The quest unfulfilled

Rating: 9/10 (24 August 2004)

My review of the Lord of the Rings trilogy:
The Fellowship of the Ring:
This is the one and only perfectly sustained masterpiece of the three. I think an important word here is sustained, no matter how many good scenes there are in a film, it will fall apart if it is too boring in-between. The realisation of Middle-Earth is beyond belief, with it's races - men, dwarfs, elves, hobbits, orcs - all credibly portrayed. And the way the film takes hold of you from the first frame, I have never experienced anything like it. Breathtaking scenes like the one going from Frodo holding The One Ring in Bag End to Barad-Dur where Gollums is being tortured and, later, Saruman bringing down the mountain in Caradhras are great. This is one film you can watch over and over again even when you know by heart everything that happens in every scene.
The Two Towers:
As good as Fellowship, not better, but credibly sets the scene for the final film. There is one overly drawn-out scene that slows down the narrative, the one where Aragorn is dreaming about Arwen. It was a bit like Seinfeld as a straight drama, he looked like Jerry sitting at that bench out on the pier when he had an inner conflict. But the Riders of Rohan were well portrayed, Gollum too, and the first appearance of Treebeard was one of the most brilliant, well, first appearances on film ever.
The Return of the King:
Unfortunately, the last film of the trilogy became an uneven mess, with lots of scenes shot with a lazy dreaminess, which let down the drama and finally made it uninteresting. Gollum had to repeat everything he communicated at the end of TTT, and there was a lot of time wasted on actors staring at the camera, each other or at nothing. Sometimes the scenes of day-on-the-beach-laziness were relieved by some intense scenes, like the charge of the CGI-Rohirrim - count the number of times the mountains behind them change - and the final stand at the black gate, but the slow scenes took away the power of the interesting ones.