A Great Achievement

Rating: 6/10 (1 February 2004)

After an almost unbearable wait I was able to finally see this film. I plan to see it again, but for now this will do. Sometimes you hear so much about something that your expectations reach the sky and when you finally see it, it is a bit of a disappointment. i would not call ROTK a disappointment, but it could have been even better. It is astounding that the 3 LOTR movies were delivered every December for 3 years on schedule. The whole trilogy was filmed at once, and the individual parts came out as the three LOTR movies. It is an amazing feat.
First, what I loved about the movie. The special effects, art direction, the magnificence of everything are unparalleled. In fact without the technological advances this movie could not have been made. The acting was excellent, even though nobody won an Oscar nomination. The characters were well developed throughout the trilogy, and by the time I saw ROTK, I knew them pretty well. This is an example of fantastic story telling. I particularly liked the part toward the end where Frodo feels the ill effects of carrying the ring and is going to be a victim of greed, but Sam pulls him back from disaster. It stresses what kind of a selfless and devoted person Sam is, and how difficult the task of carrying the ring had been all along. Even Frodo had difficulty with it. The last scenes where everything is burning are out of this world.
Now the (somewhat) negatives. I felt, as I did in Two Towers, that the story was sacrificed a bit to accommodate the special effects, the war, etc. The fighting got just a bit too long for me. I would have preferred to see more about the story- e.g. why did Arwyn (Liv Tyler) give up her immortality to marry Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen)? I would have liked to see more dialogues/interaction between good and evil (Gandalf and Saruman). We saw some of this in earlier LOTR movies, but it would have been nice to somehow bring those into the final movie. At the end when Aragorn marries Arwyn, it seems too sudden.
Except for a few minor flaws this is a great movie, and a great trilogy. I hope it wins the Best Picture Oscar and possibly the Best Director Oscar too. When you consider the long list of people involved in the making of this film, this is a monumental achievement.