more appropriate for DVD than theater

Rating: 10/10 (21 December 2003)

The Return of the King is a terrific and memorable film, but as a viewer you might enjoy it more on DVD, because in a real theater you will be hit by four big distractions: 1) long length, 2) unconvincing CGI, 3) missing scenes from the book, 4) loud soundtrack.
The length is the biggest problem -- 3 hours 20 minutes with no intermission. Anyone in a theater needs to go to the bathroom after sitting 2 hours, so one by one everyone watching this film has to sneak out and back into their seat. This includes you, meaning you might miss a scene or two (or do you just come dehydrated and risk catching the flu?). Super long movies like this need an intermission, and do better on DVD.
The CGI is sometimes good but often annoyingly unreal. Especially backgrounds; you look at a character delivering a line, and you just know they're standing in front of a blue screen -- it doesn't look realistic. This happens in practically every outdoor scene. Perhaps your eye won't notice these things anyway, but on DVD problems with CGI are less conspicuous.
There are scenes from the book missing from the film. New Line will include many of them on DVD. Maybe those scenes would help the film, maybe not, but at least it would make the film more true to the Tolkien book.
Finally, the music is loud and formulaic. There is never a quiet moment in the film -- if the characters are silent, you can count on the music to fill in the dead air. And the music is not subtle -- they hit you over the head with the same four melodies repeated over, like hammers -- "this is where you're supposed to feel touched", and "this is where you supposed to feel scared", and "this is where you're supposed to stare in awe." The music is overdone, but it becomes less a distraction when you're watching on DVD and can adjust the volume.
Return of the King is a good movie, and you're gonna see it sometime, but the theater might not be the best place. Wait for DVD.