The Return of the King

PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 12/16/03)

With The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, director Peter Jackson and his armies of actors and technicians have managed to do what the Wachowski brothers and George Lucas could not: make a perfect trilogy. The Return of the King is a phantasmagorical slab of epic entertainment that satisfies on every conceivable level. More impressive from a critical point of view—the perspective that bemoans the Ewoks of Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi and the rain-drenched, revved-up action clichés that took over the two final Matrix movies—is that Jackson and company make no real missteps. There’s nothing wrong with this King. Some might see that as small praise, but it’s not.

I’m a bit of a late convert to the Rings trilogy. Not having been steeped in J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary world of hobbits and wizards at any stage in my development, I approached Fellowship of the Ring, the first film, with some skepticism; my glib reaction to the picture was that it was like watching a three-hour slideshow of Led Zeppelin album cover artwork. But Jackson’s such an inspired and impassioned storyteller that The Two Towers made a believer out of me, and I went back to Fellowship with new and grateful eyes. King is a capper beyond compare-from its incredible set pieces (the business with the giant spider makes me very much look forward to Jackson’s remake of King Kong, and I’m someone who up until very recently could not even abide the idea of a King Kong remake) to its remarkably focused and vivid characterizations (Andy Serkis’s Gollum is really out of control here, Sean Astin’s Sam poignantly rises up to some near-impossible challenges, and Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn is a picture of taciturn strength as he embraces his fate), it's a stirring, astonishing, moving work. Yes, moving—I teared up several times, which had not happened to me once in a whole season of sitting through putatively heart-tugging pictures featuring human characters.

Those who wish to defend the flawed trilogies cited above will point out, justifiably, that the Rings trilogy is based on some quite-fully realized source material, while the Star Wars and Matrix films are . . . well, not. (As much as I love a number of the Star Wars pictures, to call them "original" is almost insulting—they’re the continuation of age-old myths.) True, but adaptation has its many pitfalls, and Jackson adroitly avoids them—at the risk of alienating some. I’ve already heard complaints that King has about five different endings, and I suppose it does. Last Samurai and Something’s Gotta Give, on the other hand (to name two recent films) each have about three different endings. The thing about King, though, is that each of its five endings is true and right and necessary, whereas in the cases of Samurai and Give, each of the endings piles a further layer of horse manure on top of what had been spread before. In any case, I didn’t want King to end at all—and can’t wait to see it again.

—Glenn Kenny