Spectacular special effects, and script defects.

Rating: 1/10 (3 June 2004)

If you are a Tolkien fan, I guess this is as good as it gets.
For the rest of us, it's just another movie, and a fairly peculiar one.
Imagine Star Wars "Return of the Jedi" without an appearance by Darth Vader or the Evil Emperor. That's what you get here. A struggle between good and evil, with the leaders of the evil hordes conspicuously absent. It's quite strange!
Then there's the consistent theme that the better looking you are, the better your character is. Dr. King convinced me that it was the content of my character that counted, not my appearance. But in all three movies of this trilogy the two go together quite closely. It's an old Hollywood theme, but not particularly to be admired.
As for Aragorn preferring Arwen to Eowen, I suppose there is just no accounting for taste; and I'm sure it is faithful to the author.
And what can one say about the seemingly endless multiple endings? Not very dramatic, but perhaps more interesting than the usual single climactic ending.
So on the whole I find the "Return of the King" a watchable film, but hardly one of the greatest of all time. Eleven Oscars? I guess it must have been a bad year for movies. Now that you mention it, there's been a lot of those in recent years.