Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

December 10, 2004

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 210 min Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

If you’ve already invested the substantial amount of time needed to see the previous two movies, you’re obviously going to see this one regardless of its reviews just to see the ending. Conversely, if you haven’t seen the other two you’d be quite foolish to start off with this movie.

After seeing the battle scenes in The Two Towers, we found ourselves greatly looking forward to what was to come in Return of the King. Suffice it to say we were not disappointed in any way. The battles are easily the biggest, baddest things ever put to film. The sheer scale of the battlefields is amazing, and the cinematography does an excellent job of keeping things in perspective. You get an excellent feeling for height, size, speed, everything. I really can’t find anything bad to say about the battle scenes at all.

However, the movie isn’t perfect. At 3 and a half hours long I did find myself checking my watch now and then during the dramatic moments. There are several overly sentimental moments throughout the movie between Sam and Frodo that should have been trimmed down a little. Hell, we kept expecting them to just start making out right on the hillside. “I couldn’t have done it without you”, “you’re a great friend”, yada yada yada. Just move along already!

The ending also needs some serious editing. There are at least 4 complete endings to the movie, Jackson should have just picked one or perhaps two and been done with it. Seriously, the last 20 minutes of the movie is spent wrapping up all the storylines and trying to give us a warm fuzzy feeling regarding all the characters. I can’t speak in any detail about this as it was the ending of the movie, but this was much more information than was needed.

Rumor has it that the Special Edition DVD edition will be over 4 hours long, and I’m sure we’ll all want to see it just to find out what else there is to see. I’m guessing more of Treebeard and an appearance by Saruman (who isn’t in the theatrical release at all.) I just hope that they don’t edit in another ending or two!

Despite it’s length and occasional dragging scene, this movie is easily the best of the three in the Lord of the Rings series, and thus deserves a strong 5 star rating. You have to see it on the big screen or there’s no way you’ll get a good sense of how good the battle scenes really are.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King