No flabber has been left ungasted by Mr Jackson's mighty battle sequences, nor no gob unsmacked.

Rating: 8/10 (9 October 2018)

Hours after watching the film, I can close my eyes and see those incredible battle scenes pulsing and throbbing in my skull. They are even more extravagant than his jaw-dropping siege of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers. They have giant elephants and swooping pterodactyls. After the second movie, I compared his epic military setpieces to Kurosawa, but it's a condescension he no longer deserves. His battles are a thing of wonder on their own account. Maybe Kurosawa's battles will one day be described as proto-Jacksonian. And for the first time in this series they are built on to a plot with some narrative force.