Ladies and gentlemen, our first SPLAT! That old stick-in-the-mud, David Elliot of the San Diego Tribune, (paraphrased) he derides the film for simultaneously not being "Tolkien" enough and yet sticking to Tolkien's unimpressive story. Plus Peter Hackson screws it up, of course, because he's not David Lean or George Lucas. Guess I don't need to bother seeing ROTK now.

Hopefully there will be a link up on Rotten Tomatoes at some point to spoil the perfect score. I recommend reading only after you see the film, although that goes for most other reviews as well. (*snicker*)

Local paper gave it 4/4 stars:

http://ae.bayarea.com/entertainment/...reviewId=13927

Oh man. I'm from San Diego. Elliot has been off his rocker sine '85. How does that guy keep his job?

Pretty positive review from the Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Dec15.html

That is why I said over time.

who knows what will happen in the future.

someone might do a huge great trilogy that will be better.

for now I am amazed at what Jackson has been able to do. This was a huge undertaking that could have easily failed in the wrong hands.

I read the San Diego article this morning. What a crock. He basicly says the only way you can enjoy this movie is to be a fanboy geek who has never seen a movie made before 1990.

"Here is an epic that divides more viewers, maybe more than the Matrix films"
That is the stupidest thing I have read in a while.
BTW I don't see it up at Rotten yet.

Not anymore 99%

Damn, one bad review now. They are up to 70 reviews on RT, and only one rotten one. Still pretty damned good, especially when you read some of the comments by the reviewers, they sound like a bunch of rabid fanboys!

Kal Jedi beat me to it!

'Return of the King' partly entertains
Tuesday, December 16, 2003


BY STEPHEN WHITTY
Star-Ledger Staff

The darkest magic done in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy -- now in its final chapter, "The Return of the King" -- is a perplexing act of vanishing.

Seen as a whole, the saga stretches like a grand medieval morality tale, full of good and evil, temptation and redemption. But divide it into equal parts and watch it separately, and it shrinks, reduced to mere, muddled entertainment.


What manner of infernal devilment is this?

Well, it's the new way of story-telling, and we only have the success of Peter Jackson's trilogy to blame for it.

The three parts of "The Matrix," the two "volumes" of "Kill Bill" -- directors no longer seem capable of telling an adventure without stretching it out over several parts and many years. What might be told in three hours is now told in four -- and then split in half, to stoke the filmmaker's ego and further fuel the merchandising.

Of course, Tolkien set the stage himself as novelist, with his original triple-volume epic. But even that was eventually issued in a one-volume edition. Besides, books are different from screenplays. They work in different ways, and their very nature requires different rules.

That's because unlike movies, books -- the original random-access entertainment -- allow you to read at your own pace, and skip around at will. It's an infinitely flexible format, and it's why epics like "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Matrix" actually work best on DVD, which similarly allows viewers to recall a fact (or skip some padding) with a grab of the remote.

In movie theaters, though, you have no choice but to watch, depending on the director to provide a constant flow of emotion and logic. And that's the venue where these new multi-part epics invariably disappoint, either assuming we know all the background by heart, or going off on tangents that interest no one but the eventual "director's cut" devotee.

Jackson's new "The Return of the King," for example, opens with a flashback to a scene that occurs even before the series began. It then flash-forwards to approximately where we left off a year ago. Don't remember precisely where that was? Tough. There's not a bit of narration, or a title card, or even so much as a "Previously on Middle Earth ... ."

For audiences coming right from a replay of "The Two Towers" DVD this may be just fine, but other moviegoers can expect to be a little perplexed. How did Sam and Frodo get separated from Gandalf and Aragorn again? Where's Saruman? And why exactly is everyone fighting so hard to preserve a land of hereditary rulers and cranky old guys in dresses?

If the answer isn't immediately clear, it may be because you don't share Tolkien's reverence for the ruling class and implicit belief in the superiority of Northern Europe. Always lurking on the page, it becomes more explicit in this installment, where you can't help but notice the abundance of blue-eyed, fair-skinned heroes fighting off hordes of swarthy brutes.

That's not necessarily an offensive choice in and of itself, or even inappropriate. Tolkien's Middle Earth was always a stand-in for an ancient, homogeneous, pre-Norman England; its whiteness can be a little startling but it's still preferable to those Hollywood movies that, trying to make the Middle Ages relevant, would drag in Sidney Poitier or Morgan Freeman as "the Moor."

But Jackson's movie doesn't ignore other races, or patronize them. It casts them as villains. Why is it, otherwise, that our heroes' latest enemies are said, ominously, to come "from the South," and enter riding elephants and wearing burnooses? Why, then, would Aragorn gives a rousing speech before the climactic battle, telling his troops that they fight for "the West" and all they hold dear?

For unquestioning Tolkien fans, however, the disturbing subtexts can be ignored. The movie faithfully provides most of the attractions of the books. All of the swordplay and sorcery is center stage, and many of the beloved characters return.

As in the books, females don't get much to do (unless you count the peculiarly androgynous Legolas among their number). Liv Tyler weeps tenderly, and looks sweetly bovine. Cate Blanchett breezes by, acting peculiar. Only Miranda Otto's Eowyn, rather unconvincingly turned into a femme action hero, gets to actually wield a sword.

Ian McKellen, though, is as fun as ever as Gandalf, shaking his stick and his big ball of a nose at everyone who doesn't do as he says. Viggo Mortensen is suitably manly as Aragorn, and Elijah Wood and Sean Astin manage to evade both the dangers of their quest and any hints of homoeroticism in their loving friendship as Frodo and Sam.

Jackson directs well. There's a fine sequence that cuts between a bloody battle and a ruler's voluptuary feast, all scored to a Hobbit's lonely song. The director's monsters are impressive, the battle scenes thrilling, and only a nitpicker would ever stop to think he or she has just paid $10 to, essentially, watch one CGI giant fight two CGI elves.

Even with the film's flaws, Jackson is to be commended for not only staying true to Tolkien's spirit but to his own style. A mammoth undertaking, the now-completed trilogy would take half-a-day to watch in its entirety (and will be shown in that form in some theaters tomorrow). Talk in Hollywood is that Jackson is a lock for a Best Director award this year -- for endurance, if nothing else.

They should give honorary awards for his audiences, too, though.

Because, like all the other installments in the saga, "The Return of the King" is part of a good movie, but only mediocre on its own, full of awkward pauses and redundancies. Blame the Dark Lord if you must, but the devilish conjuring is unmistakable: Someone has reduced the whole of an epic into three far lesser parts.

Rating note: The film contains battlefield violence.

------------------------------------------------------------

I can't believe this guy. He's disappointed that the film doesn't rehash a bunch of crap from the last movie? Then he claims LOTR is racist?

Ok.

Hehe. Now 2 rotten. The other one's the guy from San Diego that Jeptah and the others have mentioned.
Gonna read it now.

that one is hilarious. he questions why frodo can't tell gollum in evil, or why he needs to spend time with "the spider".

does this guy even realize its based on a book? that frodo is taken by the power of the ring, and has more in common with gollum at this point than his own self?

85 reviews and a 98% freshness rating. Still excellent, and David Elliott is a dick.

"Like all the other installments in the saga, The Return of the King is part of a good movie, but only mediocre on its own, full of awkward pauses and redundancies."

-- Stephen Whitty, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER


Pretty much how I felt about the ROTK.

Here's a link to Roger Ebert's review, but I wouldn't read it till after you've seen the movie. He reveals a huge spoiler. If you still want to read it, I'll hide it in tags.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert...r-rings17.html

BY ROGER EBERT

At last the full arc is visible, and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy comes into final focus. I admire it more as a whole than in its parts. The second film was inconclusive, and lost its way in the midst of spectacle. But "Return of the King" dispatches its characters to their destinies with a grand and eloquent confidence. This is the best of the three, redeems the earlier meandering, and certifies the "Ring" trilogy as a work of bold ambition at a time of cinematic timidity.

That it falls a little shy of greatness is perhaps inevitable. The story is just a little too silly to carry the emotional weight of a masterpiece. It is a melancholy fact that while the visionaries of a generation ago, like Coppola with "Apocalypse Now," tried frankly to make films of great consequence, an equally ambitious director like Peter Jackson is aiming more for popular success. The epic fantasy has displaced real contemporary concerns, and audiences are much more interested in Middle Earth than in the world they inhabit.

Still, Jackson's achievement cannot be denied. "Return of the King" is such a crowning achievement, such a visionary use of all the tools of special effects, such a pure spectacle, that it can be enjoyed even by those who have not seen the first two films. Yes, they will be adrift during the early passages of the film's 200 minutes, but to be adrift occasionally during this nine-hour saga comes with the territory; Tolkien's story is so sweeping and Jackson includes so much of it that only devoted students of the Ring can be sure they understand every character, relationship and plot point.

The third film gathers all of the plot strands and guides them toward the great battle at Minas Tirith; it is "before these walls, that the doom of our time will be decided." The city is a spectacular achievement by the special- effects artisans, who show it as part fortress, part Emerald City, topping a mountain, with a buttress reaching out over the plain below where the battle will be joined. In a scene where Gandalf rides his horse across the drawbridge and up the ramped streets of the city, it's remarkable how seamlessly Jackson is able to integrate computer-generated shots with actual full-scale shots, so they all seem of a piece.

I complained that the second film, "The Two Towers," seemed to shuffle the hobbits to the sidelines -- as humans, wizards, elves and Orcs saw most of the action. The hobbits are back in a big way this time, as the heroic little Frodo (Elijah Wood) and his loyal friend Sam (Sean Astin) undertake a harrowing journey to return the Ring to Mount Doom -- where, if he can cast it into the volcano's lava, Middle Earth will be saved and the power of the enemy extinguished. They are joined on their journey by the magnificently eerie, fish-fleshed, bug-eyed creature Gollum, who is voiced and modeled by Andy Serkis in collaboration with CGI artists, and introduced this time around with a brilliant device to illustrate his dual nature: He talks to his reflection in a pool, and the reflection talks back. Gollum loves Frodo but loves the Ring more, and indeed it is the Ring's strange power to enthrall its possessors (first seen through its effect on Bilbo Baggins in "The Fellowship of the Ring") that makes it so tricky to dispose of.

Exhilarating visuals

Although the movie contains epic action sequences of awe-inspiring scope (including the massing of troops for the final battle), the two most inimitable special-effects creations are Gollum, who seems as real as anyone else on the screen, and a monstrous spider named Shelob. This spider traps Frodo as he traverses a labyrinthine passage on his journey, defeats him, and wraps him in webbing to keep him fresh for supper. Sam is very nearly not there to save the day (Gollum has been treacherous), but as he battles the spider we're reminded of all the other movie battles between men and giant insects, and we concede that, yes, this time they got it right.

The final battle is kind of magnificent. I found myself thinking of the visionary films of the silent era, like Lang ("Metropolis") and Murnau ("Faust"), with their desire to depict fantastic events of unimaginable size and power, and with their own cheerful reliance on visual trickery. Had they been able to see this scene, they would have been exhilarated.

And there is even time for a smaller-scale personal tragedy;


Spectacle supplants emotions

The series has never known what to do with its female characters. J.R.R. Tolkien was not much interested in them, certainly not at a psychological level, and although the half-elf Arwen (Liv Tyler) here makes a crucial decision -- to renounce her elfin immortality in order to marry Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) -- there is none of the weight or significance in her decision that we feel, for example, when an angel decides to become human in "Wings of Desire."

There is little enough psychological depth anywhere in the films, actually, and they exist mostly as surface, gesture, archetype and spectacle. They do that magnificently well, but one feels at the end that nothing actual and human has been at stake; cartoon characters in a fantasy world have been brought along about as far as it is possible for them to come, and while we applaud the achievement, the trilogy is more a work for adolescents (of all ages) than for those hungering for truthful emotion thoughtfully paid for. Of all the heroes and villains in the trilogy, and all the thousands or hundreds of thousands of deaths, I felt such emotion only twice, Well, yes, and I felt something for Frodo, who has matured and grown on his long journey, although as we last see him it is hard to be sure he will remember what he has learned. Life is so pleasant in Middle Earth, in peacetime.

Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.


I like Ebert, but I feel that his reviews are sometimes based on his own huge prejudices as a movie-goer that he can't suspend a couple of his own conventions to enjoy a film. (The Ring isn't a proper villan cause it's small, etc).

That said, it's pretty balanced, although I'm sure I'll curse it in six hours after I've finished ROTK.

Now 3 rotten.

"Is a seriously flawed piece of work that is missing that certain element called "believability." It's visual eye candy without the chocolate center."

-- Michelle Alexandria, ECLIPSE MAGAZINE

what's so hard in believing in one ring can rule them all, an 87 year old ranger can be king and kick ass, elves can be sooo "pretty" and midgets with harry feet can change the way the world is..

Me, too.

LOTR: FOTR actually displaced The Godfather for the #1 spot for well over 3 months. It remained #1 for so long that IMDB actually went back and changed their weighting system for ranking their Top 250 films in order to knock it down a few notches. It slid to #2, and then #3, and remained at #3 until well after LOTR: TTT came out in theaters. It's presently sitting at #8.

Stephen Witty seems to be basing his review off of his hatred of the book. He criticizes for staying faithful to Tolkein, and even for splitting the story into three movies... right.

I don't think this review is on rottentomatoes.com but here is the Richmond Times Dispatch's one and 1/2 star review:

http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet...=1031772656840

It's obvious that most of the critics who are giving negative reviews didn't like either of the two previous films either.