Kick-ass finale

Rating: 10/10 (1 January 2005)

Final chapter in Tolkien trilogy returns to the standard set by fantastic first entry. Corrects it's course from the in-comparison-only lesser Towers, which suffered from two significant faults: 1) pointless deviations from the source material, the best fantasy work ever written; and 2) a tendency to make the odds against our heroes laughably impossible. Not that this one is perfect on those counts but it tries a little harder, maybe they felt Towers needed more ummmph or something. We're talking a good 500 pages or so for Return, they do about as nice a job of stuffing the material in as they can. Pretty much flawless acting, my personal favorite being Hill as Theoden King of Rohan. Real nice job on lighting the warning beacons, a dazzling combination of sight and sound (although I still would have preferred it "by the book" while Gandalf and Pippin are on the fly to Gondor). I lived with these books so much as a kid I get choked up throughout this movie it's visualized so well. Tolkien was a master of having his characters (often Gandalf, sometimes Galadriel, but not always so) say the perfect lifetime-memorable line; somehow with all this effort they still miss some of the great ones. But I guess nobody's perfect. Great movie. 10 out of 10