Wet Leg - Pokemon

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. 

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