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The Lord of the Rings
Peter Jackson is famous by this point for saying that The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy, but rather a single film. So, rather than give appropriate credit for aspects of Return of the King, I must instead criticize. Furthermore, instead of allotting an arbitrary amount of space for each installment, I will instead spend the entire thrust of my essay skipping about as it serves my purposes. Warning: the following essay assumes fore-knowledge of the theatrical versions of Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and Return of the King.
To see the problems inherent to The Lord of the Rings, we must first, unfortunately, deal in generalities. The most glaring error lies within its very structure. It meanders about with no real sense of purpose. Basic film structure contains a first act of introduction, a second act of rising tension, and a final act of resolution, followed by a dénouement. I point this out not to nitpick or insist that all films must adhere to this structure. There have been great films in recent years to play with or even openly defy Aristotelian structure, the most well known examples being Pulp Fiction and Memento. The reason this structure is pointed out is to show what is lacking in The Lord of the Rings. To defy this structure as the film has, one must be very careful in how it is done. A certain amount of responsibility is assumed when abandoning this structure. Jackson makes no compensation for the plodding nature of The Lord of the Rings; it is a ten-hour exercise in wandering from point A to point B, a series of introduction upon introduction that turns the cast list into a who's who of actors with too little to do.
That is, for lack of a better term, the "structure" of the film. It is an incredibly long first act peppered occasionally with character moments so brief they are instantly forgotten, a hasty conclusion, and the most drawn-out and pointless dénouement in cinema history.
With all of this stated, it is time to leave vague generalizations and move into pointed examples of what went wrong. The best place to start is in characterization. The optimal point-of-rant is in The Two Towers and the treatment of Merry and Pippen. They are established from the first as important characters. Their actions in The Two Towers cements this idea, as they are the impetus for the sacking of Minas Tirith. Yet they are given approximately ten minutes of screentime. The bulk of this time shows the two riding on Treebeard's back as he imparts what I imagine must be ancient wisdom (I suppose I would define it as such if I could remember one word of what he said), but is instead forgettable. These characters are given nothing to do. Jackson seems to think that just having two characters riding a giant tree is enough to sustain audience interest and, consequently, all three characters are relegated into a cross between prop and deus ex machine. I honestly don't know which is worse.
Merry and Pippen are given their dignity back (to some extent anyway; can such degradation really allow for a renewed dignity?) in Return of the King. However, this third installment has its own plethora of problems, and I shall address this separately.
Legolas and Gimli are given similar prop status throughout The Lord of the Rings, and this is combined with a pointless comic relief. In addition, Legolas' reason for being as his own character seems to be uttering pithy aphorisms at will (red dawn = blood spilled last night…gee, how profound).
Pithy aphorisms aside, the only purpose of the two is prop-related. They exist not for their own sake, but strictly because the plot requires them to. Gimli obviously gets the short end of the stick here; at least Legolas has a further purpose, as inane as it might be. Gimli is forced into the story to utter maxims about dwarf-tossing and to keep a humorous tally on his kills vs. those of Legolas. In the end, to say these actors are wasted upon the idiotic characters is like saying the Atlantic is just a bit damp.
They're not alone. Eomer (Karl Urban) is allowed only the briefest of glimpses, most significantly in The Two Towers, in order to get Aragorn and props to Edoras. Faramir (David Wenham), although given a satisfactory introduction as well as a great dilemma in The Two Towers, exists in Return of the King only to serve the plot: Denethor (John Noble) must die so Aragorn can become king, and that's it. That's all well and good, but what about Faramir? He is given the introductions of a dilemma, but if it's so damned important, why is he given no resolution? One moment he's riding out to his death, then he's in a coma so Denethor can die, and suddenly he's right as rain, all smiles for Aragorn's coronation at the end of Return of the King.
Grima Wormtongue (Brad Dourif) is given a few paltry minutes in The Two Towers, not nearly enough time for an actor of Dourif's calibre. Indeed, dare I say that Brad Dourif is the greatest actor working on The Lord of the Rings? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it is glaringly obvious that his talents are wasted here. Wormtongue, like so many other characters in the film, exists only because plot demands it. He is required to pass information to Saruman so Helm's Deep may be breached; beyond this, he is given only one small reaction shot when he sees the orc army.
Christopher Lee and Dourif both are completely wasted as actors here. As I've said so many times before, they exist only because plot demands they exist. It is evident that Jackson simply didn't know what to do with them once they had served their purpose, and so they are duly swept from the board as Return of the King opens. Too many characters are duly swept aside in The Lord of the Rings, and I can't really blame Jackson for doing it. By putting so many characters into such a confined space, he forces his own hand in the matter. He chooses convenience over proper characterization, fully aware that his dream film has become too bloated for its own good.
I have now come to a point where I should, logically, begin with the aforestated problems within Return of the King. I am, however, unwilling to do this just yet. I do not need to give further examples of characters gone awry, but I do need to address the emphasis of the main characters. To do this, I can offer no segue, and I must tread waters I am normally loathe to tread.
I speak of the inherent racist/sexist outlook of The Lord of the Rings.
There are three prominent female characters in the films: Eowyn, Galadriel, and Arwen. Galadriel is afforded so little time in The Fellowship of the Ring that she is irrelevant (she exists only to tell Frodo about being a ring-bearer); Cate Blanchett, like so many other actors around her, is wasted. Arwen and Eowyn are given places lower on the pecking order. Attack all I want, I can at least say that Galadriel is given a place of respect. Arwen and Eowyn are both entirely dependant upon the men around them. Furthermore, both are introduced as being what I can only call "manly women." Eowyn is shown as adept with the sword in The Two Towers, a trait only manly-men normally possess in The Lord of the Rings. Arwen is first shown as an adept rider and warrior against the Ring Wraiths in Fellowship of the Ring, but this is immediately betrayed by her absolute subservience to her father Elrong. This submissiveness toward Elrond is only broken by a shift; she becomes subservient to Aragorn rather than Elrond, even to the point of choosing almost certain death to please her man.
Eowyn is crushed when Aragorn refuses her, capping off an infatuation which seems to have appeared over-night. Arwen's big happy conclusion in Return of the King is the chance to spend a lifetime with Aragorn. Eowyn supplants her loyalty to Aragorn by dressing up as a man and fighting for Theoden (Bernard Hill), painting herself into the thought-pattern that no other way but manly-man style fighting will prove her worth. There are further examples, but what's the point? To be blunt, this behaviour is not, nor has ever been, the behaviour of your average rational woman in the Western World. This is the behaviour of ideals and stereotypes in Victorian Gothic Romance. You may remember the behaviours of the major women in Dracula, for example: in the novel, Lucy Westenra is condemned for daring to think about sex as a pleasurable activity, and Mina Harker's fate is revolved entirely around the actions of the men around her. In fact, the very idea that she can type is seen as a curiosity, in the same vein as a chimpanzee wearing pants.
It is the men of The Lord of the Rings who have the ultimate status, controlling the fate of the world. Not just any man, but only the biggest and most grizzled of them. The story begins with hobbits, true. But their actions are secondary to Aragorn's within the first hour of Fellowship of the Ring, and it quickly becomes the story of how the biggest and whitest man on the block took his rightful place as king of all men. The racism in the film is not, as a whole, overt. It is a subtle move in perspective away from the hobbits and dwarves and elves, towards the big Viking-looking men who hold all the cards and will win over any enemy. There is one exception to this subtlety, and it exists almost entirely within Return of the King. In addition to marauding orcs, the enemy is suddenly men as well. But they're not men like our Heroes; they are obviously Arabian stereotypes.
I lacked a segue into this subject, and likewise I lack a segue out. Instead, let us go into what went right in Return of the King, and how it made the series go even more awry than it could have before.
The very feel of the third installment is markedly different from the previous two. It's darker, grungier, and possessed of a paranoia and hopelessness never hinted at before. On its own, Return of the King works in terms of its mise-en-scene, structure, and characterization. It is a balanced juggle between many characters, although several major ones are given no resolution.
The lack of characterization in the previous films is nearly amended: Denethor is given an excellent dinner scene with Pippen, Frodo and Sam suddenly have large moments of time strictly to develop as people, and we can feel Faramir's pain palpably as Denethor sends him off to his death.
The problem with Return of the King is that it comes entirely out of left field. The Two Towers, for all its flaws, at least starts off on an emotional tone which Fellowship of the Ring left off on. Return of the King does no such thing. It is a different movie, yet Peter Jackson asks that it be treated as the third installment of a single film. Admittedly, when The Two Towers left off, Jackson was in a Catch-22 position. He could either continue on the same note and disappoint, or change gears dramatically to save his third act, thereby betraying the previous two in every way. He chose the lesser of two evils. In retrospect, perhaps this wasn't such a bad thing. He chose to create something which, for the most part, works on its own as a pure film. Some characters still exist only at the behest of the plot, and some are given no resolutions. But this is inevitable, and it would be fair to say that Jackson at least saved some face.
The dénouement, however, finds the audience enduring yet another radical, un-called for shift in emotional tone, one which we do not survive. I have only one thing to say about it: it is the most trite, saccharine bit of nonsense I have ever seen in any move. It's tacked on, seeming to say "all these bad things happened, but Gee! Look! We're all back together again! Even the stodgy dwarf!" It seems to say that you're doomed unless you're the main character.
In the end though, these are not exactly bad movies. They possess some incredibly poorly-conceived elements, but this is somewhat countered by a firm technical grasp found through all three installments. For all my complaints, The Lord of the Rings does look kinda pretty. Unfortunately, "pretty" just means pretty computer images. "Pretty" doesn't quite cut it: these are movies which should be forgotten quickly. Yet they endure; everyone heralds them as brilliance, just as people herald the novels as brilliant. Neither is exactly true. Many have complained to me that a lot of my issues with the movies are also present in the novels, as if that satisfies. It does not: the novels were poorly-written drek in need of a massive re-write, and in writing the screenplay, it was of utmost importance to solve these problems rather than blindly transcribe every moment into the film. An editor was needed for the books, and a rewrite was needed for the movies.