Return of the King nitpicks

Whenever I see a film, it usually takes me two viewings — or, if two viewings isn’t warranted, a few days after seeing the film — for me to really lock down my impressions of the film. The first time I go in, I essentially empty my mind, and accept the reality of the film as it’s presented to me, and it’s generally not until some time after the film, or after the second viewing, that I really start to analyze it on a more critical level. While this doesn’t give me much hope for a career as a professional reviewer, as I don’t like being overly critical on my initial viewing, I’ve found it generally tends to work well for me for solidifying — or altering — my opinions of movies in the long run.

After watching Return of the King for the second time today, I’m still quite solidly convinced that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is, quite simply, one of the greatest achievements in filmmaking in recent years. However, that doesn’t stop me from finding the occasional odd thing to mention…such as two goofs, and a few choices that I’m not entirely happy with.

First off, the goofs — and why not start with the worst of the two that I noticed?

One of the most beautiful shots in the trailer for The Two Towers was a sweeping helicopter shot of Eddoras that started close in on Eowyn as she stood before the Great Hall, then pulled back and around, giving an incredible panorama of Eddoras and the surrounding countryside. That shot never made it into the final cut of The Two Towers (either the theatrical or the extended version), but about half of it has been used in Return of the King as the opening shot of Eddoras as the Rohirrim return home from Helm’s Deep. Unfortunately, in a surprisingly bad choice, rather than moving from Eowyn out, we start with a wide shot of Eddoras and track in…which required running the already filmed shot backwards, something which is made all too obvious by the smoke being apparently sucked into the chimneys of the houses! Someone wasn’t paying quite as much attention as the should have been when that shot was approved.

Now on to goof number two. Just after Eowyn dispatches the Witch King and his fell beast, she turns to comfort the fallen Theoden, and we see them from directly above. We see Eowyn crouched over her father, who lies on his back on the ground, the corpse of his horse across the lower part of his torso. We can see his upper torso from approximately waist level and up, but we can also see his boots projecting from underneath the horse. As far as I can tell, either his boots were knocked off during the fall (and just happened to fall where they did, both with the toes pointed upwards), or Theoden was actually somewhere around eight or nine feet tall! It’s a fairly short shot, but once I saw his feet sticking out from underneath the horse’s belly, it was a little hard to suppress a slight laugh.

As far as editing choices I wish had been different, there are four that really stick out to me.

First off, along with many other people, I really wish that we’d been given some closure with Saruman. Considering how much of a presence he was in the first two films, having him so conspicuously absent this time is definitely somewhat jarring, and for some reason it seemed to be more so this time around. Not only would it have given us more satisfaction than an almost casual “well, we just don’t have to worry about him anymore,” it would have helped to explain Pippin’s discovery of the Palantir lying in the waters outside Isengard — which as it is, without seeing Wormtongue’s foolish tantrum where he tries to bean Gandalf with whatever he can find at hand to throw, seems far too convenient of a coincidence. Of course, I’d also like to see Wormtongue get his comeuppance after Saruman realizes what he’s just managed to do, too…

I kind of wish that either the sequence where the Witch King tells one of his Orc henchman that he will deal with Gandalf had been left out, or the confrontation between the two on the ramparts of Minas Tirith had been left in. Instead, now we have a setup with no payoff. It’s easy enough to rationalize it away — that the battle was hectic enough that the Witch King ended up confronting Eowyn before he got around to Gandalf — but it still ends up feeling a little kludgy.

Also, some resolution with the Orc commander would have been good. He’s a definite presence all throughout the taking of Osgiliath and the first part of the siege of Minas Tirith, but then he just disappears in the chaos — again, setup without payoff.

In a series where the main bad guy is never actually realized as a physical presence beyond the prologue sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring, it seems to me that it’s important for us to get as much resolution as possible with the bad guys that we do get to see. In TFotR we had Lurtz (the leader of Saruman’s band of Uruk-Hai), and in TTT we had Saruman (while we didn’t see the final resolution to his storyline, we did get the satisfaction of watching the Ents lay waste to Isengard while Saruman watched and fumed from the balcony). In RotK, of the three possible cathartic victories — Saruman, the Orc Commander, and the Witch King — we only got to see one of them. Admittedly, the one we did get to see was wonderful (even with a more reserved audience than that of opening weekend at the Cinerama, her “I am no man!” line still got cheers and applause from the audience), but it would have been more satisfying if Saruman and the Orc commander had been dealt with on screen as well.

And lastly, as much as I enjoy the opening sequence giving us Gollum’s backstory, I can’t help but think that Andy Serkis adopted the Gollum personality far too quickly. I’d always understood Gollum’s persistent use of “us” when referring to himself as an indication of his split personality between Gollum, twisted and corrupted by the Ring, and Smeagol, the essentially good Hobbit-like creature unfortunately ensnared by the will of Sauron. That impression is only strengthened in sequences where, when Smeagol confronts Gollum, the Smeagol personality refers to himself as “I” or “me”, where the Gollum personality continues to refer to itself as “us”. It’s as if Gollum, as the Ring and the will of Sauron, knows that no matter how strong his hold over his victim is, there is still some slight danger that Smeagol will reassert himself, and so Gollum must continually keep watch and keep Smeagol under control.

However, in RotK’s prologue sequence, Serkis lapses into his “Gollum voice” as soon as he sees the Ring being held by Deagol, instantly demanding that Deagol “gives it to us.” I don’t remember offhand just how this was handled in the book, but I’d always had it in my head that the division between Smeagol and Gollum and the self-referential “us” would have appeared over time as Smeagol battled for what sense of himself he could retain under the influence of the Ring. And, even if the plural form of self address was an affectation of Smeagol’s before coming into possession of the Ring, I would have preferred it if the “Gollum voice” didn’t kick in until later on in his deterioration.

The really funny thing for me is that with the things I’ve outlined above — especially the last four points, as goofs can creep into any movie, no matter how well planned — I find RotK as a single movie the least deserving of a Best Picture Oscar than either FotR or TTT. Taking all three as single entities in and of themselves, I’d probably put FotR at the top of the heap, with RotK just after it and TTT at the end. Now, taking all three as a single entity, especially when factoring in the Extended Edition versions of the first two (and projecting the extended version of RotK, as some of the issues I brought up are supposed to be addressed in its extended DVD release next November), I think that not only does the entire Lord of the Rings series deserve just about every Oscar in the book, but that Peter Jackson should be given some sort of special achievement award for being able to so successfully translate Tolkein’s work to film (is it too early in his career for a lifetime achievement award?). I just find RotK’s theatrical version to be the clumsiest of the three theatrical releases.

In any case, it was still a lot of fun to see the movie again in the theater, and I definitely look forward to adding it to my collection to view many more times over the coming years. All of the nitpicks I have with the film are really fairly minor in the long run, and as mentioned, the Extended Edition should take care of a good number of them upon its release. Too bad that’s not until next November!