Really liked ROTK, wish now I'd seen other two LOTR's in theater

Rating: 9/10 (23 February 2005)

I have to say I really liked "Return of the King" and that it is one of the best fantasy adventure movies ever made, along with its prequels "Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers". I saw it right after Christmas 2003 at the theater and was like "WOW! Great movie. Excellent battle scenes with about 4,000,000 Orcs and humans fighting over the fate of Middle Earth outside Minas Tirith of Gondor. And a killer soundtrack to boot as well." Slight plot twist alert: Gollum, not Frodo, as we all should know by now, is the one who actually destroys the One Ring after he bites it off of Frodo's hand along with his finger. How fitting that the malicious one, Gollum/Smeagol, who was poisoned by the ring all those years ago, would be the one who actually melts it the Mount Doom's fires, but hey, he died happy in the process. He died with the Precious in his hand and was smiling while his body was consumed by the magma.
One thing I liked about "Return of the King" was that the return of the king was not the end of the movie and here came the credits. Too many other similarly themed movies end that way. The king returns and everyone lives happily ever after. Not this movie. It wrapped up the characters' adventures when they returned home. Aragorn became king, Samwise married his sweetheart (BTW that was Sean Astin's real life family), and Frodo, he got to go into the West to the Grey Havens with the Elves as the hero of Middle Earth.
If you thought Annie Lennox's song "Into the West" sounded more or less like a eulogy, you were not mistaken. Annie Lennox dedicated that song to the memory of a young man named Cameron Duncan, who died of a rare bone cancer in November 2003 about a month before "Return of the King" premiered. He was a budding movie maker in New Zealand and star athlete. It can be seen in the extended DVD version of "Return of the King".