It was awful. Spoilers beyond.
I have, as yet, held off on getting the Two Towers on DVD, because the second movie felt like a bridge, and I wanted to make sure that it was going somewhere I wanted to be before shelling out the sheckels. I've come to understand that the second movie much improved by the additional material available to the home audience.
Let me use that as the scale by which to measure Return of the King: I don't believe the supplementary material will save it.
Scenery: excellent, as one would expect.
Landscapes (non actor scenery): middle middle. When the leave New Zealand alone, it looks great. Gondor is well presented. Mordor lacks menace.
Musical score: intrusive.
Regard for source material: poor. The skeleton is ok, but the flesh is missing. Strider, having saved Rohan, picks up the hobbits at Isendard. Pippen and Gandalf ride ahead to Gondor. Aragorn persuades (!) the Rohirrim to ride to Gondor's defense. Aragorn takes off to deal with the corsairs. Faramir returns from the river, rides out again to earn his father's blessing, gets dumped on the pyre during the seige. The Rohirrim return in time for Eowyn to kill Angelmar, Aragorn arrives in time to save the day. Frodo and Sam deal with Shelob, the tower, and the mountain. Aragorn brings the army of the west to the black gate to die, Gollum fulfills his part.
But it is all whacked. The scene in Isengard exists only to rejoin the twin forces of incompetance and destruction to the fellowship. Treebeard: I can handle the orcs, but a wizard is another matter. Gandalf: just leave him on the cutting room floor, he won't bother anybody.
Part of the problem is Aragorn, of course. This is his coming of age story, so he has to be the one taking the leadership role. Which leaves little for Gandalf to do - so he ends up telling Aragorn what is going on. So Aragorn doesn't need the palantir - so no confrontation with Sauron. The palantir is no longer important, other than as a plot device to get Pippin to Minas Tirith first. So it becomes a trinket that he finds in the water in Isengard. Sauron and Grima get to take the night of the premier off.
Paths of the Dead? No, that became a walk through a mountain, or some such thing. The battle with the corsairs is never seen. We know about it, because Elrond warns of them. Wait, what's he doing there? Well, somebody had to bring Anduril to Aragorn, and Arwen can't do it because she's dying - apparently when she declared her undying love for Aragorn, she became Sauron's soul mate,etc.
Angelmar is a complete waste of screen time. Sure, Eowyn gets to kill him, but the entire Dernhelm bit goes by the wayside. Gandalf foreshadows the arival of the great king. The lich arrives on his winged mount. Eowyn chops the head off the mount, Merry stabs him in the foot (with a mortal weapon; recall that he never visited the barrows), she stabs him in the visor, and limps to say goodbye to daddy.
Pippen must have the legs of an Uruk-hai, judging from the number of times he runs up and down the stairs of Gondor. What a wreck. Remember, the palantir is effectively written out of the story, so Denethor can't have one - so his madness and depression are completely unexplained (he can't see the corsairs, for instance). So he spends most of his time eating and being thumped by Gandalf. The entire opening exchange twixt Pippen and Denethor is reduced to a swearing of loyalty and a few bits of comic relief where Gandalf thumps on Pippen to make certain he is still in top form. Gandalf, after this warmup, pulls a Yoda during the defense of the city.
In fairness, John Noble almost manages to save the part he has been cast in.
The scene at the black gate is absurd. No mouth of Sauron, of course, and Viggo gets to re-enact his (failed) audition for the role of William Wallace, and then... Deux Ex.
I think the problem is that PJ didn't work out how to show magic in this world. The armies of Mordor are formiddable because of the mages that lead them; but instead Jackson invested in novelty and number. Fault one is that you then need to make the actual fighters pathetic to give the good guys any sort of hope, AND you have to arbitrarily wipe them off the board when the spell caster falls (because 10-1 odds, including a total lack of air support, really REALLY suck).
On the other plot: Smeagol became a caricature of himself, I think. Shelob is, well not terribly interesting. The imprisonment in the tower just becomes absurd - no mysterious elf warrior here, just Sam kicking asses (not very many, but enough that he isn't just sneaking past). Trudge to the mountain, run into Galadriel (WTF!?) Frodo loses heart, but Smeagol saves the day.
Side note number one - Smeagol's death sucks, in the sense that it is a clean CGI rendering of an absurdly wrong picture.
Side note number two - the letters appear on the ring before it sinks into the lava. Nice touch that.
The leave the mountain, get rescued by the Eagles (who sent the moth to warn Gandalf of their arrival in advance, having forgotten that moths are slower and tend not to take direct routes).
The awakening orgy is on Frodo's bed, rather than Sam's. Oh look, a curtain call. Whoops, we still have to crown Aragorn. Why is Gimli the flower girl? And despite neither of them visiting the Houses of Healing (or being treated by Aragorn, for that matter), Faramir seems to have hooked up with Eowyn. Maybe she's just easy.
And, of course, the crowning ceremony ends with all of the lords bowing to the hobbits. In this story, Frodo is a legitimate hero (following the fine tradition of Phineas Fogg getting credit for all of Passepartout's heroics. But Merry and Pippen have done fuckall in this one. Useless pair of doorstops, both of them.
No scouring of the shire, of course. Just a quick return to the Green Dragon where after a pint or two, Sam is drunk enough to try bedding a girl for a change. Frodo can only stand being jilted for so long before he escapes to the havens - oops, no, "the harbor". Oh, the Gamgees don't live happily ever after in Bag End.
Acting: none. Noble gets a pass. As for the rest, see scenery.
I will not be going to see PJ's version of the Hobbit, if that happens, unless I get buried in good reviews.
December 18, 2003 8:40 AM
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