Day 31: The Return of the King (2003)

Movie #12 – The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) - 201 min, cert 12A.

It’s no surprise to see this film high up the list. If anything, I’m surprised not to see it higher. This was the best of an outstanding trilogy. You can tell that Peter Jackson is a fan of the original books, as he really does them justice.

After a brief flashback to show how Gollum first acquired the One Ring, we pick up the plot immediately after the end of the previous film. Frodo and Sam, with Gollum, are making their way to Mordor. Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf are with King Theoden after their victory at Helm’s Deep, and they soon pick up the other two hobbits Merry and Pippin at Isengard. With a few minor scuffles along the way, the plot moves inexorably towards the battle for Minas Tirith where the massed ranks of good and evil are pitched against each other.

It is rare to find the final film of a trilogy which is also the best. In most other cases, it is the least well-received of the three. Star Wars, The Godfather, The Matrix and Back to the Future all spring to mind. But The Lord of the Rings is different, mainly because all three films were made together, so it’s not so much a third film, more like the third section of a single entity.

It’s easy to see why no one attempted to make a live-action version of this story until now. It’s only now that movie special effects have advanced to a point whereby it becomes possible to tell a tale of this nature with any degree of believability. Indeed, the effects used in this film are awesome. The mixture of CGI with live-action is so seamless that it becomes very easy to accept what’s happening on screen as reality. In particular, the way Jackson employs various tricks of scale to maintain the illusion that the leading characters are such radically different heights is easy to overlook. In reality, John Rhys-Davies who plays the dwarf Gimli is 6’1”, which is several inches taller than Orlando Bloom at 5’10½” who plays the elf Legolas. But at no point during the film does their relative size come into question. The same can be said of the hobbits when seen alongside the men. I believe Jackson had to make duplicates of several of the sets in different scales so that the actors could interact with them properly.

The only thing that lets the film down for me is its length. At 3 hours and 21 minutes it is the longest film on the list thus far, and the sixth longest overall (as the list stands today). This would be fine, if it wasn’t for the interminable epilogue. After Sauron is defeated and the forces of evil are vanquished it takes another 25 minutes to tell us that everyone lives happily ever after. This is all that lets it down, though, so it still warrants 9/10.

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.       Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.       The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

4.       Schindler’s List (1993)

5.       Inception (2010)

6.       The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

7.       12 Angry Men (1957)

8.      The Godfather (1972)

9.       The Dark Knight (2008)

10.   Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Next up is The Seven Samurai. I’ve not seen this before, but then considering it’s three and a half hours of subtitled Japanese in black & white, I’m not entirely surprised. I have seen The Magnificent Seven, which was based on this, but that’s as close as I’ve come. I suspect I might find it a bit of a challenge, so I’ll probably need to split it over two nights.