An Indepted Fanboy's Love Letter to The Lord of the Rings: A Critical Essay on the Film Trilogy, Part Three

Rating: 10/10 (12 January 2008)

(click on my name for Parts One and Two)
Yet, despite the size of what they have to compete with, the entire cast never misses a beat. Elijah Wood goes through the motions as Frodo for most of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, before Frodo goes renegade in the second half of The Return of the King, with Wood nailing a depiction of dependence and attachment to the Ring that is critical for the story's message of corruption of power to come through. Andy Serkis chews up and spits Gollum back out with such ease that it seems Gollum was the role he was born to play. The same can be said for Ian McKellen, who had never even heard of Tolkien's novel when Peter Jackson and co-screenwriter/producer Fran Walsh offered him the part of über-wizard Gandalf. Viggo Mortensen gives the somewhat arrogant Aragorn a refreshing mix of anger and vulnerability, Miranda Otto transforms a stock damsel in distress into one of the best female action heroines in recent cinema history, and as father and son John Noble and Sean Bean each portray complex, almost deranged men who have succumbed to their shared susceptibility to power and greed so brilliantly you could be forgiven for mistaking Noble and Bean for an actual father and son pair.
However, in my opinion the actor who pulls the rug out from underneath everybody else here is Sean Astin. And in just one short scene. The expression on Astin's face after Wood's Frodo sends his Sam home in The Return of the King simply makes you want to, for a very short while, choke Frodo to death. How the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences snubbed this heartbreaking performance  and about three other performances in King  and granted only one acting nomination for the entire trilogy (but no disrespect at all to Mr. McKellen) is anyone's guess. But of course, the only negative all the actors in the trilogy will get is being forever thought of as their characters, even if half have already managed to escape the typecasting. In the eyes of fans everywhere, Wood IS Frodo, McKellen IS Gandalf (despite his career-best performance in Gods and Monsters) and Mortensen IS Aragorn and so on, just like Mark Hamill IS Luke Skywalker, Sean Connery IS James Bond (that one's probably not a negative though) and Harrison Ford IS Han Solo and Indiana Jones.
Even after little more than six years, the cultural impact of Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings cannot and should not be underestimated. Jackson has made himself one of two prolific individuals  the other being J.K. Rowling  who have re-awoken children and teenagers of the twenty-first century to reading. After the release of just The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien's works shot right back up to the top of bestseller lists worldwide. Jackson's adaptations also slowly pulled the rug out from underneath the more-hyped Harry Potter movie adaptations, both critically and financially. The movie, along with J.K. Rowling's Potter series and its subsequent movie franchise for credit where credit is due, has given rise to endless merchandising and pieces of fan-fiction. But perhaps most of all to Jackson's credit, he crafted a fantasy masterpiece so undeniably perfect, and with such passion and stubborn determination, that it eventually forced a bunch of fickle old men to get over their seventy-six year-long bias (even Steven Spielberg  who only shut the Academy up when he started to make serious films like the masterpieces Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan  and George Lucas can't lay claim to that). To close, I can't come up with a statement of my own with which I can do justice to Peter Jackson's colossal adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in just one sentence, so as one critic wrote following The Return of the King's December 2003 release, "Never has a filmmaker aimed higher, or achieved more." Couldn't have said it better myself.