The End Should Have Ended Better

reviewed Thu, 01 Jan 2004

I have to keep reminding myself that I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, because I walked out of the theater annoyed and peevish.  Though the movie is mostly grand and sweeping, with rousing battles and stirring speeches, it ends with what feels like another hour, post-climax, of petty, leaden, for-true-fans-only wrapping-up that sends you out with a bad taste in your mouth and undercuts the emotion and energy of the victory.  I mean, really, who cares whether solid, simple Sam (Sean Astin) gets to marry the barmaid he fancies?  Put it on the DVD for the completists and the fanatics, and let the rest of us get to the bathroom, already.  (A 3-½-hour-long, intermission-less movie can make you a touch grumpy when it drags on; the San Francisco Chronicle published a helpful primer on when to take bathroom breaks during the film, but all I could remember from it was “whenever Liv Tyler’s on screen,” which I already knew and which – and I will never say this again – didn’t happen enough.  No, that’s not true – any Liv Tyler is too much Liv Tyler; her appearances just weren’t timed properly to coincide with the needs of my bladder.)

As some of you will be relieved to know, I don’t have much to say about TLOTR:TROTK.  The battle scenes are superlative – and unlike a certain other much-hyped  trilogy, director Peter Jackson constantly innovates and surprises rather than resorting to lazy variations on previous successes.  The problems of The Two Towers – anachronistic language, pandering humor, Bush-like speeches, ill-advised plot expediencies, Liv Tyler – are mostly (though not entirely) absent from The Return of the King.  Ian McKellen gets a bracing, vigorous fight scene in addition to his usual arch sagacity as Gandalf, and Andy Serkis/CGI give a terrific performance as Gollum/Smeagol.  Even the hobbits go from irritating to heroic.  (I have to wonder if this movie seems so much better than the previous one because of its quality or because of my mood.  After all, I had someone to kiss on New Year’s Eve for the first time in … never mind how long.)

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