#18: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Extended Edition)

Release Date: December 17th, 2003

Format: Streaming (Max)

Written by: Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh

Directed by: Peter Jackson

3.5 Stars

There is plenty of nitpicking I could do with these individual Lord of the Rings movies. You have to understand that these are movies by nerds, for nerds. Hence, they come with a few issues.

First, it’s a complete bro-fest. I haven’t read J.R.R. Tolkien’s source material, but as far as Peter Jackson’s adaptations are concerned, male-bonding is a dominant theme, possibly the dominant theme, of the whole saga. Females are largely absent from this 8-hour movie. Think about that for a sec. There are, I think, three minor female characters in an 8-hour movie. That’s incredible. It astounded me that Jackson’s two co-writers are female, especially when considering that the women who do appear in the films are a sort of male nerd’s fantasy of an ideal woman: Beautiful, nurturing, understanding, patiently waiting for their little hero to triumphantly return. A girlfriend and mother wrapped into one. 

Another nitpick I have with the LotR trilogy is the fact that magic and magical skills are the antidote to brute force. This is how nerds defeat, at least in theory, their enemies. The orcs in LotR are stand-ins for mean high school dickheads; the Uruk-hai are clearly mindless, jock football players. Nerds are hobbits who want to fantasize that they are Aragorn, or at the very least Legolas. In LotR the ragtag hobbits are able to bravely defeat their invading enemies, but how realistic is that? If we’re in Europe during the Roman Empire or Greenland circa 900 A.D., the strong win and the weak lose 100% of the time.

But you may be saying, this is fantasy! Beautiful nurturing women and magical heroism, isn’t that encoded in the genre? Perhaps so.

Can I at least nitpick the emotional ham-fistedness of the dialogue? That can’t be blamed on fantasy genre-writing tropes, can it? The LotR movies succeed despite the dialogue, not because of it, and some of the actors are better with it than others (I’m not sure the film’s main actor, Elijah Wood, is the best, unfortunately).

But do my minor issues with LotR and the fantasy genre in general get in the way of enjoying Peter Jackson’s saga? That is a resounding no, absolutely not.

Despite its flaws, I think The Lord of the Rings is the best mainstream, big budget trilogy of all-time. Damn it if I didn’t get teary-eyed at the end of Return of the King. And this is I think the fourth time that I’ve watched the series. That’s over 30 hours of Lord of the Rings.

The reason that I go back to it, and why I think a lot of fans go back to it, is that it really is a journey. We, the audience, are part of the Fellowship when we watch these films. 

They achieve something that, say, Star Wars never could, in that there is a singular narrative force driving the characters at the same time it is driving us. The films were shot at the same time, using the same source material, and overseen by a talented and driven filmmaker with a singular vision.

It’s magical. Well done nerds, well done.