| I confess: I didn’t see all of Return Of The King when it was in theatres. Even after I waited two months to see it (only partly because I was broke), I walked out halfway through the "Best Picture" of 2004.
"By Gandalf’s beard!" I hear you cry. "What kind of monster are you?" Well… in fact, I’ve been a Lord of the Rings fan for 20 years now. And that’s why I was so disappointed.
I tried really hard to love the first two movies, and I almost succeeded. I even understood the need for cuts (although I still maintain that an extended TV mini-series could have done the books more justice). No – it was the changes that got me.
I managed to force down some of them, like Aragorn smooching his horse and "returning from the dead" in The Two Towers. But when I realized that The Return of the King had been utterly Hollywoodized, despite all of director Peter Jackson’s best intentions, I finally gave up.
Consider the simple example of Pippin secretly lighting the hilltop beacon to summon aid to Gondor. Certainly it’s a big heroic moment for him – but the thing is, he’s not supposed to have big heroic moments. He’s supposed to be an everyman – er, everyhobbit – overwhelmed by the era-changing events surrounding him. The same goes for Merry knowing that Eowyn has disguised herself as a man – once he’s in on the secret, he’s lost his everyman innocence.
As far as I could understand from the books, the hobbits are supposed to represent how most of us would react to being in the midst of the ultimate war between good and evil – or in any war, for that matter. We could be heroes in the doing-what’s-gotta-be-done sense, but not in the Hollywood super-ro sense.
Maybe Jackson felt that if he had typical Hollywood underdog heroes, he needed a typical Hollywood traitor to go along with them. Gollum is ugly, scrawny, cunning, sneaky – and, by the time The Return of the King starts, completely irredeemable. As he travels to Mount Doom with the hobbits, Sam and Frodo, their relationship becomes more precarious. Sam grows even more suspicious of Gollum, Frodo grows more distant and Gollum becomes more duplicitous and, thus, his small spark of Smeagol-hope is totally extinguished. This means it’s totally understandable if Sam hates him absolutely. After all, a true hero couldn’t hate anything that had a hint of good in it, could he?
This also means, though, that Frodo looks like a gullible idiot, instead of someone driven to numbness by his journey and his burden. The entire point of Frodo’s journey – doing the best you can in unimaginable circumstances because there’s nothing else you can do – is lost.
In the film, Gollum drives a wedge between Frodo and Sam. If, by some chance, this tactic was necessary, did it have to be so damn predictable? I was so convinced that Jackson wouldn’t pull such a hokey plot device that I resolved if Sam, in his tearful trek back down the mountain managed to find the missing bread that Gollum had disposed of, I was leaving. You can see how that turned out.
Now that it has been released on video I’ll likely rent The Return of the King sometime. But I’ll probably wait for some evening when I’ve exhausted all my other options – after all, deciding "what to do with the time that is given us" shouldn’t be taken lightly. |
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