"Songs for great halls"

Rating: 9/10 (26 April 2012)

Before Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the world of high fantasy has not been particularly well-served by cinema. The genre was not even really taken seriously in literature until the 1960s. During the 80s, there was a fad for fantasy movies, but while most of these looked nice and were good enough fun, none of them really had magnificence (although the 1981 Excalibur movie comes pretty close). It was not until the first decade of the 20th century that we saw fantasy cinema's rather delayed coming-of-age.
As with the first two movies in the trilogy the transition from novel to screenplay is exceptional. There's a lot more action and a lot less dialogue in this one, and yet the plot is still clear and the narrative never feels repetitive. The idea of binding the various story lines together in time – such as when the Witch-King arises near Frodo and Sam, but the tower of green light is seen miles away by Pippin – are great for building up the tension. They also really help to establish this vision of Middle Earth as a real place with vast dimensions.
And again Jackson proves himself to be an action director with that little extra flair of intelligence. At first glance his work seems very much aimed at those with short attention spans, but there is so much loaded into each and every shot, the camera following an orc as he falls to the ground, or coming to rest upon a woman holding a baby as panic erupts in the city. His horror-tinged imagining of certain scenes is truly unnerving.
There is some all-round improved acting in this instalment. Perhaps the years wrapped up in the production were taking the necessary toll on the cast. There are some truly heartfelt moments from Bernard Hill and a wonderfully spirited turn from Miranda Otto. For me, Billy Boyd always stood out as the finest of the hobbit performers, and this is the movie where he comes to the forefront, demonstrating great dignity and emotion. The best performance however, as previously, belongs to Ian McKellen as Gandalf. There's something strangely knowing in his final scene.
One of the unfortunate things about The Return of the King is that it suffers worse than the first two movies from a lack of dignity at certain times. The CGI Gollum is too cutesy and it's hard to believe in him as an antagonist, although funnily enough the glimpse we get of partly-transformed Smeagol biting into a fish with Andy Serkis in prosthetics would have been perfect for the whole thing. Some of the most serious bits become silly. I remember laughing out loud in the cinema when Gandalf says "So passes Denethor" when the man is still pathetically running around in flames.
But by-and-large, this is an exceptional production, with its most outstanding touches in the way the whole thing has been put together. When the beacons are lit stretching a line across a mountain range, it's done in such a smooth, rhythmic way we are simultaneously impressed by the immense scale, the beauty of the landscape and the sheer brilliance of it as a means of communication. When Pippin's haunting song continues in the background as the men of Gondor ride off to their doom, we feel the depth of what is going on in a way the images alone could not impart. This is the kind of thinking you don't see in those numerous 80s fantasy movies, or in sci-fi's big trilogy, Star Wars. The Lord of the Rings movies put us right within both the excitement and the sadness of the story, for me with greater weight than Tolkien himself achieved. It elevates this above being merely another CGI action flick and grants the fantasy genre a status and stature it has never enjoyed before.