Shocked by disappointment

Rating: 3/10 (24 December 2008)

I loved the first two LOTR films, and was keyed up almost beyond endurance to see ROTK the first week it opened. When the film was over, I was stunned by the depth of disappointment I was feeling. In fact, I went back and watched the movie again a few days later; I could not believe that it really had been as bad as I'd experienced. The fault must have been mine, I thought; I'd been too wound up to really take it in. With a cooler head, I'd be able to enjoy it and the magic would work again, as it had with the previous two movies. Alas, no. The movie was just as bad as I'd thought, and it somehow managed to posthumously poison my pleasure in the other two movies as well. I've never been able to enjoy any of them since.
I came to really hate Peter Jackson, especially after watching all the "making of" interviews on the dvds. I believe he is an undisciplined, self-indulgent egomaniac, and these characteristics progressively took over as the film series continued. Fellowship of the Ring was the best of the lot, and I feel it's because it was a gamble. Now that the series is over, people forget that before FOTR premiered, there was no guarantee that the film would be a success. LOTR was a notoriously difficult book to adapt, and many worried that it couldn't be done. In that atmosphere, Jackson and his co-writers were at their most deferential to the original Tolkien text, and almost humble in their approach to such a daunting task.
After FOTR was a big success, they became more confident in their own skills, and felt bold enough to try a little rewriting for The Two Towers, even while assuring fans that it was only a little strategic reorganizing, and the original story would be preserved in ROTK. By that point, however, Jackson was so deluded by the sycophantic flattery that surrounded him on all sides, he was convinced that the fans would adoringly accept anything he filmed, simply because it was the product of such a genius. ROTK could not contain both Tolkien's story and Jackson's ego, and guess which won in the end? The story flopped all over the place, with Saruman's storyline simply chopped off and left unresolved, while Jackson wasted time indulging in invented scenes back in Rohan, when the story should have moved decisively to Gondor. That, however, was not the part of the story that interested him, so we had to have more loving photography of carved dark wood beams and animal-skin rugs, plus a vastly overdrawn love connection between Eowyn and Aragorn. When Jackson finally had to tear himself away from this romantic Viking paradise and turn to Gondor, he revenged himself on the story by turning Gondor into a sterile, dead cement city, full of cowards and idiots.
Worst of all, I felt that by ROTK Jackson was even getting sloppy on what had been a trademark of the films until then - set design and scale. For a scene where Gandalf and Pippin are on a balcony, looking towards Minas Morgul, he had both actors on the same set, with Pippin merely kneeling at the balcony, while Gandalf towered over him. However, the brain can quite clearly calculate that the scale of the balcony in relation to the bodies of both characters is wrong - in FOTR, Jackson would have built a larger-scale model of the balcony for Pippin, to keep up the illusion that he was a smaller figure in a setting made for people of Gandalf's size. This time, he couldn't be bothered, as if he felt that he'd paid his dues being accurate in the first two movies, and now he should be free to play around and have fun.
That was amply demonstrated with the stupid green goblins, the endless battle scenes, the noise, the shaking camera, and the labored "humour" in every Gimli scene. What annoyed me the most, however, was that Jackson seemed to have no grasp of what Tolkien thought was important. In the movie, only the "stars" are able to act (and yes, that includes the Hobbits), whereas Tolkien showed that nobility, courage and heroism are EVERYONE's business. In the books, the individual soldiers of Gondor had personalities, felt connected to the greater cause, and debated how best they could do their duty. In Jackson's movies, Aragorn and Gandalf do all the fighting, while crowds of women blubber helplessly and soldiers blunder about uselessly. This is why his removal of the Scouring of the Shire was both execrable and inevitable. Jackson can't recognize any drama in ordinary people in ordinary settings facing crisis and either failing or rising to the occasion - to him, the Shire is just dumb peasants who were too stupid not to leave home for adventure, and there's nothing more to be expected of them. Tolkien's whole theme was that adventure and crisis are NOT the sole property of noble heroes, but that it can touch anyone, and how we react when it does is as important as Aragorn's struggle with Sauron or Denethor's descent into madness.