Boring

Rating: 10/10 (5 January 2004)

"The Lord of the Rings" is not three features but one film broken into three parts. The first two parts, "Fellowship of the Rings" and "The Two Towers" were impressive and interesting. In "The Return of the King", just as with Hobbiton, Moria, Rivendell, Lothlorien, Rohan and Helm's Deep, the new sites like Minas Tirith and Dunharrow were impressive (and Minas Tirith got a "Wow" from me). However, as with the other films, the characters are unengaging and, while the battle scenes are moderately more decipherable than the first two installments of the film (in this one, you can at least tell who is killing whom), there's odd variations from the book (where is the Scouring of the Shire? What on middle-earth was that unnecessary spectacle of the death of Denethor?) and movie cliches that seem to be derivative of such sources as "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Taken as a movie to itself, the whole was unengaging and while it's pretty to look at so that it wasn't altogether tedious, it was three and a half hours of (mitigated) boredom. Perhaps when the DVD -- with extra footage that may explain such things as the inexplicable disappearance of Saruman, and when the three parts are seen in some sort of continuity -- maybe then the film of the greatest (fictional) story ever told will be engaging. Otherwise, "The Return of the King" had all the wonderful and antiseptic spectacle of a freshly scrubbed art museum.