The Return of the Ring

Rating: 10/10 (6 June 2013)

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is the third film in the film trilogy The Lord of the Rings. It was released in December 2003, one year after the second film in this trilogy, the two towers. Aspects like light and colour, camera work and editing will be discussed and to sum everything up the conclusion will give a final verdict.
In the third and final part of the Lord of the Ring, Sam, Frodo and Gollum continue their trip to Mordor to destroy the One Ring. At the same time, Aragorn, Gandalf and the remaining fellowship find out that Sauron is about to attack the city Minas Tirith. They try to gather a human army to battle. Then Gandalf finds out that Denethor, the Steward of Gondor is mad with grief because of his son Boromir, who died in the first film. Gandalf therefore leads the human army to give them a chance of winning the final battle. Aragorn finds personal motivation to win the battle, as when Sauron is getting stronger, his love Arwen is dying. To save her, he must reclaim the throne and lead the human army against Sauron. But even with his new army to aid Frodo he still has to have the strength to destroy the ring that has enchanted him. But does he have the strength to do this?
The usage of light and color in this film is used particularly to accentuate the moods of various characters in the film and to immerse the viewer with the feelings felt by all characters. For instance, the colors are dark when Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas visit the city of the dead, and even the brightly dressed characters seem rather bleak when inside the mountain. This changes the moment Aragorn whips out Andurill, as the saturation seems to increase slightly at the moment. Especially when the eye of Sauron gazes at Aragorn's army the harsh light and the colors bleak, it may at first seem threatening, but gives a feeling of hope and serenity as Aragorn says: "For Frodo!" The overall lighting is quite dark and the colors particularly unsaturated, with the exceptions of the happy moments of the characters.
The way the cameras are used in this film is absolutely brilliant. As the director, Peter Jackson, refused to use CGI to make actors playing hobbits seem smaller compared to other actors, he used optical illusions, placing the hobbits further away while giving the audience the impression the actors mare standing next to each other. When it was not necessary to show the faces of both or multiple characters at the same time, Peter would use scale doubles for the characters whose faces weren't necessary. An example of this is Eowyn riding to war with Merry. As they are waiting to charge on the battlefield, the shots only show Eowyn's face with the top of Merry's helmet at the bottom of the screen or Merry's face with Eowyn's torso behind him. The cameras are angled so perfectly that you wouldn't notice this the first time, but would still remain non-intrusive to the entire experience even if you were to notice it.
In this film special effects play a huge role and a total 2730 of special effects were used in the Lord of the Rings series were used of which 1477 in Return of the King. Special effects are the main reasons this film has been released such a long time after the animated series, as the technology was not present or too expensive to create visual effects as flying dragons or even many scenes which were filmed in front of a green screen and the décor was later added in the studio. The biggest example of an incredibly necessary and important special effect is, the by all loved, Sméagol. The special effects help accentuate the mystical feeling you get by all the happenings that are impossible in real life.
Once again great care has been taken to carefully adjust the film in such a way that the film is perfect and balanced correctly. During conversations reverse-shots were occasionally used to get as much involved in the conversation as possible as you experience it as if you are actually amongst the characters and joining the conversation. Whenever the action commences the average shot length decreases. This means that before the action the shots are fairly long, but as the action starts to build up the shots get shorter and shorter to create the feeling of chaos and excitement. The shots are transitioned in such a way that the audience gets more curious to what will happen and what really happened since the shot are so abruptly ended/
In conclusion we have all enjoyed this great film, as the plot was great and the cast perfectly chosen. The acting was of high quality and it was also the best adaptation of a book we had seen so far, which can't be said about a lot of recent films. The camera-work and editing was done perfectly and the light and color was just right at every moment, and the special effects were staggering. We also loved the original soundtrack, as it dragged us deeper into the film, making it an unforgettable journey through Middle Earth for us. Together we came to the conclusion that this film was worth a ten out of ten, and fully deserved all awards it had received.