The Lord of the Rings - Fantastic!

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I feel a bit like I'm the last fan both of Tolkein and of movies to see The Return of the King. Back in '83 I simply had to see the final part of the Star Wars trilogy (gee, where do you think Lucas got the name Return of the Jedi?) after school on opening day, but the mellowing and the working obligations of middle age kept me from seeing the conclusion of this trilogy until today, on the fourth day of its theatrical run.

It was worth the wait.

And by that, I'm referring to the 25 years since I first read the books. Ralph Bakshi made an attempt at translating The Lord of the Rings to the screen back in the 70's, with animation, but this was definitely a film that had to wait until the development of modern digital cinematic effects to be done properly. The effects in these three films work, giving visual life to the fantastic elements of Tolkein's story.

I could quibble about the Ents in the middle film not really matching my mental image of them (too small, and definitely too hasty), or the deletion of Tom Bombadil from the first movie and the scouring of the Shire from the last, and so forth. But that really would be quibbling. It's a classic story, at turns exciting, sad, frightening, and heart-warming. Even knowing ahead of time how it would all turn out (and even the twists in the road to get there), I was glued to my seat for the entirety of all three parts. The entire trilogy remains true to the spirit of the original, and takes relatively minor liberties with the story. (And the books are still there to be read, of course.)

Director/co-screenwriter Peter Jackson clearly loves those books, and that was even more important to the success of these films than the special effects were. So many stories get butchered on their way through the studio movie-making process, not because they couldn't be translated effectively to the screen, but because the producers just don't care. They just want the rights to use the characters for marketing purposes, so they licence the trademarks. (In which case you get tripe like the last couple Batman movies, or The Cat in the Hat.) Or they want to use some elements of an existing story, but build a different movie around it, so they licence the copyrights. (And you get a literary piece like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen turned into a brain-dead action flick, or Philip K. Dick's clever We Can Remember It For You Wholesale being used for the Schwartzenegger film Total Recall.) Fortunately, like the recent X-Men and Spider-Man films, this is an example of someone really trying to do justice to the source material, out of love for it.

I haven't bothered to collect movies for a while, and I don't even own a DVD player. But this is a set of movies for which I'm looking forwarding to buying the extended editions, and watching several more times over the coming years. And at least once I'll sit down in a comfy chair with a supply of snacks (no fluids) and watch the whole extended thing (probably about 12 hours) straight through.

Shifting gears a bit: There was one point in The Return of the King when (to my own amusement) the movie lost its hold of me. In a scene between Aragorn and Elrond (the actor who also played Agent Smith in The Matrix), I imagined Elrond in a pair of sunglasses sneering, "Welcome back, Mister Aragorn... we missed you!" {grin}