Yep, I did it. I sat down and watched all three films, the extended editions, in one day. That’s a butt-numbing eleven hours and twenty-one minutes of movie watching if you’re counting. And I did it exactly one year ago, too! Go ahead and say it: I’m a film nerd.
A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.
There’s little to say about Return of the King that I haven’t already said about the first two installments in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of Lord of the Rings movies. To my mind, it inherits the same virtues of the previous two movies while bringing the cycle to an epic and satisfying conclusion.
Look for your friends, but do not trust to hope.
It has forsaken these lands.
The middle entry in a trilogy often has the hardest job, picking up where the first story left off and leaving enough for the final part to build on. In other words, it has to hit the ground running, assuming you remember what you saw a year ago and then leave you hanging two or three hours later. I don’t count faux trilogies like the Indiana Jones movies, which are only called a “trilogy” because there just happened to be three movies. There was, however, no common narrative thread tying the films together, like there is for Lord of the Rings.
Like The Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers successfully avoids the “middle movie” trap. It does this by expanding the universe of characters and setting up the trilogy’s remaining storylines. This is in contrast to, for instance, The Matrix Reloaded, which gave us little more than a collection of whizbang action scenes while the characters spun their wheels and went nowhere.
I do not know what strength is in my blood, but I swear to you I will not let the White City fall, nor our people fail.
The first film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy had a tall order to fill. It had to establish the complex fantasy universe of Middle Earth and the peoples who inhabit it, while putting the story of the Ring into motion and accomplish this in the amount of time you could reasonably expect an audience to sit still for a movie. It probably would have been no problem to make a ten-hour film out of the first book alone.
Director Peter Jackson and his writing team of Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens pulled this off masterfully. The first film is still the favorite of the three films for many, but that’s true of the first film of many trilogies. I think this might have something to do with Fellowship being the film that introduces the audience to the world of Middle Earth. We always look most fondly on our first time, don’t we?
