Day 74: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

 

"There never was much hope. Just a fool's hope." 

I decide which film I'm going to write about for this site by a fairly simple-sounding process - I check out imdb.com's top 250 movies list and try to get some inspiration to write something about a movie I really enjoyed from it.  It's really a lot harder than it sounds, however.  There are many great movies on the list, but which ones really mean something to me at this point in time?  Which ones can I write about without sounding boring or contrived?  Then I saw this one, the third installment in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King.  And I immediately thought to myself, "there we go!"  My goal for this site (although I'm sure the goal of our other writers are different) was to introduce some of our readers to interesting, less mainstream films that they might not have heard of yet.  There is definitely nothing wrong with popular movies (and I'll probably review some), but well...they're popular.  People are more likely to have seen them.  But this film, despite its immense popularity, is one that is important to my development as a movie-goer, and that is really as good of a reason as any to write about it for this blog.

Before I get into what I really enjoy about the film, I'll give you a little personal history.  When it came out, I had just turned fourteen years old - a key time in the development of any teenager.  And even though I changed a lot since then (and my taste in films is quite different), the Rings trilogy, especially the final film, is one I've always held in high regard.  I honestly feel that if I had not gotten interested in the films like I had, I would not be in the same place as far as movie watching.

First of all, the films are just...huge.  I don't necessarily mean popularity-wise, although they were quite popular.  What I really mean is the overall scope of the films.  There are so many intertwined plot lines with a lot of different characters.  It's quite a complex set of movies for the average fourteen year old (like me), kids who watched mostly PG-13 comedies and cheesy action films.  If I would have continued to watch those types of films, I would probably not be watching the type of things I do today.  I would probably be hailing Transformers as my favorite film of the decade or something like that.

Also, Return of the King made me realize that some actors were just better than others.  Even then I could appreciate the fantastic work of Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn and Ian McKellen as Gandalf.  Despite the film being a big budget fantasy movie, the acting is quite superb, and the dialogue is great as well.  It taught me to appreciate things that I had never noticed at all before.  Peter Jackson quickly became my favorite director back then, and although I'd put a couple directors above him now, he's still great.

Alright, I'll stop being sentimental about one of my favorite films and focus on my interpretation now, almost six years after it was released.  Return of the King is shot absolutely brilliantly by Jackson.  It has the perfect combination of special effects and beautiful on location work (New Zealand works amazingly as Middle Earth).  Locations like the dark Mordor and the white city of Minas Tirith look so incredibly realistic.  It's really an immersive film - you feel like you're there because everything is so amazingly well done visually.  The fact that Jackson, Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh were able to take Tolkien's novel and reflect it on screen as well as they did is a testament to their skill as writers.  Like I said before, there are so many plot lines and they all come together at different times.  However, the screenplay is very well written and everything makes sense on screen.

Viggo Mortensen's performance still manages to impress me all of these years later.  If they were to ever reboot the series, I don't think anyone could pull of as great as a performance as he did for that role.  Even Orlando Bloom, who isn't too great of an actor in the films (I mean, he barely has any lines and they're all in the same style) is decent to me, because like Mortensen, it just feels like he is the character he portrayed (that probably makes no sense).

Anyways, it's exciting, full of action (the battle scenes are intense and epic), well written and shot, and most of all, it's an extremely important film to me.  So even though I wanted to introduce some of you to less mainstream fims that you might not have heard of, I think it was totally worth it to write about The Return of the King because of the influence it had on my life - and maybe my post can make you appreciate it a little bit more if you've already seen it.  And if not...I'm sure you know what to do.