The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Herein I give you my penultimate post -- the last one will be me talking about resources for learning about Tolkien and his world -- in which I take on maybe my favorite movie ever (but that’s a designation I honestly need to revisit): the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/5/5e/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_-_The_Return_of_the_King_-_Ensemble_poster.jpg As always, this is not a criticism of the film as a moviegoing experience but an assessment of how the film handles the adaptation of the source material.
I led off my take on The Two Towers as a film by praising the Frodo/Sam/Gollum storyline, and so I do have to say that I think the adaptation goes off the rails a bit here. I do like the depiction of Deagol and Smeagol at the very beginning, but once we’re at the pass of Cirith Ungol, all nuance is stripped away from the novel’s depiction of Smeagol/Gollum -- in the book I felt there were continued indications of the war within that character, but the war is long over here. I also find the Ring’s influence over Frodo to be excessive -- somehow it persuades him not just to suspect Sam, but literally to send him back to his likely death while traveling on alone with “Smeagol”? Again, it raises the stakes in film terms, but as a depiction of their relationships, it just doesn’t really ring true -- and frankly, if he’s like this now, what about Mordor? It is undeniably effective at convincing us that Frodo’s succumbing to the Ring’s influence, though, and I guess that is a little harder to show on screen?
The sequence at Isengard works pretty well -- we need to deal with Saruman’s final outcome (especially since he’s really been built up as a major villain over two movies), you’re not going to give us the Scouring for that purpose, and the staging of this whole thing works. The poetry of him falling and being broken by his own machinery is pretty effective, if brutal. The rationale for Legolas slaying Grima here is a little more confused, for me, but I guess we can call it an impulse decision. The only thing I genuinely am baffled by is that Saruman makes reference to Frodo’s quest, which he absolutely cannot know about -- at least, I don’t see how he can? He understood initially that there was a hobbit who had the Ring, but if he actually knows that Frodo is carrying the Ring to Mordor, how has he not told Sauron at this point? That, more than some spicy wordplay from atop Orthanc, would really give it to these people he hates and wants to see suffer. I guess the novel never really addresses how much he knew -- maybe this is a bit of a criticism of both stories, since we need to explain somehow why the Uruk-hai were told to bring back hobbits alive with all their gear. But the film making it very plain that he DOES know forces me to ask a bunch of questions that are even harder to answer.
I simply do not understand why Theoden is written to be reluctant to aid Gondor, other than that Bernard Hill is really good at saying “Where was GONDOR when the Westfold fell?” He really is, though -- so much so that we just believe his indignant anger. But there’s no indication he ever asked for their aid before (to warrant this level of resentment -- honestly, it seems that, under Grima’s influence, he very intentionally avoided seeking allies for Rohan). Anyway, in film terms, his reluctance is cast away the instant the beacons are lit, so what’s the point? It creates some imaginary tension but it’s not “resolved” here and we gain no insight into the characters -- it just makes Theoden seem petulant and not very self-aware, since really the question is where was Theoden when the Westfold fell? I can imagine the movie making him grapple with that, and with the fact that his frustration with Gondor is him projecting his frustration with himself, but it ain’t here.
Watching them all in a row like this, one consistent theme I’ve noticed is that the scripts are too keen on making villains out of everyone in Gondor. I get it -- Boromir, Faramir (very briefly), and Denethor all in their way create obstacles for one or more of our heroes. But I feel like all three of these characters had more complexity and more goodness than is shown on screen. John Noble would have been excellent as a more tortured/torn Denethor, but the guy we get here is so close to evil that it’s hard to understand how he’s not just Saruman but we’re all putting up with him and looking the other way, like your racist uncle at a family picnic. It would seriously not be that difficult to show the strain he’s under and the fact that his strength and will have been crucial to Gondor’s survival (even as we critique other things about him). I know that time is short in a film and you cut some corners, but again, Noble’s a fine actor who could have done a descent into madness, instead of just “madness”. It feels like a real missed opportunity, since the people around him (Gandalf, Pippin, Faramir) are doing excellent work -- both the characters and the actors playing them -- and there’s a lot to really like about these initial Gondor scenes.
Here’s another change from the books that I like: Elrond bringing Aragorn the reforged Anduril is a good move. Sure, as a book readers, I think it’s a minor bummer that he hasn’t had the sword all this time, but this is more powerful than Elrond’s sons bringing a banner -- that was the sort of thing that felt a lot more significant to Tolkien than it does to me. Tying Arwen’s life and death to the Ring feels like a cheap move, though -- why create those stakes? It’s agonizing enough without them -- I guess to explain why she hasn’t come? Sure, the tough girl we met in Fellowship probably would have ridden here to Aragorn if she could, but I think that’s easily explained -- we get one scene where she tells her father she’ll go to Aragorn, and he starts crying and tells her that, now that she’s chosen mortality, he needs her to stay away from the war, so that at least he has the consolation of knowing she will live long enough to have that family she’s choosing over him. Or maybe we could find other explanations that work in character -- I just find it a little irritating that we get a magical explanation that really makes no sense (how on earth did this one elf who has nothing to do with the Ring find herself soul-bonded to it?).
The Paths of the Dead lack a little urgency in the novel, I’ll admit -- I found them a little creepy but also a little underwhelming. For that reason, I do like that PJ uses his horror sensibility here to make them more menacing and exciting -- my memories of this sequence are definitely the richer for having the film. I will find the Dead irritating in a bit, but here I really like them, so let’s lean into that. Also really great here is the whole Eowyn/Merry storyline -- we get invested in them, and within the movie’s limited bounds, we see their connections to events and what explains their choices. The only baffling thing is that we see her and Merry, open and unhelmeted, hanging out with other Rohirrim in their pause before battle -- this makes no sense at all, unless we’re assuming that somehow Eomer and Theoden aren’t anywhere close by and not a single one of the hundreds of people who can see them recognizes Eowyn? It would have been really easy to show them ducked behind a rock or a bush -- it’s a strange lapse. But again, in character terms, the conversations, etc., work really well.
Jackson’s very good at horror, and therefore the whole Shelob sequence works really pretty well -- I’m still irritated at Sam’s absence until the end, but I can’t deny that having Frodo alone here really creates the terror that Jackson presumably wants out of the scene. Everything in Cirith Ungol honestly works well also, although I do lament a little how much gets stripped away here -- the Watchers, Sam’s eavesdropping, the arrival of the Nazgul, etc. Given the time that I feel is a little wasted elsewhere in the film, it would have been nice to add a little more back in -- here is where the decision to push so much material from the book The Two Towers into the film Return of the King has some downstream effects. But I certainly can’t complain about how this all comes across on film -- it’s very successful and it’s very consistent with the books in the ways that it needs to be.
My impressions of the battle of Minas Tirith are such a roller coaster of highs and lows. To start with a low, given the circumstances changed for the film, Gandalf’s willingness to sprint away to Faramir is ridiculous. Faramir was dying the last time he saw him, and Gandalf is literally riding away from the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians to see if he can maybe save one dying dude: in the novel it already feels a little out of whack (and Gandalf himself says so) but at this point in the battle it felt a lot easier to believe that Gandalf was making the right call. In the film, all I can do is try not to think about it, which is a bummer. I get pretty grouchy throughout here -- I don’t understand how the Witch-king has the power to break Gandalf’s staff. Gandalf can do that to Saruman because he has broken the terms under which he came to Middle-earth -- Gandalf is literally acting as an agent of the Valar and taking Saruman’s gun and badge, effectively. How does this wraith spirit of a mortal man break Gandalf’s staff -- I can believe that, under the influence of the Shadow, he might be able to overcome Gandalf, but the symbolism of the broken staff here really irritates me for some reason.
The confrontation with Denethor works really well -- moments of heroism for Pippin and for Gandalf, some good dialogue -- right up until we get fireball Denethor, since he’s fully engulfed as he runs out of Rath Dinen, and the movie has already gone to some pains to make sure we understand this is a ways back into the cliffside, so the sprint to the forward edge of the Citadel is just nonsense, and I’m not even sure what the point of it is. Like, Denethor has been unhinged since the moment we met him, so there’s nothing about this moment that feels like a new insight into him. It has no impact on the battle -- it’s honestly pretty comical in a moment that doesn’t really call for comedy, you know? Gandalf mournfully saying “Thus passes Denethor” would work in book terms, but in movie terms he’s saying it about a genuinely malicious coward and fool who is sprinting off a cliff like a video game character -- so, so weird. I hated it the first time I saw it and it has not improved.
Fortunately for the film, that moment is juxtaposed against one of the sequences I love most, since Theoden and the Rohirrim come across beautifully. The text’s simple descriptions are realized fully, and the cinematography and the editing and pacing here are really perfect for raising the hairs on the back of your neck. You can tell this was carefully planned -- as Helm’s Deep was -- and I think overall it’s a reminder that this is the sort of work Jackson does best, converting relatively simple descriptions in the text of battles and outcomes into really elaborate and well structured scenes on the field itself.
Eowyn’s slaying of the Witch-king goes pretty well, though I feel like there’s just a little bit of a hiccup in the exchange of dialogue near the end. Certainly Otto’s inhabiting the role of Eowyn remains some of the trilogy’s best acting work, and Monaghan as Merry plays his role well. The moment in the books is super cinematic already, and Jackson preserves that feeling very successfully. Inside the city, we get a really great acting setpiece also, in which Pippin and Gandalf talk about death and McKellen takes Gandalf’s face and voice to a whole other realm in thinking longingly about Valinor. It’s incredibly moving, and it honestly comforts me just thinking about it. And we see Eowyn and Theoden have the tearful conversation as the king dies, which the novel denies us, and honestly I think we do need it -- another improvement on the novel here -- which helps really cement how this film deals with death and loss. I love this whole stretch of the film so much.
Oy. Then we have to go back to the sweep of battle, and I just told you Jackson’s good at this, and I guess I need to caveat that with “as long as ghosts aren’t involved”. I mean, ugh, I understand that in film terms you’ve got to pay off the Dead, and I guess the Umbar assault wasn’t enough because we don’t actually get to see the battle? I don’t know why, though, since showing us that battle at all means that the arrival of the black-sailed fleet is no longer scary -- we figure it’ll be Aragorn -- and therefore you might as well show us the actual victory. Marc Templin, in a comment on my post regarding the chapter about this sequence, called the film version of the Dead “scrubbing bubbles” and he’s completely right -- they slop all over the battlefield and city, scouring away any trace of “the bad guys”. I guess that’s convenient, but it saps the end of the battle of any sense of weight -- why are Legolas and Gimli out there risking their lives when a school of undead piranhas are going to skeletize Sauron’s entire forces? Tolkien’s a little at fault here for never really working out how this works -- are the Dead vulnerable in any way or are they effectively invincible? -- but at least he kept them away from the Pelennor, so that dealing with victory was actual work for Aragorn and the other leaders on the field.
The bits that follow the battle are uneven -- without a “the hands of the king are healing hands” for context, it sort of looks like Aragorn has come to tend Eowyn out of love for her personally (he checks on no one else), which undermines the Elrond scene from earlier. I mean, here we see her wake and look at him with, what, love? There’s no dialogue that would help us make sense of this as anything else -- and yet clearly Jackson doesn’t intend it since there’s no further Aragorn/Eowyn interactions. We then get a much, much too hasty Faramir/Eowyn romance -- use that screen time for something else, Peter, if this is all you’ll do for these two. Just let me see them smiling next to each other at the coronation and imagine what might have happened. Or else give me an actual explanation for them -- put Faramir and Eowyn in the same recovery room, or give them a real conversation about how hard it is to lose fathers/father figures while also feeling like they were never given much of a chance to be the person they really are and not who someone else wanted them to be. I know -- we need to not just let Eowyn disappear, and it probably felt like there wasn’t time for more than the two of them looking cute next to each other and Faramir saying two sentences about The Shadow -- but I think once your movie’s 4 hours long, you can give us another 45 seconds with two important supporting characters.
Back to the solidly good parts: the logic of marching on Sauron is well laid out, and Aragorn’s confrontation using the Palantir is really good too. There’s a much more explicit depiction of how Sauron’s getting baited (and of the emotional weight for Aragorn -- even if I think the Arwen wasting disease is a foolish plot device, I can see how Jackson’s trying to use it) than in the novel, and some good decisions are generally made here about how quickly to move. The cutting between the two storylines (inside and outside Mordor) works pretty effectively, and certainly The Mouth is absolutely horrifying, exactly as he should be. I don’t like Aragorn just whacking his head off -- sure, The Mouth is repulsive and he’s taunting our heroes with the death of their friend. But also this is clearly a parley in which The Mouth is not a combatant but an emissary -- challenging him to solo combat would have been aggressive but at least sporting, but riding up and just decapitating him impulsively is what a villain does, or an antihero, but not Aragorn, the King Elessar. I don’t get it -- is it so we can get Gimli’s 97th quip into the movie? Or as a sort of echo of the beheading of the Uruk-hai leader in Fellowship? Sigh. Anyway, once that’s done, Aragorn’s inspiration of the soldiers works well, as does the ensuing battle sequence. I’d quibble with things here or there, but the battle is pretty sketchy in the novel as it stands, and so I can understand Jackson taking some more liberties here.
Inside Mordor, the painful crawl to and up Mount Doom is really effective and we get Astin’s very best work as Sam in the scenes that follow. Really inspiring stuff, and the friendship between Frodo and Sam is given the space and respect here that I really wanted to see earlier in the film. Inside the Sammath Naur, we do effectively get Frodo knocking Gollum into the fire, and that I’m less keen on, although I might be reading too much into what little we see of that struggle from a distance. Certainly the panic for Sauron is handled extremely well, and the collapse of Barad-dur is as cinematic as we could want -- we get a real sense of relief and triumph that we and the characters have earned from the journey.
I know one of the major criticisms always voiced about ROTK is the feeling that the movie ends about five times, but honestly the multiple “endings” don’t bother me -- the pace feels steady and earned, I think. Jackson does love both a fade to black and a whiteout, and sure, maybe he uses them a little too much here, but it’s not something that merits the level of critique I’ve seen.
What bothers me about the finish of the film is the sense that everything’s fixed -- we don’t see a city in ruins trying to rebuild, we don’t see a broken Isengard, we certainly don’t get a Scouring. To the contrary, the movie’s message is that, when you win, everything’s pretty great -- you get the girl, you sing and flowers fall from the sky, etc. The Shire is EXACTLY what it was, and the movie’s message is, that’s what happens -- you won! Which honestly, I get it -- you can’t do the Scouring very easily, and it is a bummer to think about the brokenness of the saved world, etc. But then you’ve made it almost impossible to land the line, “We saved the Shire but not for me” -- ever since Frodo woke up in the Field of Cormallen, every time we’ve seen him but one he’s been laughing and smiling and clapping like he’s in a sitcom audience. That one time he clutched his chest a little like Daniel Radcliffe rubbing his forehead scar -- that’s fine, I guess, but man, it does not sell the idea that a very young hobbit is about to turn his back on a life he seems to love. Tolkien’s ending, with the departure from the world of many of the characters we know and love, only really works in the context of a world where it’s NOT as simple as “we won and life is good now”, and I think that’s why us book readers were so vocal about the loss of the Scouring. I see that it would have taken a ton of screen time to do well, but I think Jackson could have done something less menacing that still gets the message home -- we’re at the Green Dragon and everyone else is laughing but Frodo seems far away. Sam’s Gaffer has built a millwheel in his absence that reminds us of Isengard, and there’s a weird awkward moment where the hobbits can’t decide whether to be glad that the Shire is “improving itself” or fearful of what may come in its wake. Show us one more of those Elf expeditions headed through the Shire for the West, like Frodo and Sam saw in Fellowship, and have Frodo be haunted by it. I don’t think it would take much to express the pretty obvious truth that someone can come home from winning a war and find that it’s not all roses.
I really can’t understand the writing decision where they claim that this is the last boat out of Middle-earth -- no voyage awaits Sam or Legolas (or Gimli), and that’s a pretty big swerve, honestly. Maybe it’s designed to make us feel that Frodo’s got to go now or else he never will, but if so I’d tell them it’s a sign they didn’t lay the groundwork well for his decision, and they should revisit those choices rather than creating an arbitrary pressure. I will say, though, that there’s no denying that the Grey Havens scene is handled incredibly well -- the lighting, the camera work, the score. That one serene smile from Frodo as he looks back from the ship. Gorgeous stuff -- the little changes all work in service of the emotional weight of the scene, and when Sam comes back home to a little hobbit girl running out to meet him, I do at least feel that the movie’s landed the plane where he’s concerned. We don’t see anybody else’s happy ending in any kind of detail, but we see Sam’s -- and if we have to pick just one character to do this with, this is the right one.
And we finish it off with the best closing credits song in movie history, and I’m sorry, it’s not even close -- unless there’s another movie out there where the closing credits song is sung by Annie Lennox also, in which case I will at least hear you out. Into the West is so perfectly integrated into the best moments in the movie we’ve just seen, drawing on Gandalf’s conversation with Pippin about death and on the scene at the Grey Havens, with a musical motif they employed as Sam carried Frodo up Mount Doom. Add to that Lennox’s powerful and expressive voice and, uh, I just sit in the theater for the whole closing credits, silently crying. Because yeah, that’s what I did every time I saw this film.
I get it, my list of criticisms above would make it seem that I’m pretty irritated with this film, but honestly, it works really well -- better than you’d think. I think in part that’s because it doesn’t challenge us as much as the novel does -- the ending in particular plays on our emotions and what we want to believe in, whereas Tolkien was more interested in what might be more plausible as an ending. But it’s also true that in general we’re getting fantastic acting performances, and the sequence of events in this film plays even more to Jackson’s strengths than the previous films did -- the outcome is a movie that feels like it giving you the experience you loved from the original book. This time, watching it in the shadow of a just completed close read of the novel, was definitely the time this movie worked least well for me -- I’m as aware of the changes to the story and what those changes necessarily imply as I’ve ever been -- but even so, I genuinely enjoyed it, and I can’t imagine any other filmmaker doing a better job, really. Jackson poured himself into these adaptations, and the level of dedication to Tolkien’s language and settings and plot devices is really remarkable -- I don’t want to seem ungrateful! My hope is that we can enjoy the movies while also remembering how much richer and more complicated these characters and scenes are in the 1,000+ page novel that serves as its source material -- that a movie can’t do the level of nuance and detail that a novel can, and that’s okay. There’s an emotional surge available from a great movie -- from the combination of actors and music and production and camera work -- that a novel doesn’t produce, and this movie does that to me over and over again, raising the hair on the back of my neck and flooding me with endorphins. It was a great way to finish the journey I’ve been on since May.
So that’s it for my experience with the extended editions -- I’ve already composed most of the final post, which will talk about resources connected with Tolkien and his world, and that will be up today or tomorrow. Many thanks to those of you who’ve been following this hashtag and reading these excessively long posts for months now -- I hope you find even better ways to spend your free time, and I hope that the time you gave me here was repaid with something worthwhile as I’ve tried to both celebrate and interrogate this story I’ve spent more waking hours thinking about than probably any other work of fiction. Happy book reading (and happy film watching) to you all!