Thursday, 4 December 2025
Wednesday, 3 December 2025
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
There are clear points of dissimilarity between The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, largely in how each film tells its portion of the story. Fellowship is hurried and clipped in its telling whereas Two Towers is much more gradual, slowly layering in tension and torrential threat before arriving at a crescendo. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King does not attempt to continue this trend with a brand new phase of storytelling though, what it does instead is marry the disparate voices of its predecessors, arriving at a wavelength that may struggle to be considered in the singular - this is very much a continuation of already extant episodes rather than a piece unto itself - but works wonderfully as a grand summation of this Middle Earth material. Which is a roundabout way of saying that Return of the King is best enjoyed hot on the heels of its prequels; the third-act in a unbroken chain rather than a second sequel.
As if to underline this marriage of differing narrative objectives - Fellowship had to catch viewers up on thousands of years of imagined history while Two Towers simply has to set up an almighty battle - characters within Return of the King find their finer qualities reconciled before the curtain finally falls. This mediation is best expressed by this third film's approach to Gandalf. In the first instalment this grey wizard was a leaf-smoking, wrinkled adventurer; in the second, a bright angelic presence who foretold the salvation of morning and burned the eyes out of any who gazed upon him. Thankfully, Return of the King allows a little of the first episode's distracted crankiness to creep back into Ian McKellen's performance. Between battles he even gets to fire up his pipe. He's back to being a person who needs to sort through his thoughts then. At the other end of this world, Elijah Wood's Frodo, Sean Astin's Sam, and Andy Serkis' Gollum creep through a boiling, computer-generated inferno towards the summit of their quest. Perhaps it's just that volcanic regions read so well on film but, like Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith a couple of years later, there's a sense in Return of the King that the armies of special effects teams that toil on these films are delivering several steaming levels above their previous, still extremely impressive, work.
On release, Return of the King was mocked for the inelegance of its endings - staggered sequences in which it felt like a clean break was being proposed but then instantly succeeded by yet another just-as-conclusive incident. Although the "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Tolkien's book has been omitted here (of all the interquel ideas that have been floated as a way of the following up the enormous success of this series, it's a wonder that a filmic adaptation of this discarded element apparently hasn't ever been considered), writer-director Peter Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens find a wonderfully elegant way to contrast the enormous accomplishment of the Hobbits with the aggressive indifference of the people who have stayed at home, living lives completely removed from the war with Sauron. Young men wreathed in the livery of mighty human kingdoms? These parochial little gnomes are far more impressed by a truly massive pumpkin. As well, given the pervasive warmongering of the period in which this film series was completed and released, it feels not just notable but forward-thinking that Return of the King leaves us with the impression that combat takes more than a physical toll on its victims. It leaves invisible scars on all those that survive, preventing them from reassuming the patterns and rhythms of their previous lives. In this telling, Frodo is broken by his desire for the ring; reduced to a bleeding mess squabbling with another junkie above a crack in hell. There's just no undoing that. Even the overabundance of slow-motion photography in these epilogues, that seize on flicking facial gesture, is appropriate. It is as if the filmmakers themselves cannot bear to let these characters go.
Tuesday, 25 November 2025
Monday, 24 November 2025
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Although The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers picks up exactly where The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring left off, the two films have surprisingly distinct visual identities. Fellowship, with its hobbit holes and winding, Escher staircases could - when not hurrying away from such images - present moods premised on these fantastical, often hand-crafted environments. Viewers were able to sink into the crevices. The Two Towers, by comparison, is a much more expansive, horizontal experience; a film about great, galloping journeys and never-ending plains that builds to the siege of an enormous hold chiseled into a mountain. Whereas before characters looked like tourists miserably coping with a destination holiday at the ends of the earth, here the warrior heroes find themselves hurrying between homesteads while the countryside around them boils with brewing conflict. The Two Towers then owing far more than expected to the widescreen vistas of American westerns or the arrow-flecked turbulence of Japanese chanbara.
Perhaps because we're already well aware of their overarching objectives, the surviving members of The Company of the Ring recede into the background for significant stretches of The Two Towers. Writer-director Peter Jackson - Stephen Sinclair, who previously collaborated with Jackson on Meet the Feebles and Braindead, joining Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens as co-writers - apportions space to two characters who chart paths into and out of damnation: Andy Serkis' motion-captured Gollum and the late Bernard Hill as the enfeebled King Théoden. Gollum, who acts as a guide into hell for Elijah Wood's Frodo and Sean Astin's Sam, struggles with distinct and even warring personalities, each with markedly different outlooks. A rapid-fire back-and-forth between the piteous Sméagol and the more conniving, ring hungry Gollum, as the two aspects weigh up their options, is both impressive and humorous. But, equally, watching this computer-generated body splash along a shallow river after a slippery fish is actually able to evoke a vivid physical trepidation. We are acutely aware that the sallow, vulnerable skin of this creature is dangerously close to some sharp-looking rocks. That injury doesn't occur (or, more accurately, couldn't occur) isn't the point. The shots, despite their falsehood, prickle shivering sense memory in their audience.
Hill's Théoden awakens out of a crumbling, mummified half-life (shades of The Fisher King from Arthurian legend or King Arthur himself, as depicted in the latter half of John Boorman's Excalibur) and is instantly thrown into the tragedy of having lost his child. Hill's performance isn't showy, he doesn't rage or even really demand attention in successive scenes where his character must make the most of a truly dire lot. What the actor offers instead is a quiet, resurgent dignity steeped in age and doubt. Viggo Mortensen's otherworldly Aragorn may be pegged for greatness but it is Hill's Théoden who, despite the enormous responsibility this older man has woken up into, is able to consistently transmit a seasoned, kingly temperament. Which is to say that as the situation worsens, as greater armies of mutant Orcs bear down on this harried community, Hill's Théoden isn't seen to buckle. Instead he seems to grow bigger and bigger in his role as a front-line commander, defying the patriarchal standards of his time to place faith in his niece, Miranda Otto's Éowyn, and fighting side-by-side with his knights - knowing that are all likely doomed - as they blockade creaking fortifications. This rain-lashed Battle of Helm's Deep still staggers, thanks largely to the sheer amount of onscreen bodies, both living and computer-generated, who crash upon this fortress. Director Jackson demonstrating an ability to build entire acts out of concluding action that account for scope, subtlety, and character. A shot that simulates a camera arm, fixed to a vehicle, rolling as it follows behind mounted riders as they batter through waves of armoured ogres has a genuine note of delirium about it.
Monday, 17 November 2025
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Revisited in its theatrical cut, director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is still an impressive achievement in compressed storytelling, an approach that makes the film's three hour runtime feel positively breakneck. In adapting JRR Tolkien's first volume of The Lord of the Rings Jackson, along with co-writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens, have jettisoned characters and situations, as well as borrowed events from later books, to arrive at a piece that is largely built around two characters - Elijah Wood's Frodo and Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn - both of whom are slowly being crushed by expectation. For Frodo it's a pressure that he has, to some degree, chosen to take on himself. Although, as Ian McKellen's Gandalf pontificates, Frodo is uniquely suited to meet this call to adventure, it is this young hobbit who stands amongst squabbling giants at Rivendell and volunteers himself to transport a ring of incredible, corrupting power across the world to be dropped into a volcano.
Frodo, and the rest of the halfling members of this expedition for that matter, are positioned as cheery innocents who, in attempting to repeat the storied quests of their forebears, find themselves journeying deeper and deeper into an all-encompassing horror. It isn't difficult then to draw parallels between the residents of the green and pleasant Hobbiton and the British Tommies who left their homes to be gobbled up by a new kind of warfare on French fields during the Great War. Both are, popularly, framed as guileless and therefore massively unprepared for what awaits them abroad. Tolkien, presumably, twisting his own flea-bitten experience of pulverising modernity at the Somme to ask what conflict could possibly be worth all this bloodshed and destruction? Threat in this first installment then is organised in terms of the technological, specifically generated by a vassal state transforming itself into an industrial hub. Christopher Lee's fallen wizard Saruman, who believes it politically expedient to align himself with a returning spectre, orders his underlings to overturn ancient trees and churn up the earth beneath them until this sorcerer's domain is cast in mud and smoke; an enormous warren of intersecting tunnels where roughly hewn armour and mutant hordes each tumble off a production line.
In a wider realm spotted with the crumbled remains of advanced civilisations, Saruman's excavation registers as obscene - the willful destruction of a formerly picturesque, fantasy landscape for selfish or even cowardly ends. This is war as a seismic disturbance. A blot that threatens to, should the ghostly Sauron regain his full strength, engulf everything. Whereas Frodo's suitability to smuggle this crucial ring is largely illustrated through comparison - several much more obviously powerful men shudder to even touch the thing - rather than stated exposition, Aragorn's royal lineage, and the weight that carries, is directly spoken to us on several occasions. Perhaps, given his cool nickname and proficiency in a fight, the screenwriters worried that an audience unfamiliar with the original text (or overfamiliar with the Neanderthal seen in Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings) might assume that the character is a heavy and nothing more? Certainly Mortensen's performance consistently works against any such dismissal, tempering whirlwind sword skills with a tender, fatherly nature that suggests a greatness on the cusp of being assumed. This insistence that we know Aragorn is descended from fickle human kings introduces a note of doubt about his motives as well. Will he be able to overcome the innate, reflexive treachery of man and be a true ally to Frodo?
More than anything though, what remains specifically appealing about Jackson's approach to Fellowship is that this piece arrived before green screen and computer generated effects became a ubiquitous answer to filmmaking problems. Jackson, who made his bones on low budget horror (if not splatter) films threads this first instalment with similarly inventive compositional solutions. Since this is a world that demands people and objects of varying sizes are interacting with each other, there is a constant need to find fresh viewpoints as a way of concealing the scaffolding beneath them. So although CG is frequently deployed it sits alongside detailed and expansive sets, life-sized puppetry, forced perspectives, and (reportedly maximal) miniature environments. Regardless of whether or not it should be the case, these physical - touchable - effects are better suited to stressing an idea of human craftsmanship and ingenuity than purely digital compositions. If big budget blockbuster entertainment is a series of magic tricks deployed in service to a hair-raising story, then a variety and depth in the execution of these deceptions is best suited to the task of consistently delighting an audience. None of this is to say that Fellowship is perfect - at least in this edit the truncated shape of the central journey, one told primarily in gigantic establishing shots, begins to feel less like a grueling odyssey and more like a succession of bullet points, as if favoured locales are being ticked off - but Jackson's opening salvo cannot help but register as a laudable example of large-scale filmmaking that foregrounds the kaleidoscopic disciplines that underpin such massive endeavours.
Friday, 14 November 2025
Predator: Badlands
In Predator: Badlands find a kind of sangam for a great many of the former 20th Century Fox's science fiction and fantasy properties. Of course there's everybody's favourite invisible hunters with an added army of disposable synthetics, on loan from the corporate wing of the Alien franchise, not far behind. Such intermingling isn't new but the cross-pollination doesn't end there. Hanging on a trophy room wall in a derelict space craft there's a skull from one of Independence Day's locust-like Harvesters and, in creating a extraterrestrial environment seemingly dedicated to stripping outsiders to the bone in record time, there's more than a little of Avatar's Pandora in the mix for these bad lands. The film's approach to storytelling differs from previous Predator installments as well, harkening to the armoured, near-mute leads seen in Star Wars television spin-offs. The Volume VFX of The Mandalorian is obvious but, as well, there's something of Genndy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars at play, certainly in terms of the deft touch for character-based action that director Dan Trachtenberg demonstrates here. The centering of an uncommunicative, vengeful berserker as he traverses an unmapped environment isn't a million miles away from Conan the Barbarian either. Sadly, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi's Dek, the outcast Predator of Badlands, never quite gets enough space to voice the bitter introspection afforded to Schwarzenegger's orphaned reaver. Really, all that's missing is a good, hard nod towards the Planet of the Apes. Although, having said that, there's something a little stark in play with Weyland Yutani's busy little mechanoids. Several layers of artificial hierarchy plot and probe without any clear input from a flesh and bone master. For all we know, Elle Fanning's crumbling androids toil in a far future were the post-human dreams of David (from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) have been fully realised.
Thursday, 13 November 2025
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