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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the KingTHE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING Justifying his dramatisation of Kenneth Grahame's immortal The Wind in the Willows, A.A. Milne explained that if one were going to have fingerprints on one's bread and butter, it were best that they be one's own. The completed three-film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's great trilogy provides us with the next best thing. Jackson's passion for the books shines through every interview, article and of course the films themselves. The disappointing sequels to that other blockbuster with overtones of moral destiny, The Matrix, made one somewhat apprehensive about how The Return of the King would turn out. After all, major plot changes had been made in both the earlier Jackson films: where was Tom Bombadil, for example? Why had Helms Deep become the lengthy climax of The Two Towers? And many viewers lost track of exactly who was going where with what in Middle Earth. Most of the criticisms arise from the fact that The Lord of the Rings is an enormous novel. No film could ever render the text literally. Each of Jackson's films must stand on its own - though all three were shot together, they were released months apart, which itself dictated some changes. The Helms Deep battle, for example, gives the second film a dramatic conclusion unnecessary in the book, whose division into three volumes was a publishing convenience rather than a structural necessity. The films are a parallel artistic device in a different genre, using the techniques of film narrative rather than epic fiction. They thereby create a vibrant and loving cinema analogy to what Tolkien was doing in print. That being so, it's a miracle that so much of the novel survives in the film. Though some plot elements (for example, the scourging of the Shire, and the fate of Saruman), are indeed omitted or distorted and some, like Aragorn, are sometimes used in ways different to how Tolkien used them, other characters, such as Andy Serkis's incomparable Gollum, are almost perfectly realised. But throughout, Tolkien's deeply Christian, profoundly human vision emerges virtually intact: and nowhere more brightly than at the climax of the film, when huge armies clash, war elephants and monstrous fell beasts attack the armies of men - and across the desolate ruins of Middle Earth, two diminutive Hobbits painfully make their way to Mount Doom with the fate of the whole world in their hands. It's extremely satisfying that one of the great films of our time is so faithful a rendering of one of the great Christian classics of our time. David Porter© Evangelicals Now - February 2004 |