The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
'Lord of the Rings' on Boston.com
Maybe it's just hobbit fatigue.
"The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" delivers on all the mighty expectations Peter Jackson created in "The Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers." Armies clash, towers crash, Middle-earth is made free once more. Yet where many viewers staggered out of "Towers" last year in a daze of exaltation, "Return" may leave one overwhelmed and exhausted. Hopes have been awfully high -- unfairly high -- for this crowning chapter, and a lot of us have been devoutly wishing for a grand slam. Only in that context can an inside-the-park home run be viewed with faint disappointment.
Make no mistake: "The Return of the King" unfurls with the sprawling pageantry of the first two installments, movies in which Jackson reclaimed the fantasy epic as a source of headlong astonishment. Tolkien purists will find plenty to fault with the collapsing, collating, and streamlining that has been done to the book, but with one exception -- the missing passages in which Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) truly becomes a king out of legend -- "King" is a shapelier movie for it. Those audiences who don't have halberds to grind and who possess rear ends of steel and a taste for declamatory heroics will find themselves rewarded.
"The Two Towers" began with that stunner of a sequence in which Gandalf battled the Balrog all the way down to the roots of the mountains. "The Return of the King" opens with a smaller back story: the moment in which a hobbitlike creature named Smeagol (Andy Serkis) sees his friend pull a gold ring out of a river and kills him for it. Through a series of graceful, unforgiving cuts, we see Smeagol degenerate over the centuries into Gollum, bringing us into the film's present and leaving Gollum, Frodo (Elijah Wood), and Sam (Sean Astin) at the edge of Mordor.
The Fellowship is fully scattered, and the uncommitted viewer probably needs a score card to keep track. Very well. Now that the armies of men have won the day at Helm's Deep and Treebeard's Ents have brought down Saruman's tower, Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) ride to the city of Minas Tirith in Gondor to warn the surly steward Denethor (John Noble) of the approach of Sauron's orcs. Merry (Dominic Monaghan) stays behind in Rohan while King Theoden (Bernard Hill) and Eomer (Karl Urban) put their country back in order and Eowyn (Miranda Otto) makes puppy-eyes at Aragorn. Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) hang about with little to do, a problem in the book that's exacerbated in the movie (the Dwarf in particular is limited to comic relief, as though Buddy Hackett had been brought on and handed a battle-ax).
That's the chessboard before Jackson starts moving his pieces around, and there is, in fact, something dutiful about the way "King" marches to its inexorable Mount Doom. If "Fellowship" established the world of Middle-earth and the stakes at play, and "Towers" brought the story out of the Shire and onto the endless fields of battle, the final film thunders toward its resolution without looking to either side. The sense of purpose is impressive, but all that solemnity begins to pall over the backstretch.
Jackson does pause to give us wonders, but just barely. The sequence in which the beacon fires from Gondor to Rohan are lit -- across hundreds of miles, from snowy peak to peak -- plays like Maxfield Parrish on steroids, and Aragorn's foray along the Paths of the Dead culminates in a meeting with a ghost army that flickers like a nightmare aurora borealis.
Minas Tirith itself is a gasp-inducing CGI invention: a ziggurat jutting onto the plains like a massive stone ship. Sam and Frodo's adventures in Shelob's Lair (carried over from the second novel) play out with skittery monster-movie dread, and if the battle of the Pelennor Fields, with its giant elephants clomping through the action, strikes some as reminiscent of "The Empire Strikes Back," Jackson has directed the scene with the clarity of a battle map.
The human dimension is what goes missing amid all the illuminated heroism. Not that Tolkien cared two crumpets for psychology, but there was a measure of classic tragedy in Denethor's attempts to drag surviving son Faramir (David Wenham) down with him to hopelessness and death, and that's been reduced to a Lifetime movie moment here. Doubly so for the strained relationship between elven Arwen (Liv Tyler) and her father, Elrond (Hugo Weaving), and triply so for Aragorn's coming into his sense of kingship.
Humanity is accorded mostly to the hobbits, and mostly because Frodo and Sam have nothing to do but suffer on the long road to the Cracks of Doom. There isn't a bad performance anywhere in these films, but Elijah Wood comes out of "The Lord of the Rings" with extra laurels, so wearily and sorrowfully does the actor carry the growing weight of his character's mission. Many are wounded in "The Return of the King" but only Frodo is truly scarred, and only in him are you struck by the cost of what is lost.
There are signs of haste in some of the special effects in "King," and there's also the sense that the director just doesn't want to let go: Even without the events in the book's penultimate "Scouring of the Shire" chapter, the film's final scenes feel like a road that does, in fact, go on forever. You can't blame Jackson, since the trilogy represents both the realization of a long-held dream and possibly the apex of his career: If "King" isn't everything I'd hoped, the filmmaker still deserves an Oscar for the combination of artistry and orneriness it took to get the entire project made.
Still, how do you follow a thing like this? Jackson will next tackle a remake of "King Kong," but he has announced future plans to film "The Hobbit" -- no word yet on "The Silmarillion" or "Farmer Giles of Ham." Clearly, the man strides through Tolkien's world with great joy. Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over.
'Lord of the Rings' on Boston.com
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