Return Of The King

ByThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

First, the good stuff: as always, Aragorn, The Movie beats the crap out of Aragorn, King Of Forsoothspeak. By the time you get to the end of the movie you really want him to be king, whereas in the book I was just mightily sick of his high-heroic-diction ass. I also liked Legolamb and Giblet in this movie, especially the battle at Minas Tirith. The whole notches-on-the-axe-haft casualty competition was kept going without making it a bigger deal than it deserved to be (I especially liked Legolas counting to himself under his breath as he charges through the lines impaling people) and although my tolerance for gratuitous action stunts is low, I admit that Legolas's fight with the gigantic elephant was pretty cool, even if the whole thing was just a setup for Gimli's punch line. I find that the preparing-for-the-battle stuff is more affecting to me than the actual battles, because I can relate to people trying to psych themselves up to face certain death better than I can relate to weapons and armor and whatnot. I liked Gandalf's conversation with Pippin about what happens after death, which is saved from cheese by the fact that you can tell how badly Pippin needs to be having that conversation at this moment. Eowyn also comes across better in the film than in the book, I think, even though she gets less screen time overall; she spends less time mooning around after Aragorn and more time beheading Nazgul mounts. While it is true that I found the "If you touch him I will kill you" line unnecessary--as I said to Liza, "I'd recommend you kill him even if he *doesn't* touch Theoden"--we were both highly gratified by her Brunnhilde Moment at the end, especially since every time that @#$! Nazgul bragged about how he couldn't be killed by any man, we both kept going, "Yeah, but she's not a man, she's a woman!"

(You all know, right, that when Siegrfried finds Brunnhilde asleep on the rock at the end of *Siegfried* and he starts undoing her armor, he yelps, "This is no man!" right before he finally learns the meaning of fear? Well, he does, and that's just one of the ways in which Wagner's *Ring* is all over this saga, but I digress.)

The Mount Doom segments had a lot of good stuff--Gollum falling toward his fiery death with a huge smile on his face, Frodo panicking/fighting his way through Shelob's lair (Hobbits and giant spiders...never a good combination), Sam hauling Frodo bodily up the slope, Sam handing the ring back to Frodo while making you nervous that it's finally going to turn them against each other for good, and the two of them sitting on the rock waiting for the world to end. There were also some unfortunate things, which I will address in good time. But my favorite part of this movie, and I'm sure that the producers tried to get Jackson to take this out, was the lighting-the-beacons sequence.

I don't know, there was something about it that got me choked up, and I think it has to do with being aware of the world outside the movie theater. The suspense comes from the fact that you know the beacon system will only work if every link in the chain holds. If there's one town in the chain where everyone's been massacred or they've stopped putting a guard up there or they just don't give a shit any more, the signal never gets there. So every time you see another beacon light up, that's one more town in the middle of this wilderness where people are still trying to help each other. It's an achievement, and a strike against darkness, just to get the signal all the way down the chain; and then there is that awful moment of suspense when Aragorn comes running in and you're not sure that Theoden is going to do the right thing, and then he does.

That's what makes the books work for me: people getting over themselves and their differences and histories and ambitions and greed and whatever and coming together to beat something that would otherwise destroy them. It's the kind of thing that needs to happen right now, and the kind of thing that frankly I find harder and harder to imagine in the real world.

OK, moment's over, now comes the griping.

Like I keep saying, you can't tell a movie the same way you tell a book, and there's a lot of stuff that was changed that didn't bother me. Our friend Jay, for instance, was livid about the fact that they cut the whole thing with Sharkey and the shire at the end. I personally was glad to see it go. I said to Liza, "It's the worst and most pointless part of the whole series," and she said, "Is it worse than Tom Bombadil?" and I said, "OK, the second worst and most pointless." Jay also told us, before we went to see it, that "they changed something at Mount Doom," and Liza became convinced that they were going to "hero Frodo up" and make him throw the ring in himself instead of having to have Gollum bite it off him. I said that probably they would just give Sam more to do, because Jackson's mantra through the whole series appears to have been "Find The Hobbits More To Do." As it turns out, we were both wrong; from what we can tell what Jay was talking about was the fact that Frodo turns on Sam and sends him away. Although this is a betrayal of the way the relationship works in the novels--Sam is the one thing that Frodo always *does* trust--it is not totally unjustifiable as a way of showing how the ring is working on Frodo. One thing we both wish he *had* changed was the struggle between Gollum and Frodo while Frodo has the ring on. The book shows that from Sam's point of view, and so does the film; but unfortunately it looks pretty silly to see Gollum crawling around in the air. Liza thought they should have filmed it from Frodo's point of view so you could get the cool Ring-O-Vision effect, and I think she's right. We were both pleased that they kept the "praising with great praise" to a minimum, and that nobody presented anybody with medals or a light globe from Sharper Image.

Of the stuff they changed, the thing that irritated me the most was the addition of Elrond and Arwen. Arwen is, as far as I'm concerned, almost totally useless in the novels and in the films she isn't much better. I can see Jackson *trying* to make her more useful, but it's not working, especially since everything back at Rivendell is confusing and disconnected and he appears to have deliberately gone out of his way to dress her up as a pre-Raphaelite painting. The whole "Arwen is dying" thing is a bogus concoction designed to a) make us care about her b) link the Aragorn/Arwen romance more closely to the main plot and c) force Elrond to recognize and acknowledge his connection to the world of men and get involved in the battle. I can see why he wanted to do it, but you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and you can't make a real character out of Arwen.

That decision also led Jackson to spend too much time on the whole army-of-the-dead thing, which verged on the ridiculous. Every time Aragorn yelled, "What say you?" I wanted to yell back, "Dead men tell no tales!" But this was one of several points in the film where I think Jackson changed things just to create suspense for people who haven't already read the books. You know they're going with him, and I know they're going with him, but that 12 year old PlayStation fanatic in the fourth row doesn't know that. As for the special effects, which Jay complained about, all I can say is that I think they handled it better than in Pirates of the Carribbean, although I don't think they had to make them all green.

What's more of a problem, IMHO, is the number of things that were left out altogether. The biggest "What the hell...?" decision was not revealing that Denethor is like he is because Sauron has been fucking with him via the palantir. I kept waiting for Pippin to be the one who figures it out (you can see him looking at Denethor with this expression that could easily mean, 'Hey, this guy's craziness kind of reminds me of that special craziness I went through when I was looking into that stupid glass ball...') and then not only does Pippin not figure it out, nobody ever does. That really changes Denethor's character and the whole Minas Tirith part of the plot, and is a bigger intervention than anything that happens on Mount Doom.

Another thing that I don't think should have been left out is Aragorn's healing Eowyn. Apart from it being the big Recognition Scene where everyone figures out that he's the king, it's important development for Eowyn and Faramir, who are coupled up together in the final scene with absolutely no preamble or explanation whatsoever. Yes, I know the movie was 3 and a half hours long as it was. I think they could have trimmed the battle scenes and kept that in. Or, if he just couldn't stand to lose a single second of swordplay, perhaps he could have compressed the cheesefest with which the film closes.

I actually was less hard on this than Liza was, because as I said, you have to give people a cooldown period after working them up that way. There were good moments--I liked the scene where the four of them are sitting down in the tavern and they just look at each other in silence while everyone else parties around them, and of course Frodo saying goodbye to Sam, cheesy as it is, is also very sad. I don't even mind the focus on Sam's marriage, which Liza ranted about ("that Rosie--she's like Michael Weiss's wife and kids, always trotted out on camera just so we know he's straight"), because it was Tolkein's way of showing that life would go on for Sam whereas it really couldn't for Frodo. But I agree with Liza that the use of slow-motion and voiceovers was a huge mistake, and I would also like to have seen less of the overexposed/suffused-with-otherwordly-light look, and the soundtrack suddenly began to grate a lot in that "love theme from *Titanic*" kind of way.

So, all in all, we were glad we went and I think that in the grand scheme of things Jackson has really done a remarkable job with some very daunting material. I was telling Liza on the way out that the changes, which are inevitable, are actually a good thing because they keep the books alive. If it were possible to make a *perfect* film adaptation, it would simply replace the novels and nobody would bother reading them. But since it isn't, people who watch the movies will still have to go back and read the books to find out how it *really* happened, if only because they don't want to be shamed before the other Tolkein geeks. Because the films are different, they become part of a dialogue between the page and the screen and provide fodder for debate for generations to come. The best thing that will probably come out of this trilogy is a new generation of Tolkein readers, who may come for the smiting and whacking but will stay for the Elven poetry. That can't hurt.