Return of the King

exactly.
The movie was probably better than anyone else could have done. And there is so much that PJ did right. It is hands down the best movie ever made (my opinion). It's just that there was actually the potential for it to be even better if PJ had made better use of the book's existing dramatic points.

You miss understood or I misspoke. Throwing Aragorn off the cliff was a complete waste of time. I wish they would have used the X minutes devoted to it, elsewhere; to strength Gimli/Legolas.

Here are some of my thoughts on the movie, from the perspective of someone who's read the books 5 or 6 times, and the Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales, and played the RPGs.. etc, etc. (I.E. total nerd)

I'll start with things I LOVED:

When the Rohirrim assemble on the Pelennor before Gondor, and Theoden gives his pep-talk: "Death!" "DEATH!" "DEAAATTHH!!!" SO COOL. I LOVED that part in the books, and I wondered how they were going to pull it off in the movie. Though I must admit, when I read it I imagined it as a much more somber, sortof singular chant. Like "Death." without the exclamation point. Very grim, not a battly cry. But it still gave me shivers in the movie.

Pippin getting ahold of the palantir from Gandalf. But then what? Nothing. Palantir? What palantir?

Eowyn and Merry's fight with the Witch King of Angmar. Perfectly done.

All of Frodo and Sam's journey into Mordor, Shelab, the tower, Mt. Doom, Gollum, etc. The only thing that bugged me a little was that the flask of light that Galadriel gave Frodo (can't remember its name off-hand) .. in the movie it was just, eh, a light. In the book it was OMIGOD THE BRIGHTEST LIGHT, like a star come down to Earth. No big deal, just would have been cool to see.

Faramir's first retreat from Osgiliath, when Gandalf rides out to fend off the Nazgul. Just like I imagined it.

The ending(s), when everyone bows to the four hobbits, and Sam getting married, and Frodo going off to the havens with Gandalf, Bilbo, and the elves.
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There was nothing that I absolutely hated, but a few things that bugged me:

The Paths of the Dead: what the fuck? "Oh, we just happen to be camped in front of this evil mountain, and Legolas just happens to know the whole story.." I think really this was the only change from the book that I really, really didn't like.

Where were the Dunedain??

"Why should Rohan ride to Gondor's aid..?" and the whole Pippin-having-to-sneakily-light-the-beacons thing.

Denethor. They made him out to be a disgusting, evil idiot, when in reality he was a very wise, proud man who's will to fight had been overthrown by the deception of Sauron through the palantir. I just think they wayyy over-simplified him. Instapundit's comment was "If fictional characters could sue for libel, Denethor would have a case."

There's a scene in the book that is similar to the scene between Gandalf and the Balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring. When the battering ram Grond breaks down the gate to the first level of Minas Tirith, the Witch King appears at the head of the army leading them into the city, and only Gandalf stands in his way. "You cannot enter here.." I was so looking forward to seeing that in the movie.

The Nazgul in the books were MUCH more badass. Even the armies of Sauron were terrified of them. Tolkien describes them as being "driven in madness before them". And why wasn't the Nazgul LEADING the army? Who the fuck was that Quasemodo wannabe orc mother fucker?

I totally understand why they were left out, but I missed the Wild Men that helped the Rohirrim reach Gondor in time.

The leaving out of the scouring of the Shire (blasphemy) didn't really bug me. By the end it was already like... three and a half hours... and honestly I was ready for it to be over.

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But it was totally great. I can't wait till the extended version comes out, and we can make a Saturday marathon of watching them all back to back. 10 hours or something!

[Edited on Dec 19, 2003 by Keith]

If you REALLY want to see that scene, a crap version of it is in the ROTK game put out by EA. Not filmed mind you...just an in game cut-scene.

excerpts from interview with jackson

How genuinely surprised were you when the first movie did as well as it did?

I was relieved. Relief was more of the emotion than surprise. You never know what you’re making when you’re making it. You never have a clue. And all that you can do, and all that I ever rely on, is making the movie for myself. This one was fraught with all kinds of traps: if we listened too much to what the Tokien fans wanted, or their opinions, I thought we would trip ourselves up. We just regarded ourselves as Tolkien fans – Philippa, Fran and myself – we thought we were going to make it for Tolkien fans, but it was going to be us, not the huge number of fans out there in the world. So, at the end of the day, the decisions that we made on the movie was really, “What would we want to see in the movie? What would we want to enjoy out of the movie?”

Taking a no-holds-barred approach to what you could cut out of the film, the structural pitfalls are myriad, especially in terms of RETURN OF THE KING, where you’re dealing with a lot of falling action, and what some would say is a long denouement at the end. With this film in particular, how did you attack the structural problems?

Obviously, we started with the book. But, then, our structure in this film differed from the book quite a lot because we had inherited a few sequences from THE TWO TOWERS book, like Shelob, or the scene on Minas Morgul going up the Cirith Ungol stairs, and then into Shelob’s tunnel… all of that whole section with Frodo and Sam was in the book of THE TWO TOWERS. When we came to three… in the very beginning, we sort of laid out a ninety page treatment of what we thought the films could be. Then, we developed screenplays. It was sort of compounded by the fact that we started working with Miramax, and we did two scripts, like a Part One and a Part Two. Then, when New Line came on board and wanted three movies, we then had to rewrite it. It was all during that period, which was, like, ’96 to ’99, that we were doing all of the script work and structural work. But we always felt that RETURN OF THE KING was, for us, the strongest film simply on the basis that it had a climax; it had an emotional payoff. It was the movie, because it’s the payoff film… it’s the reason that you make a trilogy. You want to get to the last one. The last chapter is the reason for the first two even existing. It always felt the most comfortable of the scripts to us, and it was more fun to shoot it, too.



Would you have worked on it more? Two weeks more? One month more?

You can work on anything as much as you like. The reality is that nothing’s perfect. Nothing’s ever perfect. We’ve never once at any stage had a script, or an edit, or a special effects shot, or a music cue that we’ve said, “That’s perfect; don’t touch a thing.” You get to a point when you run out of time. So, to answer your question, if we had worked on it another week, it would’ve been better. If we had worked on it another month, it would’ve been better. Anything would be better. Scripts would be better if you worked on them longer, but, at some point, you have to send it out to the big world, and hope that people like it.



As you went through the three films, was there any aspect of your approach to the work that changed or got refined over time?

Our respect of Tolkien grew a lot. We actually went into it at the beginning with a sense of, “Okay, adapting LORD OF THE RINGS, we’re going to have to change this a lot, we’re going to have to make this more like a movie, we’re not going to be too locked into the book.” In fact, the very first drafts of the script reflected that to some degree. And, then, we just (realized) the more we read the book, and the more we examined everything, because, in writing the script, you’re also having a minute examination of what Tolkien wrote, and why he wrote it. You’re really putting your brain into it. And we just came to respect him more and more. There were a few things about Tolkien that annoyed us.


Like what?

Well, if you were writing an original screenplay of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, you wouldn’t have as many characters as you have. If you were writing THE RETURN OF THE KING as an original screenplay, the battle of Minas Tirith would be a defeat, not a victory. That was tough. This big battle where they win, and, then, you still have to sling this story around to Mordor, and another battle outside the black gates. It would be much easier for us if Minas Tirith had been a total defeat.


Did you ever consider making it a defeat?

No, no. We obviously changed a lot of things. We changed a huge amount of things. I don’t know what the rules are with a so-called faithful adaptation. Some people think we faithfully adapted these books, some people don’t, and I don’t know, myself, what the word “faithful” actually means in context of what we’ve done. But we’ve changed everything. Everything’s changed. Even a scene where you’d say, “This did this scene from the book, and it’s in the movie.” It’s changed. We’ve given some lines of dialogue that Gandalf says to Elrond. We’ve given some lines that Elrond says to Aragorn. I don’t know what being faithful to the book really means anymore, but… we drew the line somewhere, and, obviously, changing Minas Tirith to that degree, we sort of drew the line not to do that.

Interview

exactly, you can tell that even from the behind the scenes documentries that everyone was excited to be working on this movie. that dedication and love came out on the finished product.

the intro is brillent. i like that the first scene didn't start out with a bang but with something serene at first but disturbing at the end.

Wasn't that scene in the trailer for the movie? I vividly remember a shot of Gandalf and Pippin on Shadowfax in Minas Tirith being stopped by the Witch King riding right in front of them. I kept waiting for it in the film but...nothing. So it MUST be in the EE DVD.

A friend sent me this

Finding the right moment to take a bathroom break is difficult in "Return of the King," where key plot points and impressive special effects shots are strung together with almost no interruption.

Fortunately, the makers of "Lord of the Rings" have given viewers a subtle visual cue for when to dash for the facilities. Whenever Arwen (Aragorn's elfin love interest, played by Liv Tyler) appears onscreen, nothing important happens.
Below are a few tips to help choose your breaks in the "Rings" movies and a few other noted marathon films

The Liv Tyler Rule of Diminishing Returns: It's becoming clear that Tyler's role was overblown in the series, most likely so they could include a chick on a Burger King souvenir drink glass. After the first half of "Fellowship of the Ring," where Arwen actually had something to do (she carried Frodo on horseback to safety), the character's scenes have become increasingly pointless.
The first Tyler-sponsored bathroom break in "Return of the King" comes in the middle of the 26-minute mark. At that point, a full three minutes of romantic mush is piled on before anything important happens. Arwen appears again just before the one-hour, 15-minute mark, giving viewers 72 seconds of nothingness before a key plot point is revealed
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After that, "Return of the King" is pretty much one battle after the other. Try to hit the facilities early during the Tyler breaks. If nature calls later, wait until Frodo says the words "I have to destroy it for both of our sakes" at the one-hour, 45-minute mark. You have a minute and a half of down time before the action resumes.

I have to disagree on the time excuse, at least for everything except the Shire sequence. There were plenty of opportunities to explain Denethor's madness and the palantir withought adding more than moments to the movie. Possibly not adding time at all, just replace some of the dialogue that was there which didn't serve to further the story.

The armies of man still gathered at the black gate, it's just that the entire scene was rewritten.

Aragorn still walked the valley of the dead and got himself an army, but the entire original sequence was removed and replaced with a trailer for Disney's upcoming Haunted Mansion (tm). They could have cut out an entire scene or two before Aragorn entered the valley, and the entire sequence he was there, no added time to the movie at all. Jackson took the easy route of cornball popcorn flick 'drama' and turned the sequence were the black ships arrive into a comedic moment. Perhaps the blame lies on the producers and whoever wrote the actual screenplay.

That's probably it, actually, it probably wasn't Jackson at all. He did an excellent job on the scene where the orc armies left Morodor, and Sam, Fordo, and Smeagull climbed up the side of the mountain.

My argument stands, though, aside from the Shire I am not suggesting anything that would have extended the movie by much at all, as those scenes were not just absent, but replaced.

I took the same cues when "Two Towers" was in theaters. "Ah Arwen is on screen...sweet relief"

Besides, that one scene where she spies a glimpse of her future child...that kid looks like some scary 80's hair band spawn.

...maybe they could've cut the 15,000 scenes of a close-up of someone's face looking worried with a deeply furrowed brow?

So, So sorry.

I hate it when people spoil the ending of a movie for me. Take heart though, nothing that anyone has said here can compare to the experience of actually seeing it live in all its glory.

I might be wrong on this, and if so, my deepest apologies, but...

how did Shelob sting Frodo in the chest THROUGH his Mithril shirt?
Tell me I saw it wrong, tell me this movie was total perfection, that my eyes have played tricks on me.

I can't believe Darth Vader is Luke's father.

I went and saw it completely stoned. So stoned I thought my gums were melting.

I kept falling asleep during the battle scenes. Too many in my opinion.

IT was good I guess.

It sure was pretty to watch! And if I say any more than that, I'll probably get lynched.

He WAS stabbed through his vest, wasn't he?!! Wait, no. There is a scar on his UPPER chest that isn't from that dirty Witchking blade. Good eye Columbo.