Our Long National Nightmare is Over

Rating: Null/10 (1 February 2004)

When I reviewed `The Two Towers' a year ago I came up with what I thought was a good line: It's `a three hour tour of a nightmare conducted by a cast of Lears'. I now think perhaps the best reference is to Wagner. You half expect Brunehilda to march on the screen singing `Ride of the Valkries' at any moment. I found I can only take so much of churning battle scenes and the endless climb up mile high mountains and towers before I start looking at my watch. This film not only has that but an extra half hour of crownings, weddings and tearful goodbyes. And where the heck are they sailing at the end?
The film is, as with its processors, primarily a technical achievement. The special effects in this series exceed that of anything I have ever seen. Any other movie looks like it was made a century ago by comparison. What is lacking is any real sense of adventure or leavening humor. This is the most grim-faced cast of heroes any movie ever had. It badly needs an iconoclastic character like Han Solo and scenes like the cantina scene from Star Wars to cut through all the overwrought dramatics. Instead we get still another battle and still another cliff. Even the effects seem less designed to tell the story than they are to show themselves off. They talk about one army being 6,000 strong and the other 10,000. That's as many people as are in sections of football stadiums. Here we see line after line of warriors stretching off to the horizon.
At least Elijah Wood is given something to do besides look worried. All of the best scenes in this are with him, Sean Astin and Andy Serkis as Smeagol, `The Golem', who is by far my favorite character. They do battle with giant spiders, each other and themselves as they try to resist the lure of the ring. When they go off the screen so we can witness another computer generated battle, the film gets much less interesting.
That said, I agree with a friend of mine who is much more of a fan of this that Peter Jackson and the film deserve to be recognized by the Academy for the extent of their achievement. I believe the films have to be evaluated as a trilogy or even as three parts of the same story and, given that there were no really great films out this year, (although several were good), I wouldn't mind if this won best picture and director Oscars. Certainly if they had released all three segments in the same year, it would have blown anything else away. The producers of the other contenders are insisting that they should only have to compete with `Return of the King' but I don't think they are going to get their wish.