Too many changes

Rating: Null/10 (6 January 2004)

"Lord Of The Rings will become a milestone in movie history."

It will, indeed. Peter Jackson pronounces Return of the King the best of the three movies. I think it's the worst, because it makes the most changes to Tolkien's story. It deletes many sequences, about which more in a moment, and adds many others. I wanted to see Tolkien's story; I have no interest in Jackson's embellishments. My opinion of this movie was somewhat rescued by a perceptive usenet poster who summarized the many scenes, and there were a lot of them, quoted verbatim from the book.
I thought the whole journey into Mordor (or as Elrond says, Mor-r-dor-r) was very poorly done. The business with the lembas was a Jackson improvement sarcasm mode completely unnecessary. He might have been better served filming Beregond, a character whose interaction with Aragorn serves to demonstrate Aragorn as a wise king, or Aragorn's confrontation with Sauron via the palantir, which serves to establish Aragorn as a power in middle earth, the equal of Elendil and Isildur, his illustrious forebears. It wasn't Frodo who came across as a wuss here. It was Aragorn.
Having read the book a number of times, I have no quarrel with the ending of the movie. I thought the staging of that ending was ineffectual and it defenestrated the considerable pathos that Tolkien so poignantly evoked, but it was Tolkien's ending. I would have been thoroughly upset if the movie had ended any other way. I am probably the only person who thought the ending was too short, and left out much from Tolkien's appendices that could have been included in an epilogue.
The Grey Havens sucked, no other way to say it. It struck me as if Jackson had invested himself so much in the Battle of Pelennor Fields and the siege of Minas Tirith, he had nothing left for one of the grandest chapters in this marvelous story, and one of the saddest: the passing of elven-kind from the affairs of men into the uttermost west. The book evokes a terrible, achingly poignant sense of loss - the loss of grandeur - that the movie altogether misses.
The short version: too many discomforting changes .. Good but not great. 7 out of 10