lucis

Saw The Return of the King today. There were three special midnight shows. I went for the one at 12:05am. It was absolutely crazy. People had been standing in queues to get in for hours. We reached around 10:30, and were very lucky to get half decent seats. First off, the previews before the movie were absolutely terrible. I dont even remember the names of the movies (well, other than Harry Potter)!

Okay, so how was it? Well, it was amazing. Clearly one of the best movies of the year. It was probably the second time that I really clapped when the movie was over (the first was Kill Bill). But it could have been better. Sadly, yes. It was not perfect. More on that later.

First the good stuff. Acting and direction was best of the three volumes. Peter Jackson did a great job in keeping the story moving at a consistent pace. The book told the story in a very different order, which I dont think would have worked for a movie quite as well. Juggling efficiently between various threads of the story, Jackson manages to make a movie that never loses the audience.

There is lots of CG in the movie - most of which is great. The battle scenes are unbelievable. The Path of Dead, Minas Tirith, Shelob, Minas Morgul, etc. all look exactly like I had imagined them when reading the book.

Quite a lot was not included in the movie. Very little of Mordor was shown - which I thought was bad. Very little was shown of Faramir, which was okay. And finally the ending was greatly reduced - no scouring of the Shire. This worked okay in my opinion. Thankfully not much was changed from the book (unlike The Two Towers).

Okay, now stuff I didnt like all that much. My first problem was with CG! Some scenes did not quite live up to the rest of the movie. Though most battle scenes were phenomenal, there were a few that appeared out of place. I clearly remember one scene where a wall of Minas Tirith fell like Lego bricks when hit with a catapult. It looked so artificial. I wonder how it made it to the final cut.

My other issue was with scale. At certain places the book gives an impression of a much bigger scale. The ents for example. In the book it appeared the entire forest was moving towards Isengard. The movie had a few lean trees that were impairing it. Then in the end from what I remember there were many other elves that left with Gandalf etc. The movie had just 3-4 elves, Frodo and Bilbo on the boat. This looked wrong to me. When Minas Tirith is shown for the first time, the camera could have had a more free motion. It seemed too restricted. They had no shots from the top that would show the whole city. They could have done much better to give a feeling of “wow, thats huge!”.

One of the reasons behind this is that it is so hard to transform from a book to a movie. A book can give you so much background information about a place or a character. Specially Tolkein spent pages explaining small stuff like the history of a place, the reason it was built, or the complete history of a character. Such things greatly enhance the picture a reader forms in his mind. This is much harder to do in a movie.

The movie makes Sam the hero towards the end. He is shown to be the more intelligent and smarter than Frodo. Again I dont remember having this feeling when I read the book. Maybe it is just that Sean Astin (Sam) is a better actor than Elijah Wood (Frodo).

I am getting really critical here. There were scenes that I felt were not perfect. Any other movie and I would be okay with it. But J R R Tolkein was a perfectionist, and for each of the LOTR movies I expected nothing less than the same perfection. In this regard I think Fellowship of the Ring was the best. ROTK was better in most other respects.

And now the worst thing about the movie… This is the last one. No more Lord of the Rings action next year. Oh well…

Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for? - Gimli

If I cannot carry the Ring, then I will carry you! - Sam

Edit: It turns out that one of the teasers at the begining of the movie was of the movie I, Robot. The preview was like a commercial for a “fully automated domestic assistant”, with no indication of the movie name anywhere. This should be an interesting movie.