An excellent Fairy tale, skillfully crafted!

Rating: 10/10 (20 December 2003)

I always loved to read great fairy tales - and, of course, I wanted to see the one or the other fairytale as a movie. But every movie I saw before Peter Jackson came along with his Lord Of The Rings adaptation, had always sorely failed (in my opinion). The only fairytale movie, aside from the 3 LOTR movies, I can watch is the Director's Cut of Legend.
The LOTR movies managed to "wake up" a strange nostalgia inside of me, I remember the times I read fantasy/fairytale books (for those of you who can read the German language I highly recommend the fairytale books of Ernst Wiechert, BTW). And I always tip toed around the Lord Of The Rings books - and never came around to read them. Mostly I didn't have the time, but also I think I was pretty scared by the size of these books together.
Now with the magnificent and deeply satisfying third part of his movie trilogy, Peter Jackson has succeeded in bringing the books back to my attention. Sure, purists will say I should have read the books first and then see the movies. They will say the movies spoiled the books for me. But I will disagree: I was able to watch the movies totally unbiased, without scrutinizing them. I was able to take them on as excellent storytelling and movie making achievements by themselves, but also as a first wonderfully enchanting magnifying-glass-look at a vaster, deeper fantasy epic.
And now I started to read the books. I was skillfully primed by the LOTR movies - and after having a relaxed great, unspoiled fun time at the movies I can relax even more and go on the (mental) journey to Middle Earth to discover everything else there is to see.
Like the first and the second part, Return Of The Kind deserves a 10 out of 10.