FILM REVIEWS

 

Hours after watching the film, I can close my eyes and see those incredible battle scenes pulsing and throbbing in my skull. They are even more extravagant than his jaw-dropping siege of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers. They have giant elephants and swooping pterodactyls. After the second movie, I compared his epic military setpieces to Kurosawa, but it's a condescension he no longer deserves. His battles are a thing of wonder on their own account. Maybe Kurosawa's battles will one day be described as proto-Jacksonian. And for the first time in this series they are built on to a plot with some narrative force. The two feisty young hobbits Frodo (Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) journey to Mordor in the company of the wicked and duplicitous Gollum (Andy Serkis) to destroy the Ring. Meanwhile, the forces of good led by Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) embark on a massive diversionary tactic: an all-out assault on the orcs, to distract the evil one from seeing that Frodo is going to dispose of the Ring he covets. And there are loads of other showstopping moments, including a creepy tangle with a spider. It's a fantastic spectacle, but how much you really love it will depend on testicle-altitude. Unlike other fantasy stories which have an airy sense of buoyancy, The Lord of the Rings always has that stolid, puddingy heaviness, the earnestly childlike quality of which almost, but not quite, prevents it from being pompous. After every long-bearded, pointy-eared thing has been said and done, after every hobbity madrigal has been crooned, every unfunny pipe-smoking bit of business complete and every Elvish phrase solemnly intoned - subtitled, not dubbed - has this film anything meaningful to say about war, or about the eternal moral contest with evil? Well, with Saruman's omission there is no compelling intelligence directing the forces of darkness; the face of evil effectively has to be Gollum who, although nasty, is no worthy dramatic counterpoint for Aragorn and Gandalf. And anyway, in Return of the King, apart from the sacrificial loss of Bernard Hill's King Theoden, who is poignantly old anyway, the only people killed in battle are trillions and trillions of nameless beasties and anonymous hordes. No one important. Very different from warfare in the non-toytown world. There is no sobering experience of loss, no real sense of the obscenity and tragedy of war and therefore nothing really at stake. That's why it appeals to adolescent boys, and to adults sentimentally loyal to their departed, adolescent selves. It may seem churlish to remember how shallow The Lord of the Rings is, when the Peter Jackson movies have turned out to be such terrifically enjoyable escapism. I started the series an atheist and finished an agnostic. With enormous energy and a passionately exacting eye for detail, Jackson has made the regressive-romantic legend live again. He has given the Tolkien myth a turbo-charged rush into the 21st century. It's tripe. But he's made it mind-blowing tripe.