A Self Important Yawn-Fest

Rating: 3/10 (28 December 2003)

There is no reason why this film needed to be three and a half hours long. You could trim the last hour of the film that is just a never-ending farewell that could have been completed in about 15 minutes. There are also plenty of dramatic pauses and sluggish scenes that should be on the editing room floor. Even the battle scenes are redundant. Didn't we basically see the assault on Gondor in the second installment? How many times do we need to see an overwhelming numbers of Orcs being inexplicably defeated by a depleted band of humans? Everyone who thinks that this is great epic film making needs to go back and take another look at films like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Spartacus or even Gone with the Wind. These films use their long formats to build characters and emotion whereas The Return of the King just piles on the battles and speeches and teary-eyed goodbyes to no overall effect (plus some were kind enough to include an intermission). It's as if Jackson believed that a film has too be bloated and long in order to be important. This is an epic waste of time.