ROTK review

this evening i had the pleasure of seeing return of the king-- a sneak preview.

my expectations were pretty locked in, having seen the prior two movies in both their conventional and extended versions, and for the most part the three-quel was what i expected. unfortunately due to some downright annoying things i'd be hard pressed not to rate this as the bottom of the three.

first off, there's the glaring omission of the scouring of the shire. like it or not, it's a pretty major part of the story. after all, it involves saruman (sir not-appearing-in-this-film). without it, he could still be holed up in isengard or whatever. the whole point of the scouring of the shire was to demonstrate how far the hobbits had come in their adventure, and that evil isn't always completely gone when you think it is. completely omitting it and making the shire seem exactly as they left it when they return seemed to be over-sugar coating it a bit for a happy ending.

when a movie runs 3.5 LONG HOURS, and still manages to leave out a major portion of the story and consequently several loose ends untied, you really wonder what the director was thinking. i can deal with the other liberties taken in the conversion, but when there's gobs of battle sequences, a few of which are very similar to those in TTT, i keep on reminding myself that there's supposed to be a story told here.

i had finally come to terms with the lack of the songs from the books in the last two movies, when ROTK has to go and include them for some reason. i would have been ok with this slightly irregular incident, except the songs are delivered in such a detatched and uncomfortable manner that they can't be viewed as anything but an afterthought.

three things caught me as a poor revisit of TTT: legolas wrangling the oliphant, and the killing contest. legolas swinging himself onto a horse was graceful and in character, and even though it was identifiable as cg it was short enough that you didn't really care. the oliphant oreal was superfluous and unbelievable only somewhat due to the cg.

overall the acting seemed stiff and wooden in comparison to the last two. apparently elijah wood thought that bearing no emotion whatsoever would be a good interpretation of the weight of the ring. the scene at mount doom was well played, though.

the fellowship of the ring was good because of the adventure, the two towers was good because of the battle scenes and the interaction of frodo/samwise/gollum, and return of the king was in many ways just a rehash of the themes of the two towers. in many ways, the fellowship of the ring was better at portraying the menacing evil of the ring than return of the king. the scenes involving frodo and sam and gollum just weren't that convincing. consequently sam saving frodo is much less dramatic too.

and i guess this had to be said, but there's unbridled hobbit homoeroticism in this one. i know i wasn't the only one, as i overheard conversations about it as i was walking out of the theatre. needless to say, there's an abundance of hobbits holding each other, hobbits with their arms around each other, hobbits bouncing on another hobbit's bed, hobbits touching other hobbits faces, etc.