantee everyone has seen. No more sweeping shots of New Zealand. No more girls perving on Orlando in his cute blond wig. No more insanely long, slow and boring scenes between Elrond and Arwen. No more brilliantly executed fantasy battles. No more pointless slow motion shots. No more Gollum. And, sadly, no new and exciting trilogy adaptation to look forward to for December.

There’s a few categories that people tend to fall into when it comes to these films. The stickler books fan who judges every film by how much it diverges from the books. These sorts are unlikely to enjoy any adaptation, really, but luckily most of them died while watching the theatrical version of The Two Towers. The books fans who don’t remember every exact detail, but have their favourite bits that they look forward to in every film. This is probably my category. Orlando/Viggo/Elijah fans also seem quite prominent. And of course there are many more.

Return of the King probably won’t satisfy all of these people. There’s certainly too many divergences for the stickler to enjoy it. Even my deeply repressed stickler side was raging insanely when he realised that he wasn’t going to even see Saruman in this film, let alone see him get killed. I dread to think how he would have coped if he hadn’t been warned well in advance that ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ wasn’t going to occur in the film. The second decision was clearly justified — there’s about five endings to the films already in ‘Return’ without adding yet another really long one. The first is valid to a point — but frankly I can’t see why they ever cut Saruman’s end out of The Two Towers.

While I’m in this slightly negative territory, I’ll try to get it all out of my system. What’s so cool about slow motion that every single vaguely important moment had to be highlighted with it? The film runs to around three and a half hours, but this probably could have been cut down by at least 30 minutes if a few of these scenes had run in normal time. And would have been 20% less cheesy as a result. Sauron’s eye functioning as a big spotlight seemed rather dodgy, but I can’t think of a suitable replacement representation of his baleful gaze. Elijah Wood’s performance doesn’t really shift gears until the very end, which tends to envelop the whole audience in Frodo’s subsumed, soporific state. And several of the films’ verbal cliches surface again, such as “The something-or-other is over”. Perhaps all those scenes were filmed in the same week and they didn’t notice they’d written the same thing so many times.

Most glaringly to me, Aragorn seems to be missing some key scene where he completely and aggressively embraces his destiny and responsibility, rather than just having Elrond tell him to. Suddenly, he’s in cool armour and giving inspirational speeches, and it just seems a bit of a quick change. Indeed, despite the film being named after him, he seemed one of the least well served characters.

But then, for all these problems, there’s more than enough cool bits. The whole theatre in Banff cheered when Eowyn got potentially the coolest kill of the trilogy. Legolas’ trademarked ‘awesome stunt per film’ was also pretty impressive. Pippin and Merry of course stole every scene they were in — no more impressively than Billy Boyd’s mournful singing during Faramir’s charge. And I challenge anyone not to feel just a bit moved during the final bow to the hobbits.

Minas Tirith proved an impressive new setting as well, with both John Noble’s perfectly disgusting performance and amazing visuals. Sometimes these crazy tall cities take a bit of disbelief suspension in order to fully appreciate, but this one came across as reasonably convincing. Less convincing was the concept that Gondor folk were living in insanely inhospitable conditions on the tops of various mountains, always at the ready to light their rarely-used torches in cases of world-shattering danger. Stickler Tom would of course at this point like to point out that he really did like all the Gondor stuff in the book a lot, and he wanted it in the film, too, no matter how damn long it took. But we should probably ignore him.

It’s traditional to end a review with some kind of conclusion, but I find that I don’t really feel I’ve watched the whole film yet. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is over. The wait for the extended edition finale has begun…

776

This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Wednesday, February 25th, 2004. It concerns such pressing issues as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.