So Near and Yet So Far: The Return of the Box-Office King

I've been putting this off and putting this off because I had hoped that time would change my mind, help me find a better perspective, ease the sting, etcetera. It didn't, so I can't put it off any longer.

I loved J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King.

I did not like Peter Jackson's The Return of the King.

In the now almost three months since its release, I have tried to find reasons to change that opinion, but none have come. I've tried to find the parts of the movie that I truly enjoyed, hoping that if I focused on them, the flaws would seem less painful, but sadly, I had a hard time coming up with more than a few moments, or generalities that were more like commenting on the pretty color and nice leather of what is basically a very ugly and ill-fitting pair of shoes. I've been told that if I just gave it a chance and watched it enough times, it would grow on me, but that strategy felt more like brainwashing than reasonable acclimation. Either I would like it because of what I saw in it the first time, or I would dislike it because of things I saw in it the first time. Well, I've seen it again, and I found that the things I enjoyed in RotK were things I'd enjoyed in the two previous films: the cinematography, the design of props and costumes and sets, the performances of Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, Bernard Hill, and several others, the score.

But I also found that I still dislike it, for all the reasons I disliked it after my first viewing, and the biggest reason is the writing. Yes, I know Jackson et al won an Academy Award for their script, but frankly, I think it was not deserved. That award was supposed to be for best adaptation of a work from another medium, and RotK was not a good adaptation; all the awards in the world cannot make it so. I could go on at considerable length about the specific details of why I consider this a poor script, from the viewpoint of someone who has written scripts adapting the work of others, but I'm not inclined to invite nitpicking arguments from the people who have already decided they love this movie, right or wrong, and want to convince me that I'm in the wrong.  Since they already love it, they can be content with the fact that they apparently got what they wanted in this last movie of Jackson's trilogy, whereas I did not.  But though I will not get into minutiae, I will certainly address the larger reasons for my feelings.

To me, Return of the King was, at best, a mediocre adaptation of its source material, and the reasons for it all boil down to one thing: too much Peter Jackson and his co-writers (and New Line Studios), and not enough J.R.R. Tolkien. Book-purist, you say? No. I understand the need for change in writing adaptations. I know that some things have to go while others stay, and that certain aspects have to be emphasized while others are underplayed or set aside. There are some things -- Tom Bombadil, the Woses, the Scouring of the Shire -- that I had no problem bidding a fond farewell. But the heart of the original work should remain, and sadly, though that heart beat strongly in Jackson's version of The Fellowship of the Ring, it had some arrhythmia in The Two Towers, and went into full fibrillation and died in Return of the King. What am I talking about, you ask?

Simple. The Lord of the Rings is not a story about war and battles. It's a story about people who live in a time of war and are caught up in it, and how it affects their lives. The war is there, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground, always an undercurrent for motivations, but not the real reason for the story. LotR is a story about people, not about fighting, and beginning in TTT the Movie, the fighting began to take center stage while the characters stepped to the rear. In RotK, it was front and center through virtually the entire film. The only characters who were given decent screen time were those who were fighting, and even they were not handled well as characters. To put it plainly, there were just too damn many battles, and they went on far too long. This was a film full of battle sequences and character moments when there should have been character sequences and battle moments in which those characters are involved.

It has often been said that LotR is a saga about the struggle of good and evil, but when you're swinging swords and shooting arrows and hacking and killing, good and evil look pretty much the same. What makes the people doing that fighting good or evil is something that you don't see on the battlefield. The choices of the heart and spirit that make one what they are in a moral/ethical sense happen in less grandiose settings and in quieter, less action-packed events. Tolkien showed us those moments, in councils and in conversations and in other interactions between characters that had more depth and impact than the sound-bytes to which they were reduced and squeezed in between fighting in the movie. Doubtless, they fell by the wayside when Jackson and his co-writers made their adaptation because they didn't make for a "good" movie, at least by their definition (and doubtless New Line's). From what we were given in the last two films, they decided among them that drama needs a lot of action in order to work.

Funny, To Kill a Mockingbird didn't need it. It also didn't need a badly-drawn romance between a woman who does all the trying and talking and sacrificing and a guy who can't decide what he wants to be and never says one word of affection to her (though he does to his horse). Perhaps a better blueprint for how to adapt LotR into a movie would have been From Here to Eternity. Yes, it takes place during a war, and is about people involved in that war, and the war affects their lives and does come to the fore from time to time, but ultimately, it never loses sight of the fact that the story it's telling is about the people, not the battles. That was closer to the kind of story Tolkien wrote than the movie Jackson made. And it didn't seem to have suffered for taking a less action-packed route.

The worst trouble was that by focusing on the action rather than on the characters in truly meaningful ways -- primarily those ways in which Tolkien intended for them to fit into his story -- all of the characters lost focus. Characterization and even true plot took a backseat to action. Battles were lovingly, painstakingly drawn, sets and costumes were made with incredibly fine detail, but little of that same attention and patience and depth was given to the script. Virtually all scenes of character interaction were rushed, and far too often wound up being melodramatic as the result of compressing what should have been more lengthy and involved conversations and debates and personality conflicts into short "character moments" that could be gotten through as speedily as possible so that the movie could move on to the next supposedly dramatic action extravaganza. (And let's not even get me started on how some of these quick character moments seriously distorted the characters in them because they were either wholly inventions of the screenwriters' minds or were profoundly warped and in some cases highly inaccurate paraphrases from the book that gave erroneous impressions of the world Tolkien created.)

The actors took on the task of presenting things as gamefully as possible, but ultimately, they were given precious little with which to work. They all ceased to be characters and became caricatures -- quick, exaggerated sketches that were the "best hits" highlights of their personalities and places in the story (if that), and not clear portraits of what these characters really were. The story was no longer about the people; it was about the war, about the machinery of war and the blood-letting and the violence. The rallying cry became "for Frodo," which certainly was designed to tug at the heart-strings, but rang false with the point of Tolkien's saga. It wasn't for Frodo; it wasn't for any one person, or one nation, it wasn't about getting Aragorn on the throne, or getting Aragorn the girl. It was about a single cause:  the defeat of Sauron, without which all other efforts and goals would be in vain. And defeats of such an enemy are not achieved only on the field of battle. They are achieved primarily in the hearts and minds of people in their everyday lives, which they bring with them to that battlefield. We were given long and sustained views of the war, but only brief glimpses into the characters -- enough, perhaps, for today's action-oriented audiences or for readers of the books who were determined to love the movies, whether they be fair or foul, but not enough to give a truly good and reasonably accurate rendering of Tolkien's tale, or to be appealing to people who prefer more real food on their plate and less flash and show in the presentation.

I have repeatedly heard from those who adore this movie that "the movie is not the book." With that, I agree completely. Nor is the book the movie, for which I will be forever grateful. The book was vastly better in terms of plot, characterization, and simple storytelling. Return of the King the Movie was visually impressive, and managed to capture a few moments of the moving and thought-provoking things Tolkien wrote into his novel. But for the most part, the film went for action over character development, special effects over subtlety, melodrama over true dramatic plot. Many claim to have been swept away by the spectacle, often saying that they "let go" in order to let themselves enjoy it. Like an old Ent, my roots run too deep; I could not let go of what I already knew about the Real Thing, Tolkien's book, and sadly, this movie left me feeling as if I had been swept over the falls of Rauros and dashed on the rocks below. Or perhaps like the plot and characterizations, I was swept under the gaudy rug of action, movie star glamor, and special effects.

My feelings about Peter Jackson's Return of the King , especially as a part of a greater trilogy, can be summed up by a quote from Gandalf in The Two Towers (the book): "I grieve that so much that was good now festers in the tower."  What began well ended badly, and I do not know if this is so because of bad planning, misguided notions of what a good adaptation would be, the unfortunate but inevitable desire on the part of nearly all filmmakers to "improve" on the works they are adapting, to leave their own mark on it, or pressure from the studio to produce a film more appealing to a mass market weaned to think of all fantasy as sword-and-sorcery, lots of action, a little bit of sex, and very little depth in character or plot. There is no doubt that Jackson's achievement overall was great, and his final chapter clearly was tailored to appeal to today's critics and today's audiences. But I for one will never be able to see these films without thinking about what might have been if only a little more effort had been made to focus on the story of J.R.R. Tolkien as it truly was and not on the way Peter Jackson wanted it to be.