Best that could be made but still not a great film

Rating: Null/10 (12 January 2004)

I don't believe that Return of the King is a great film, or that Jackson's trilogy is a great trilogy in the sense that the Godfather films are great. That being said, I don't know if a better adaptation of LOTR could be brought to the big screen given the challenges that face any director attempting to make a film of Tolkein's books. For that reason I am reluctant to offer the following three criticisms:
possible *SPOILERS* and tedious literary analysis ahead.
1. Jackson doesn't address the underlying themes dealing with power, corruption, war, and so on contained in the books, or if he does address them he does so lightly and in passing. I liked Tolkein's books because, to me, they represented the attempt of a tweedy Oxford professor who grew up on King Arthur and Beowulf to come to terms with the modern horrors of the World Wars. Although the premise of the books was essentially silly, with plenty of elves and dragons and wizards, and the writing archaic (Tolkein's heroes are always "tall", just as heroes in Homer are always "godlike" or "royal" even when they are being cowardly), there was enough about the twentieth century tucked away that I found them well worth reading. Jackson portrays some of the horror of war (the children fighting in Helm's Deep in Two Towers), but his images are usually cliched (the friend dies, the mother loses her child) and the battle at Minas Tirith in Return of the King ends disappointingly with a big green CGI blob eating up the enemy armies. As well, the temptations of power tormented every character in the books who came face to face with the Ring - in the movies it's only Boromir who really agonises. 2. Like most literary heroes, the main heroes in Tolkein's books all underwent some sort of death and rebirth. Gandalf actually dies, Frodo appears to die when Shelob stings him, and Aragorn undergoes a symbolic death when he takes the Paths of the Dead. There are (not very exciting) reasons for this which go back to the earliest civilisations and which have profoundly influenced the development of a variety of world religions. This may have been too subtle for Jackson, however, as he adds another sequence into Towers where Aragorn appears to die and then returns dramatically. As a result, Aragorn's symbolic death and rebirth in Return of the Kings loses some of its resonance. 3. Particularly in Return of the King, Jackson avoids simple, direct storytelling and resorts to complicated action sequences. I think part of the problem is that, in Frodo, Jackson had to deal with an almost completely passive hero - all Frodo does is endure suffering - while making a movie for a modern audience with a taste for superhero protagonists. As a result, the sequence with Shelob becomes a tangled mess of running here and there, falling, fighting, and reconciling. The climax, as well, with Frodo at the Cracks of Doom, suffers mightily in comparison to the same scene in the book, which does not involve an extended tussle between Frodo and Gollum, nor the painfully overdone "hero hanging from the cliff while his buddy reaches for him and tells the hero to trust him" scene which we are subjected to in the movie.
In summary, Return of the King is, I believe, the best version of the book audiences are likely to see, given all the circumstances, but it is very much a light version of Tolkein's story.