Well, I now have seen the much-vaunted extended edition of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, the version of the movie that I have been oft told would fix all the problems with the theatrical release and redeem the entire series (and of course Peter Jackson) in the eyes of the fans of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien who were not as smitten with said film as the critics and award voters of Hollywood, not to mention the starry-eyed fans of various actors.

I had heard the same thing about Windows 98, and that it was going to redeem all the problems, big and small, that users had been having with prior versions of Windows. Windows 98 turned out to be little more than a bug fix that didn’t correct certain major issues and introduced a bunch of new ones, thus demonstrating that Microsoft’s aim was not to please the customers, but to please themselves and make more money.

I had exactly the same reaction to the extended edition of Jackson’s Return of the King. I watched it, and afterward was even more thoroughly disgusted with what he had done to Tolkien’s work. In the end, I threw it away.

To be frank, I would’ve preferred to get my money back, plus an extra bonus for having wasted so much of my time screening what turned out to be a glorification of Jackson’s myopic "vision" and a diminishment of Tolkien’s work, but since the stores won’t take back opened DVDs (perhaps I should’ve told them it’s damaged goods, it certainly seemed to be to me), the trash can is the only place it belongs. Admitting this has already won me whining from people who wanted me to give it to them instead and not "waste it," but I remained adamant. I won’t give away something that I consider highly disrespectful of the original work. My dislike of what was done in Return of the King runs far deeper than mere displeasure with the expanded version of the movie. I was appalled when it won as many awards as it did, because I (and an awful lot of other people I know, some of whom work in various parts of the industry) honestly don't feel it deserved them, especially not as an adaptation.

I have not liked Jackson's Return of the King since my first viewing of it in the theater. I tried very hard to give it a fair chance, and went to see it again several months later, when I could be certain that I was not being distracted by things like audience noise and elevated expectations. I found I disliked it even more after the second viewing. The extended edition simply underscored all of the things I disliked about it in the first place. Too much action, not enough solid character development, too much tinkering with Tolkien's story when it wasn't necessary for anything but the changes the scriptwriters wanted to insert, too much changing of the characters themselves.

What was most appalling to me were the ways in which Gandalf and Denethor were twisted and diminished. Despite having two excellent actors to portray these roles, Jackson wasted them by handing them scripts that were truly abominable. Jackson's Denethor is a unapologetic lunatic with no dignity and no real reason behind his madness -- a common garden variety nutcase who is driven mad not by a powerful and evil Enemy, but by a petty personal desire for ultimate power and control in the form of the throne of Gondor. He is not the proud steward whose pride pushes him to attempt something dangerous for the sake of his people that winds up becoming the beginning of his end, and almost the doom of his people. He is a would-be king who wants the power of the Ring to complete his rise from servant to royalty. Think not? Then consider just one line: In the book, Denethor tells Gandalf, "The rule of Gondor is mine and no other man's, unless the king should come again." In the movie, "unless the king should come again" is omitted -- small, perhaps, but very significant. It puts in clear focus what Jackson wants us to believe is Denethor's true ambition -- not to mention the fact that he already considers himself to be the absolute monarch of Gondor -- and in one swift stroke robs the character of the misguided nobility he had in the book, the very characteristic that made him someone with whom the reader could identify. I felt sympathy for Tolkien's Denethor; I felt none for Jackson's. The snippets of scenes they added, like this unwisely rewritten line, only underscored Denethor's madness; they didn't give him back a whit of his dignity and the air of a leader tricked into going astray that made the reader think "there but for the grace of God go I." Jackson's Denethor may be easily found in real world business and politics, and that very connection weighs down the story and drags it into the muck of everyday life rather than lift it above the ordinary into the realm of myth and fable from which many important lessons are learned.

And Gandalf...! Shudder. Even if Gandalf had not been my favorite character, I would have been horrified by what they did to him (my brother, who is a Sauron fan, agrees with this). Gandalf was so diminished and disempowered in the last two movies, they might as well have left him dead in Moria and let him retain the dignity he had at that point, to become a rallying cry for the armies of the west. Instead, he became an uncertain, shaken, powerless old man whose staff is broken by a thrall of Sauron, and whose primary purpose seems to be to appear so weak and uncertain and useless that he makes Aragorn look good by comparison. As the series wore on, this was direly needed to fix the story because back in The Fellowship of the Ring, the scriptwriters went and softened Aragorn's character and imbued him with SO much uncertainty and human weakness that any strong character standing beside him would have made him look unworthy of the throne. Diminishing Gandalf in order to build up Aragorn breaks one of the most basic rules of good writing (as does building up Sam at the expense of Frodo): if you have to weaken other characters in order to make your hero look strong, then your hero is badly conceived and badly written. This wasn’t a problem with Tolkien’s book, in which such amateurish tricks were not used; it IS very much a problem with Jackson’s scripts. Tolkien invented a world of diversity, populated not only by Men, but by Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, and Wizards, distinct races that have had problems with one another, but who in a time of dire crisis come togther to defeat a great evil. Jackson invented a world of Men, in which the only creatures who count are the mortals, and in which the immortals are ultimately of no consequence -- things to be defeated, or driven out of this world so that Men (and Hobbits, the other mortals Jackson likes) can have it all to themselves. He showed this again and again and again through these films by narrowing his focus until the only people of importance -- and power -- are humans. He gives Legolas a last hurrah in taking down a mumak single-handedly, but makes sure that Gandalf is defeated as a wizard even before the last battle, so there's no risk of him doing anything to one-up the mortals. That shows such a narrowness of mind and such a lack of understanding of Tolkien's work (not to mention a lack of reading it; Gandalf did nothing in the Last Battle that would have diminished the reputations of the Men), it makes me want to go clobber him and his "inspired" co-writers with the heaviest copy of the book that I can find. If people who saw the movies want to complain about their racial bias, they should point to Jackson's overemphasis of "the world of Men." It's not a lack of skin color and gender that mars his films; it's the glorfication of Man and the ham-handed belittling of all other races (even the hobbits do not fully escape this) that shows the narrowness of the director's viewpoint. He may give Elves fancy houses and pretty clothes, the Dwarves an impressive (if abandoned) home carved beneath mountains, and allow wizards a few moments of power, but in the end, he pushes the Elves out of the picture, turns the Dwarves into court jesters, and makes the wizards, old, feeble, and powerless. Jackson lives in a world of Men, and cannot envision anything more wondrous, even when he has the book right in front of him.

Jackson and his co-writers started down this path when they made Aragorn uncertain of his ability to be king, then made matters worse when they made him start questioning and even rejecting his love for Arwen. He makes noises to Elrond about Arwen making her own choices, but the upshot of the conversation is that he himself denies her the right to make her own decision by pushing her away to make Daddy Elrond happy. He may have different reasons for doing it — which, coincidentally, we are never told, we’re just left to presume that Aragorn was completely convinced by Elrond’s specious argument about their love remaining “ever green” if she goes to Valinor (an impossibility if the lovers are forced apart before their love is even consummated, one to inevitably die while the other remains eternally alive) — but the ultimate effect is the same. Aragorn caves in to Elrond’s wishes and in the process throws away his spine. When Jackson put in the scene where Aragorn tries to return the necklace to Arwen and says it was "just a dream," they stripped him of any clear motivation for being involved in the matter of the Ring.

Everyone else in the Fellowship has a reason. Frodo inherited the Ring and its burden. The defeat of Sauron is Gandalf’s reason for being in Middle-earth (athough we don't really know that from the movie) and he's going along because he got Frodo into this mess in the first place. The other three hobbits are kin and friends of Frodo, determined to stand by him and help him even before he left the Shire (well, not in the movie, in the movie, Merry and Pippin appear to have been taken along by accident, at least at the outset). Jackson's Legolas and Gimli are determined to one-up each other because of their racial prejudices. Boromir out and out wants a chance to steal the Ring. But what about Aragorn? He doesn't want to go to Gondor and be king, he doesn’t believe he’ll ever be able to be with Arwen again, so what's motivating him? The fact that he's a Ranger? What's a Ranger? The movie never tells you. There's a lot the movie never tells you that it should (like, do Aragorn and Arwen actually LOVE each other? The word never seems to come up between them). By the time the movie reaches Helm's Deep, Aragorn's only motivation appears to be to "kill orc." They talk about him being a leader, but a leader of what, and for what purpose? Elves? They hauled in a whole regiment of them where they didn’t belong... why? So Aragorn could have a bunch of crack archers and warriors to lead, to one-up Théoden and make him look bad, too? (That WAS the ultimate upshot of having the Elves at Helm’s Deep; Jackson’s Théoden admits that he was useless in battle, that Aragorn did all the leading, another degradation plainly meant to bolster Aragorn’s poorly redesigned character.) Was there something wrong with leaving Aragorn as he had been written by Tolkien, an unassuming man whose prowess and leadership skill in battle alongside ordinary soldiers leads to natural respect? Aragorn’s character was so dreadfully diluted (and/or artificially inflated) via Jackson-inspired “improvements” to the story that by the end of The Two Towers, something had to be done in the third film to make him look strong and kingly, or the whole matter of “the return of the king” would have been a joke.

Something was done, all right: Gandalf became the sacrificial lamb in the attempt to repair the script. He became nothing. There was nothing he did in Return of the King that couldn't have been done by somebody else (or explained away without the need for "magic," as in the rescue of Faramir). The only purposes he serves are that of an encyclopedia, to provide information to Pippin; a rather bossy general (which goes against the very nature of the character and would have had Tolkien spinning in his grave); and an unhappy old man who keeps worrying about sending Frodo to his death just so Aragorn can come along and buck him up and look kingly. Even when Pippin tells him, "We have the White Wizard, that has to count for something," the look with which Gandalf answers says, "No, it doesn’t." All of a sudden, Gandalf has taken over the role Jackson had earlier made for Aragorn — weak and indecisive — because he apparently couldn't think of another way to repair Aragorn's badly damaged character and make him look worthy of the throne before the time came for him to park his back end on it. He even resorts to the absolutely ridiculous ploy of having the Witch King break Gandalf's staff -- without striking it, just as Gandalf broke Saruman's -- and then has him literally grovel on the ground, thrown by his horse and helpless, to make sure he gets across the point to the audience that Gandalf is now powerless, and it's up to Men, and human means, to defeat Sauron. This was absolutely unnecessary (had Aragorn's character not been needlessly weakened and required shoring up), since in the story Tolkien wrote, Gandalf used very little "magic" during the last book, and instead used encouragement and hope to strengthen the hearts of the Free Peoples to stand against Sauron and defeat him. Unfortunately, Gandalf of the movie can't do this, because Jackson thought it best to turn him into a character without hope, filled with a considerable amount of doubt and despair.

The films remain visually beautiful, a triumph of set decoration, special effects, costuming, and even casting, but it's all style and no substance in Return of the King. Lines that were moving in the book because of all the back story that gave rise to them become platitudes in the film. I find it particularly interesting and frustrating to see just how many of the new lines in the extended edition were Gandalf's lines in the book -- good lines, obviously, or Jackson and his cohorts would’ve dumped or rewritten them -- that were put into the mouths of other characters, while he was left with new things devised by Jackson and company that lacked any of the eloquence and insight and wisdom the character was supposed to have, that Tolkien wanted him to have. Obviously, the filmmakers did not, to the ultimate detriment of the film. Aragorn's rise to power was unconvincing because it didn't start back in the first movie, where it should have: with the Ranger who sets forth to defeat a terrible enemy and win his birthright not out of a desire for power, but from a clear love of a woman with whom he wants to share his life. I would have cheered to see that Aragorn take the throne because he had a purpose. Jackson's Aragorn... no. I would've rather seen Jackson's Théoden on the throne of Gondor. For all the mistakes he made, he still loved his country and its people, and that we never doubt. Aragorn is a bundle of doubts and uncertainties, his confidence is gained too heavily at the expense of others -- and in the end, when the crown is set on his head, he STILL looks like he wants to run away. If this movie is about The Return of the King, it would've been nice if the King more clearly had his heart in it. If these changes were made to increase dramatic or sexual tension, they failed. Even people I know who hadn’t read the book found them unconvincing and ultimately boring.

And there is more. Another cardinal rule of writing drama: comic relief is needed during the build-up to the climax (to diffuse dramatic tension both for the relief of the audience and to provide contrast to the ultimate payoff), but once you’re into the part of the story that IS the climax, you WANT the dramatic tension to build and be relieved only by the climax itself, not watered down by comedy that is now out of place. Just before Christmas, I happened to see The Muppet Christmas Carol, several days after viewing the Return of the King Extended Edition. I was floored by the scene in which Scrooge meets with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and Gonzo and Rizzo — who have been acting (and often overacting) as comic relief through most of the film — turn to the audience and say “you’re on your own,” bowing out until after the dramatic climax. Brian Henson, the director of that film, was a first time director — and yet he and his screenwriter, working in a medium that has always been basically comic in nature, KNEW that there’s a time to stop the jokes, or the payoff will fall on its face. Apparently, Peter Jackson is unfamiliar with this concept. In the extended edition scene in which we meet the Mouth of Sauron, it was bad enough that we had yet another instance of weak and frail old Gandalf falling apart and needing Aragorn to lop off the Mouth’s head to shut him up and make things all better, but then Jackson made a situation that was already bad from two angles even worse by having Gimli quip, “End of negotiations” after the head goes flying. Jackson had already overused Gimli as comic relief — turning him from the proud but staunch and loyal Dwarf of Tolkien’s book into a snorting, slobbering, hot-headed boor bereft of intelligence and useful for making or being the butt of jokes (take note that Gimli’s best scenes initially wound up on the cutting room floor, and were only seen in the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring) — but this instance was the worst use of him in the entire trilogy of films. There was no need for a joke at that point; indeed, having a joke at that point diminished the drama of the scene and cheapened it. Aragorn’s ability to simply ride up and hack off the Mouth of Sauron’s head was unbelievable — no person that high in the ranks of Sauron’s service would have allowed an enemy leader to come that close without withdrawing or preparing a defense — and Gimli’s unnecessary wisecrack was further proof of how badly the scene had been rewritten. Tolkien presented it just fine. Jackson presented it so poorly, it would have been better off had it never seen the light of day.

All of this is bad writing. The medium doesn’t matter. Be it in a book or a movie or television or a stage play, characterization done this shoddily is a disservice to the plot and an insult to the audience. Every last one of my mentors in fiction writing would have agreed with this. And it's bad adaptation. There was no reason for them to change Aragorn's (or Gandalf’s, or Denethor’s, or Sam’s) character that made sense within the context of necessary alterations to accommodate the shift from book to screen. It only makes sense within the context of scriptwriters attempting to impose their own specific modern tastes on a story that is not modern; it's mythical. When you change myths to "update" them on levels that alter the basic nature of the heroes and villains, you alter the core message of the myth, and ultimately weaken it. You wind up not with the Hercules of Greco/Roman myth, but with the Hercules of '90s TV. Jackson didn't go quite that far, but in my opinion, he came awfully close. As the movies progressed, we saw less and less of Tolkien's story -- and the POINT of Tolkien's story -- and more and more of Jackson, Walsh, Boyens, and Hollywood mentality, without any clear point at all. The myth — and the moral core — of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was swept aside by the big-screen epic and became a swashbuckler with lots of violence and action, insipid half-baked romances, and no magic of the kind that is really important: the magic of the heart. The heart of this movie is as dead and smelly as a fish that’s been floating belly-up for two weeks. The truly weighty issues — love, loyalty, honor, duty, compromise, cooperation, sacrifice — are largely implied, never clearly spoken (save in histrionics), and are generally glossed over in quick sound bites that are too rushed to have weight, just so the film can hurry on to the next action scene, the next special effects extravaganza.

And Tolkien’s West -- the land of the Valar and their guests, the Elves — is diminished into a metaphor for death — which it is not, but which is all the movie makers understood of it. They are so heavily mired in the “world of Men,” they cannot lift their eyes from the dirt nor pull their feet from the mud and realize that there is “more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of” in their philosophies. Aragorn is not a scion of kings from a time when Men were of a greater and nobler and more mythical sort, the Men who walked with giants and were the stuff of legends; he is a king after the model of our modern world, no better than ordinary men, and sometimes worse because they are expected and obliged by their position to do more and cannot, because they have used rank and privilige as a means to their own ends, not to fulfill the obligations of their position. Gandalf is no longer an “angel” sent to help the suffering world be rid of a great evil; he isn’t even a wizard, for he has lost his magic, and is reduced to using baser means for making points — clubbing people with his staff to get them out of the way, shouting orders he has no right to give, fretting and fussing over the past and not looking on to the future. He loses his dignity and becomes pitifully maudlin, wholly a Man and not a nobler being in the body of a Man. Frodo comes closest to retaining his original character. We might be able to forgive him the Jackson-invented dismissal of Sam because of the influence of the Ring and Gollum, but by inserting this little twist to Tolkien’s tale, the bond of trust between Frodo and Sam is shattered. It cannot be mended simply because Sam happens to come along at the right time to rescue him, because he didn't go into danger with Frodo in the first place, and in fact was coming back to prove that Gollum had lied, not because he had refused to be parted from his beloved master. In one fell swoop, their relationship is cheapened, their nobility tarnished, their achievements made less than they might have been, because the scriptwriters failed to see the point of their relationship as Tolkien had written it. They “improved” it supposedly to emphasize the increasing hold of the Ring upon Frodo, and didn’t even notice that the method they chose ruined a more important aspect of the story: the extraordinary friendship between Frodo and Sam. They dragged it down to the commonplace, perhaps making it seem more "real" in their eyes, but robbing it of the larger than life aspects that had made it a beautiful part of Tolkien's saga, a friendship worthy of becoming legend. The failure of this aspect of the film might also be laid at Sean Astin's feet. He did all right in the first film, but by the end, his Sam is much too aggressive and angry. His performance is most convincing when he is displaying such emotions. His "softer" moments are generally unconvincing, sometimes bordering on histrionic -- insincere, especially when compared to the better and more subtle performance of Elijah Wood. Perhaps Astin and Jackson felt that trembling lower lips and teary eyes and quivering voices are enough to make a heartfelt performance, but even if the appearance is perfected, the performance will fail if there is no real heart in it. I'm afraid that for me (and for a lot of people; I know I am far from alone in feeling this), Astin's performance was the worst in the entire film. And no amount of defense raised by irate fans of the actor can change this.

Tolkien’s three major heroes — Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf — were all heroic because they were in some way transcendent, able to rise above the weight of the burdens placed upon them, admit their limitations, and work with others to achieve Sauron’s defeat, not for their glory nor even for a crown, but for the love of the world and the people in it. None of this comes across in Jackson’s final work. It is completely lost, and rather than bring back these elements in the extended edition, Jackson merely did a more thorough job of crushing them to dust. He “reinvented” Tolkien’s world, as the extended edition brazenly proclaims, and he ruined it for those of us who loved it as the good Professor’s more bountiful and expansive imagination created it. He drowned Lord of the Rings in the cesspool of secular humanism of which it was never a part, put his mark on it, and did what Tolkien tells us Gandalf would have done had he taken the Ring and become enslaved by it: He made what had been good evil, and ultimately detestable. In the final telling, it appears that the “experts” on Tolkien’s works that supposedly worked with Jackson on his films were only there to get the “look and feel” right, to provide details on what things should look like, and come up with phrases in Elvish when they were needed. They plainly offered nothing to help the director understand what the story was about on any level more than an inch or so below the surface. If they had, Aragorn would not have needed pitiful old man Gandalf to make him look kingly, nor would Frodo have needed Sam “Rudy” Gamgee, All American, to pull him out of the pit in Mount Doom.

Even though I liked the first film, I was never willing to “trust PJ,” as so many other fans told me I should, having seen often enough in life that what begins well still can end badly. I was told that Jackson wouldn’t sell out to Hollywood, because he was from New Zealand. But now that all is said and done, Jackson has only proved that a filmmaker from New Zealand has just as many human failings as the Hollywood directors who make bad movies out of good books. That Return of the King won many awards is no proof of its merit; the same fans who danced in the streets when Return of the King won awards had been whining and griping about the unfairness of the Hollywood system and Hollywood politics when the first two films lost (both of which were more deserving of awards, in my opinion).* Yet it’s the same Hollywood, the same awards systems, the same politics, even the same voters who in previous years had awarded “undeserving” films that gave so many awards to Return of the King. Did sudden wisdom from on high come down and change those things just so that Return of the King would receive awards that were actually awards of high merit, or are the awards worth exactly the same as those given to the accursed “undeserving” films that “robbed” Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers — that being nothing?

If one faces the truth, one knows the answer: awards such as theses are ultimately nothing but beauty contests, and whoever is most popular or trendy — not actually the best — in any given year wins. A thousand awards wouldn’t validate this final installment of Jackson’s work any more than hour upon hour of commentary by the director and screenwriters justify changes in the story that were out-and-out bad writing. Sadly, Jackson fell prey to the Ring of popular success. He abandoned his original self-proclaimed mission to make a faithful adaptation of Tolkien’s books into film, and instead reinvented Tolkien’s world to suit himself. He betrayed the book fans whose trust he had begged for at the beginning with vows that he would remain true to Tolkien’s work, sold out to the movie fans who worshiped his own creations, and made excuses rather than apologies for having broken his promises.

Addendum

Lately, I’ve been hearing quite a bit from the apologists who have been trying from the first to coerce me into liking Return of the King, but their arguments remain unconvincing.

1). “You need to get into Jackson’s head and see what he was trying to do.” Why? He and the studio told me that this was an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. That’s all the more “into his head” that I should need to get. If they had been honest from the beginning and told me that this was going to be Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (loosely based on or merely inspired by Tolkien’s work of the same name), then I might have at least felt that I’d been warned. But I wasn’t. Jackson himself claimed to be a fan of Tolkien’s work, and stated repeatedly that he was going to try to make these movies for the fans. What he didn’t say was that halfway into things, he was going to bid the fan’s of Tolkien’s work goodbye and start making the movies for HIS fans.

2). “You need to separate the book from the movies.” Fair enough. I've written adaptations, and I have always understood that this is a given. I tried. Conclusion: The book was well written. The movie was not. I’m not saying that from the standpoint of someone who wanted and/or expected to see every moment of the book translated to the screen. I’m saying it from the standpoint of someone who has been both a writer, adaptor, and an editor. Had the script of Return of the King been sent to me for my approval as an editor, I would have rejected it or sent it back for considerable revision. Ditto The Two Towers. Once again, bad writing is bad writing, regardless of medium. In separating the book from the movie, one does not start forgiving bad writing just because the medium changed. I have found that those who do are doing so because they are somehow star-struck, smitten with actors in the films, or blinded by the glitter of fame and the overwhelming size of the silver screen. But none of those things are reasons to ignore what was done wrong when there was no reason for it to have been wrong in the first place.

3). “It could’ve been worse.” Ah, the rallying cry of mediocrity. That’s like saying to the survivors of a disaster that it’s of no consequence that they’ve just lost their home and livelihood; they got through it alive. In real life, that would be true (though I’ve known survivors of great tragedies who would beg to differ; it is never easy to be the survivor who is left to bury the dead and mourn the loss, then try to rebuild with nothing). But this isn’t real life; it’s the movies. We shouldn’t reach the end feeling like survivors of a disaster, glad to have gotten out with our lives and grateful for the scraps we are able to salvage from the wreckage. The images I’ve heard cited as to how Return of the King could’ve been worse are absurd, since even a bad writer would have recognized such exaggerated and egregious deviations as unacceptable (i.e., naked dancing girls at the celebration in Edoras -- yes, I really heard that). We do know that Jackson seriously considered things nearly as bad (i.e., Arwen fighting at Helm’s Deep, Sauron and Aragorn fighting before the Black Gates) and was persuaded to abandon them, though he DID film some of these scenes, coming perilously close to the apologists’ “worse” scenario. From this evidence, if I were to follow their advice to “try to get into his head,” then I would have to conclude that his head wasn’t where it should have been had he been sincere in his stated intent to make a reasonably faithful adaptation of Tolkien’s book. Had he been, such deviations would never even have occurred to him. For example, if he wanted to bring in Arwen at that point to keep her in the minds of the audience, why didn’t he just have her arrive with other Rangers AFTER the Helm's Deep battle to bring Andúril to Aragorn? That would have served several good purposes: giving us a clearer picture of the Rangers, showing Elrond's support of Aragorn's bid for the throne, making Arwen a more active part of Aragorn's life.... Oh, wait, I forgot, “Arwen is dying....” Yes, that’s SO much more effective and in keeping with the spirit of Tolkien’s work. I thought they might be heading back on track again when Aragorn looked into the palantir, but they turned it into a crystal ball for telling the future rather than a communications device WHICH CANNOT LIE. Sauron could not have showed Aragorn such a vision because it hadn't happened, and the palantiri can only show what is true and what is. In that scene alone, they dragged Tolkien's work down to the level of all the mediocre "fairy tales" which employ crystal balls and magic wands and the other trappings of unimaginative magic that have nothing to do with the "magic" in Tolkien's created world. In the final analysis, the films were more than sufficiently bad because they fell apart and failed the audience on what is probably the cheapest level of production: the writing. Jackson didn’t go out and hire some big name to do the adaptation; he and his wife and a friend did it themselves (shades of the old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movies: “My mom can sew the costumes, and we can use my dad’s barn....”). What are typically the most expensive aspects of movies like this — the effects, the sets, the cast, etc. — came out just fine. But the script, which is often among the cheapest part of the costs, wound up as a disaster. It suffered from many of the problems that plague novice writers: it started out well with a good concept and reasonably solid characters, then lost focus and direction, and tried to use writer’s tricks rather than good sound writing to pull things together. Far too many of the scenes that follow the rescue from Mount Doom are long wallows through cheap emotion, in which maudlin tugging at the heart-strings is used as a substitute for true significance. For instance: Frodo rubs at his shoulder, saying that the old wound still hurts, then shrugs it off as one might a mild case of tennis elbow as a lead-in to a longer exchange between him and Sam about The Book, the last pages are for you, blah blah blah. Yes, there was such an exchange in Tolkien’s book, but with Frodo’s very real spiritual pain and suffering diminished to a mere physical ache that is too easily dismissed, the deeper significance of the passing of the Red Book from Frodo to Sam is lost. Unless they’ve read Tolkien's book, the audience has no understanding of just how badly Frodo has been wounded, physically and emotionally, by his ordeal with the Ring and Evil. I’ve heard of far too many people who were left wondering why Frodo had to leave Middle-earth and die when he could have stayed behind and been healed by the love of his friends. From the information we’re given in the films, this isn’t an unreasonable conclusion; the Shire DOES look like the perfect place where Frodo can recover, because his wounds aren't all that bad, and love heals all. A completely wrong conclusion, yes, but that’s not the fault of the audience. It’s the fault of the screenwriters, whose job it was to tell the story well enough so that the audience properly understood the story. At the end of Return of the King, many did not. Worst of all, this need not have happened, since the writers had a perfectly clear map to follow; they could have led the audience to the proper ending if they had focused more clearly on Tolkien’s road and cut down on the off-the-road excursions into lackluster regions of their own invention.

4). “Well, at least it got a lot of people to read the book.” From what I’ve seen on the Internet and elsewhere, it got many people to BUY the books. Some read them; some started reading them and didn’t finish ("it's too long, it's too boring, it's too OLD"); too many stopped reading them when they found out they weren’t just like the movies. When Fellowship of the Ring was released, it was hard to find copies of Lord of the Rings in resale shops. Now, the shelves are loaded with them. One might argue that these were just “extras,” copies people sold when they got more than one set as gifts, but somehow, I don’t believe that. I've seen too much evidence that people would rather sit through hours and hours of a poorly done movie adaptation with lots of hunky stars to ogle than curl up with an even better book that will lead the reader into the far more wondrous realm of their own imaginations. But then, I fear that modern movies, television, and books have tended to stunt the imaginations of their audiences, making them want more of the pabulum they produce and less of good honest food you can sink your teeth in. After all, why bother to cook when you can go and buy a TV dinner? Never mind that the TV dinner has reduced nutrition and more additives that aren't good for you. As long as it looks like real food, it must BE real food, right? So if a movie based on a book looks good and the actors in it turn you on, that's all you should really need, isn't it? Making you think deeply is too much like work.

5). “You need to listen to the commentaries to really understand the films.” I do? I first read Lord of the Rings when I was 11 years old, and although I read the appendices and found them interesting (because I was sorry the story was over and wanted to read more about Tolkien’s world and its characters), I didn’t need to read them to “really understand” the book itself. Extra material can enhance and add even greater depth and breadth to a story, but if the central tale cannot stand on its own and requires further explanations to be properly understood and appreciated, then the story has problems. In the case of a film, those problems usually are a combination of poor writing, poor editing, or poor direction. In the case of Return of the King, I’d blame all three. The script provides the basis for the storytelling, and in many scenes, it provided a foundation so shaky, the scenes worked badly at best and failed utterly at worst. Directing and editing choose how those scenes will be presented, and a number of scenes that would have been perfectly fine if allowed to play out differently flopped because of bad directing and editing choices. Major case in point: Éowyn’s confrontation with the Witch King. This stands out as absolutely the worst presentation in the entire trilogy because of one critical — and frankly foolish — mistake on Jackson’s part: he cut away in the middle of the battle to show us fighting going on elsewhere. The dramatic tension of Éowyn’s struggle with the Lord of the Nazgûl had already been watered down considerably by Jackson’s choice to make her presence in the army known to the audience when the Rohirrim set out rather than keep it secret, as it had been in the book. He then made matters worse by breaking the scene into two pieces, cutting away to show other fighting and thus diffusing the build-up of dramatic tension in Éowyn’s struggle. By the time he finally gets back to her and the Witch King, the viewer’s head is so full of other images, Jackson cannot possibly hope to rebuild the tension and focus to give the scene its proper impact when Éowyn delivers the fatal blow. It’s too late. And no amount of explanation for why this was done will ever make those choices right. They were bad writing, bad adaptation, and bad film making. Besides, if a writer writes a bad book, are they given the luxury of then publishing a second edition with a few “corrections” and long, drawn-out excuses for why they did it? No. Perhaps if their original book made the kind of money Return of the King hauled in, they’d get that luxury (Stephen King did, if I recall correctly), but then, it would only prove — as this does — that it isn’t the true quality of the work speaking, it’s the popularity and its ability to turn a profit. An “extended edition” should enhance the original work. It shouldn’t be counted on to fix it, and sadly with Return of the King, the extended edition did neither. At best, it provided more dazzle to blind the audience to the fundamental flaws of the original film, and far too often, its “extensions” only emphasized those failings. They “fixed” nothing, and ruined much.

*Frankly, I think the only person who was “robbed” of an award from the Academy was Sir Ian McKellen, who did an astounding job with a nearly impossible role. I’d like to give him an extra-special award for being the Greatest Trouper of All Time, on the basis of how remarkably well he did with how little he was given after the post-Fellowship of the Ring decision was made to diminish Gandalf’s role and essentially emasculate and trivialize the character, without one word of complaint from him about being so badly slighted. Bravo, Sir Ian!