Excellent....But!

Rating: Null/10 (18 December 2003)

The film is excellent; perhaps the most excellent film I have ever seen.

Could anything have been better ?
Yes. Firstly, the makers missed a great opportunity to show us the deteriorating relationship between Saruman and Wormtongue that leads to Wormtongue eventually strangling his master. Christopher Lee and Brad D'ourif were absolutely fabulous in TTT and shouldn't have been let go in RotK - they could have cut some of the more syrupy (although still well done) ending scenes to convey the misery of these two characters.
Secondly, the scouring of the Shire is an important part of the book and a rather sad one. What really happened in the book is that Saruman - whose realm Isengard is destroyed in TTT wanders north with sidekick Wormtongue and captures the Shire and turns it into an awful industrialised and militarised dump - all the teletubby style scenery you seen in FotR and TTT is turned into slag heap wasteground.
Saruman does this to create his own power base. Tolkein put this in to reflect his own sadness at how his native area of western England was industrialised in the early 20th century (he positively hated industrialised). But this motif goes back to Homer - in the Odysey Ulysses returns victorious to his native lands only to see it having been destroyed (there are paralells of this idea also in the celtic mythology of Ossian). Basically are heroes are supposed to endure one last moment of awfulness after their victory and this is it. Of course it would have been bit of a downer for the cinema audience and this is probably why they scrapped it. But they could have compromised by showing the scouring of the shire, and the killing of Saruman by D'Ourif and the rebuilding of the Shire. This would have been even better than the 30 minute ending they did have.
A few other little remarks:
The day after the battle of the fields of pellenor the thousands of corpses of orcs, trolls and other creatures have mysteriously vanished from the battle field. A bit careless that. Also Minas Tirith, which has generous chunks knocked off it by orc artillery, is spanking new a few weeks after the battle.
But in spite of all this, the film is a tremendous achievement for Jackson. I can't help wondering how the same guy who produced "Braindead" (a hilarious but very tacky low budget horror movie) could have turned out this achievement.