The eyes have it

Rating: Null/10 (29 December 2003)

Spoilers included.
Not just a bunch of empty CGI. I truly cared about the outcome, and what happened to all the main characters. Much of the imagery was frightening in an effective manner. Appreciated the unbridled contrast between the pure beauty of heavenly realities and the decayed ugliness of evil. So many of the once beautifully created beings who still maintain some semblance of their former glory, but roam about a cursed land, visually and morally ugly in their depraved state.
At the same time, this finale is far from perfect. In fact the entire series suffers from action-movie-itis. PJ relies heavily on cliched cinematic devices for both battle scenes and sentimental scenes. It started to distract me from appreciating the flow of the story at times. I was sensing too much insincerity in eliciting emotional responses from the crowd, and this where I feel the director's limitations were blatant many times. Such key scenes would have been handled more convincingly by a more mature director... like Ang Lee (a la Crouching Tiger) or Peter Weir (a la Gallipoli).
A quick example is these multiple dying/death scenes: always a close friend or family member right there to shed tears for the death (cue viewer's tears), but then after about the right amount of time we discover... he's not dead! he's alive! and that's great for everyone, because now we have the feeling of triumph following perhaps the viewers' deepest emotions of grief when we were being tricked into thinking this was a death scene. I know this was thematically important to do with Gandalf early on, but it's happened to so many of the main characters before and since, I've lost track.
This is a case where the audience is being underestimated and slightly insulted, because the filmmakers are self-consciously aiming for the widest global audience possible. It's a bit of Lucasitis here, but again forgivable in the bigger picture.

I thought about the role of the EYES in this film, this saga. The eye of Sauran; the eyes of Pippin witnessing a glimpse of Sauran's plans; the elvin eyes of Legolas, interpreting weather patterns to foresee an evil presence; the eyes of Frodo revealing his present condition at all times (the actor doing his acting through peculiar eyes - he was cast for this reason). Plenty of close-up shots of the eyes of many characters. The witch-king and its horrific lack of eyes. The details in Gollum's eyes, like the varying degrees of dilation correlating with his split personalities. What was perceived and learned from the eyes and through the eyes heavily propelled this entire story to its very conclusion, and the "eye" of the camera is no exception. Like when the camera rises above the ledge in Mount Doon, and we see Gollum's eyes and face through the ring he finally holds between his fingers, we see in his disturbingly gleeful expression the fruit of his lust.