Flawed finale to the trilogy

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2003)

The Return of the King is certainly the least successful of the three Lord of the Rings movies. It's beset by the flaws that often mar the last parts of trilogies (cf. Return of the Jedi; Back to the Future III), namely that the director tries to do more of the same things he has done previously, but BIGGER! While this gives fans what they crave, it tends to leave others cold - because by doing everything bigger, the bad points are bigger and more obvious too.
The Return of the King is bedevilled by excrutiating slo-mo sequences that were often used in the previous two movies. Here, though, every other scene seems to be played out in half speed. Likewise, the scattergun narrative style of the previous film reaches new extremes here - Jackson is so keen to include as much authentic Tolkien as possible that the overall thrust of the story is lost. The most important part of the journey - Frodo's quest to destroy the Ring (against which the great wars are merely incidental) - is smothered under endless technically impressive but frequently soulless battle scenes. Ultimately, we have a very bitty film that jumps from scene to scene without any ready explanations (suddenly, and apparently on a whim, Arwen's fate becomes tied to that of the Ring; Aragorn finds a deus ex machina army lurking in the mountains, and - most criminally - the main villain of the first two movies, Saruman, is written out with a single, off-hand comment from Gandalf).
The destruction of the Ring and Sauron is also anticlimactic - this happens halfway through The Return of the King book, with the real emotional climax being the Scouring of the Shire and Saruman's final fall. For reasons of time, this was dropped from the script - but there's nothing to really replace it. Perhaps if Jackson had opted for something radical like having Sauron manifest himself - becoming more than just a remote villain whom is endlessly talked up but never seems to do much except sit and stare - this would have been a better climax.
That said, The Return of the King contains many great moments. Shelob is genuinely horrible, the arrival of the army of Rohan is a real air-punching moment, and the pyre of Denethor is a marvellous piece of over-the-top Gothic melodrama. Aside from the above-mentioned surfeit of slo-mo sequences, Jackson's directorial flair is readily apparent, and the film is never less than entertaining, and many of the issues that I've pointed out (Saruman's no-show, the lack of ready explanations) will surely be corrected in the Special Extended Edition. Having said at the outset that this is the lesser film of the trilogy, that's actually not much of a criticism - because Jackson's Lord of the Rings is sure to become the definitive interpretation of Tolkien's novel for many years to come.