Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is the seventy-sixth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. Reviewing just one installment of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is something like reviewing one chapter in a book. Sure, each of the three films has its own arc, its own strengths and weaknesses, but at the end of the day the whole series was developed and filmed in tandem. Three pieces of a whole project. It is fitting then that the weakest of the three chapters, The Return of the King, was awarded as the culmination of the entire trilogy. Following on the journey begun in The Fellowship of the Ring and continued in The Two Towers, The Return of the King picks up with hobbit Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) on his quest to destroy the ring of power. He travels with Sam (Sean Astin) and the nefarious Gollum (Andy Serkis) ever closer to Mordor, home to the wicked Sauron and his army of orcs. Meanwhile, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen,) Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and Legolas (Orlando Bloom) set off to defend Gondor after successfully mounting a defense of the kingdom of Rohan. A problem of structure, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy loses steam as it approaches its end. The first film presents a colorful cast of characters that come together and one of the joys of the story is watching their dynamics at work. At the conclusion of The Fellowship of the Ring, these characters we’ve come to know are thrust onto diverging paths and the latter films are forced to splinter to cover their separate journeys. Not only does this mean that each character’s arc is given less attention overall, but also that the film goes long stretches in which main plot lines are backgrounded. There is a repetitiveness that creeps up as well. Frodo’s long march to Mordor is exactly that, long. Mostly consisting of traveling some winding road and bickering between Sam and Gollum. This time they at least have a pretty thrilling battle with a giant spider. The problem is worse for Aragorn and his companions. After spending nearly all of The Two Towers defending the kingdom of Rohan from Sauron’s army, they spend nearly all of The Return of the King defending the kingdom of Gondor from Sauron’s army. Just like previous battles, they hunker down in some nondescript castle, outnumbered by the orcs, only to be saved by surprise reinforcements at the last second. By the end of the third film it becomes a bit much. Still, there is beauty in the magnitude of such an undertaking. Fifteen months of filming and over three years of production on the entire series, getting something this massive across the finish line in a successful way is a tremendous achievement. The effects are dated from a modern eye but Jackson was able to use the cutting edge tech of the time to create a believable Middle Earth full of frightening creatures. With a fantasy epic of this scale, the performances often get overlooked and that was the case with The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Of the 30 nominations the series received at the Oscars, only one — Ian McKellen in Fellowship — was for acting. That is a disservice to some really nuanced performances below the flashier CGI and monumental action sequences. Viggo Mortensen and especially Sean Astin impress in this chapter. With the massive impact that Peter Jackson’s trilogy had on the medium, it is not hard to understand how its grand conclusion was finally crowned. Given the trajectory of the series, it does feel akin to a lifetime achievement award. And that’s fine. The Return of the King is nowhere near the upper echelon of Best Picture winners but its win does reflect the power of movies to build worlds of imagination. That’s exactly what The Lord of the Rings captured in theaters around the world in the early 2000s. 6/10
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