The trilogy ended with what I consider to be the best of the three films. The Lord of The Rings: The Return of The King has become a classic. I realize that it has been less than 8 years since the film’s release, but it is a classic. Not in the same way as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Godfather, but as the culmination of a fantastic body of work.
To everyone who is a fan of the LOTR movies but did not go to see the rerelease of the trilogy this month then you really missed out on something special. Not only were we treated to an introduction by Peter Jackson providing insight into the making of the movies, and a super clean transfer with mind-blowing audio, but this was the extended edition. This was the Mouth of Sauron on the big screen for the first time, 100 feet of bloody teeth!
Everything about ROTK and the other two films was fantastic. If I had one complaint and there is always one, it would be that because of the sheer volume of special effects scenes in what turns out to be a 4 1/2 hour movie, some were not as spectacular as they should have been. From time to time you could tell where the scenery ended and the special effect began. A small price to pay for what I would say is the greatest film trilogy of all time.
Some of you might be thinking that having the trilogy on blu-ray is just as satisfying (I own the extended edition blu-rays as well), but it is not the same experience as seeing it on the big screen as it was intended. I threw FOTR into my PS3 and watched the first half hour on my 61” TV, and it wasn’t the same. It just wasn’t.
Now that we’ve established that the movie itself was awesome, let me talk about the audience. If you’ve read my previous reviews of FOTR and The Two Towers, you will remember that for Fellowship, the audience was fantastic and exactly what you want when you go to the movies and for The Two Towers, it was exactly the opposite. For ROTK it seemed like the there was a mix of the two. With school having just let out, the audience was younger and did not tolerate a lot of the clapping feces that overtook The Two Towers, but it still happened. There was one guy a few rows in front of us who clapped all the time. He received shouts of “Go kill yourself!” and “Fucking asshole!” from me and others in the audience. At one point there is a kissing scene and when the clapping started my friend Danny yelled, “You’re only clapping because you’ve never been kissed before and you never will!” I almost fell out of my seat laughing.
To show you just how dumb the audience was, during the scene where Sam and Frodo are on the rock surrounded by lava after they had destroyed the ring, the movie fades to black. One person actually stood up to leave thinking that the movie was over. Everyone laughed at him as they should. The last hour of the movie was a clap fest and at that point we were unable to get back into the film. We just kept yelling obscene things at the people clapping and that seemed to make us happy. On a side note, the guy behind me actually said during the scene where the spider wraps Frodo in her web, “Hey, it looks like spaghetti!” I wanted to stab him in the face.
I think the moral of this story and the culmination of these three reviews is that if you can see the Lord of The Rings trilogy (extended edition) up on the big screen with only a few friends and no one else in the theater, then jump at it. If other people have to be there, don’t bring any weapons with you as you might be tempted to use them.
Related articles
- The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship Re-release Review (mytakeradio.com)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Director’s Cut (mytakeradio.com)
