The Return of the King: No flabber left ungasted, nor no gob unsmacked
 

It is finished. It is all over. The mighty conflict is at an end. And we, the dazed and shellshocked audience for Peter Jackson's colossal fantasy über-epic are permitted to disperse, as across the battlefield at sunset, picking our way through the horse-cadavers, twitching orcs and fallen warriors. No flabber has been left ungasted by Mr Jackson's mighty battle sequences, nor no gob unsmacked. After three hours and 21 minutes of devastatingly sustained assault, underpinned by an almost continuous horn-blaring, kettle-drum-bothering orchestral soundtrack, we've got our hands up. It's been a long, long final instalment, and never boring - although sometimes you feel the way prog rock fans must have felt on listening to the final side of Yessongs, glancing over at the needle tracking through the vinyl and realising it's not over yet, not by a long way. Was it really only two years ago that Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings started? This giant movie marathon has dominated everyone's attention and its reputation has grown while other event-movie franchises have floundered. In Jackson, the Tolkien legend found the perfectly sympathetic director to realise its Arthuro-Nordic saga, and in Lord of the Rings, the computer-generated image technology found the perfect medium for the stunning new effects now possible.

Technically it really is superb, with breathtaking landscape tableaux and settings, seamlessly meshing cyber-geography with the New Zealand locations. It is another triumph for production designer Grant Major and cinematographer Andrew Lesnie.

But does it deserve those excitable claims of greatness? A moral exposition of good versus evil? After The Two Towers, I heard normally sensible critics jabbering the word "Miltonic". But imagine if Milton had decided to cut Satan out of Paradise Lost. Because Jackson has cut Saruman out of Return of the King: the evil lord so brilliantly conveyed by Christopher Lee. I don't know how that plays with the Tolkie purists, but I'm disappointed. Lee was one of only two really good acting performances in the series, among all the simpering maidens and beefcakes and callow hobbits, the other being Ian McKellen's splendid Gandalf. Saruman gone! Could it be that Peter Jackson decided that what with all the expensive battle scenes, there wasn't time? He could have cut half the shots of Elijah Wood's Frodo doing his bug-eyed, smudgy-faced worried expression, and freed up about 20 minutes. But there we are. Without Saruman, it's not good versus evil. It's good versus... a sort of swarming amorphous danger.