A poor conclusion to the trilogy

Rating: 5/10 (18 April 2005)

Essentially the Return of the King (ROTK) is a rehash of the Two Towers, think about the basic plot is the same, Frodo continues on to Mount Doom whilst the rest of the fellowship do battle with another enemy bent on the acquiring the ring. The final battle meanwhile is an inflated version of the climax to the Two Towers, only in the ROTK it is considerably less enjoyable to the crudeness of the CGI. The less said about Elijah Wood's performance the better, he was irritating at best in the Two Towers yet he managed, somehow, to be even more annoying in the ROTK in that he has more or less the same expression on his face throughout the entire film.
The flaws in the ROTK though cannot be entirely attributed to the actors and crew, since Tolkien's book is easily the worst in his trilogy. The book is simply a long fuse leading to an all too obvious and therefore uninteresting climax. Peter Jackson's film, meanwhile, is over long and has nothing new to offer - for example, try to pin point anything meaningful that happens in the final half hour.
In my opinion Jackson's undoing was that he stuck far to closely to Tolkien's novel. In the ROTK another 'good guy' needed to go (George Lucas made a similar mistake in Star Wars VI) had Jackson written out say Samwise he could made the audience unsure as to which characters would survive. Perhaps Frodo should have fallen into the lava at the end, after all he had been corrupted by the ring. In the film though Jackson only gets rid of Theoden who was only really a peripheral character.
Don't get me wrong though, I do not have anything against the trilogy in general, I thought that The Fellowship of the Ring was a brilliant film and I thought The Two Towers was a very solid adaption. With the ROTK though I felt I had wasted three and a half hours of my time waiting for one scene in Mount Doom and a pretty uninspiring final battle, invincible warriors show up with Aragorn hardly nail-biting tension is it, especially when compared to the stunning battle at Helms Deep in the Two Towers. The ROTK could surely have been shorter too.
All in all the ROTK falls way short of the FOTR and the TT which was a shame because the ROTK's failings really do in my opinion drag the whole trilogy down.