Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

There's the funny fact people like to mention about the television series M*A*S*H*: They note that the Korean War only lasted three years, but that M*A*S*H* lasted for 11 years. Fortunately, people were mostly enjoying the show so much that they didn't worry about that.

I feel the same way about the three films in the Lord of the Rings series: It's around 36 hours (typo intended, so please no complaints) into Return of the King and Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) are approaching Mordor and it struck me that they'd probably been out on the road for less than a year. Somehow it all feels like longer.

Like so many people, I remember when I first heard that Peter Jackson was making the trilogy. I remember when Stuart Townsend was cast as Aragorn and then when he wasn't. I remember the first trailers and then the first time I saw each of the three films. I remember the hours of sitting and watching, mostly in awe, as my bottom went numb. Throw in the actual memories of the various adventures within the narrative and even though the time span in the Lord of the Rings trilogy was only 14 or 15 months, I felt like I'd spent years and years and years with these characters.

That's a tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien, of course. But as I mentioned in my review of The Two Towers last year, I read The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring and then I wasn't interested enough to keep reading.

So it's really a tribute to Peter Jackson (and, to some large measure, fellow scripters Frances Walsh and Philippa Boyens). At the end of the day, I'm not going to have given any of the three films more than 4 stars out of 5, but taken as an overall achievement, the Lord of the Rings films have no real epic contemporaries. Even if George Lucas hadn't desecrated the original Star Wars trilogy with two subpar prequels, the textured writing of Jackson's trilogy puts it ahead of Lucas's. The third film sinks The Godfather trilogy, of course, and lets not get started on the Scream or American Pie movies (little joke there).

Simply put, it's hard to imagine any director dedicating the time and money to replicating this kind of endeavor any time soon, but it's nearly impossible to imagine any other director achieving this kind of scope not just once or twice, but three consecutive times.

Return of the King is an assured and fitting conclusion to the trilogy and it probably stands up as the most accomplished of the three movies. That Jackson and his outstanding technical crew were still capable of producing this kind of open-eyed wonderment the third time around is baffling. With each stunt, with each computer effect or character, with each battle sequence they kept needing to raise the bar and they kept succeeding. For an example of the difficulties of that task, one need only look at how the Wachowski brothers managed to completely and totally alienate one of cinema's most passionate fan bases with two sequels of diminishing returns.

Return of the King offers satisfying conclusions, richer characters and increased cinematic confidence over its predecessors. That being said, it suffers from the same moments of overkill and the same structural problems that periodically plagued the first two movies. Jackson and company had a task of daunting proportions and succeeded as often as was humanly possible, but that doesn't mean that there aren't flaws. But I'll get into that as I progress.

Rather than beginning at the exact ending of The Two Towers, Jackson rearranges the narrative to offer a special treat. Suddenly, it's lovely and sunny again and we're back in The Shire, where a slightly goofy hobbit named Smeagol (Andy Serkis, finally in the flesh) is out fishing with a fellow hobbit, Deagol. The other hobbit hooks a fish, but finds something more valuable at the bottom of the river -- a shiny gold ring. Smeagol is drawn in immediately and kills his friend. As the years pass, we watch Smeagol lose weight, lose his hair and lose his hobbit identity as he becomes the endearingly evil computer generated character Gollum.

Having established the degenerative properties attached to the One Ring, we're better attuned to shift back to our place in the narrative, as Sam, Frodo and Gollum are getting closer and closer to Mordor. Frodo has become a bit of a dead-eyed cipher, but now we have a better sense of the unfortunate direction in which he's headed. Frodo, Sam and Gollum have the simplest and most linear aspect of the Return of the King plot. Sam and Frodo want to go to Mordor to dispose of the ring, while Gollum/Smeagol are having an internal battle over whether to kill the hobbits and recapture the Ring.

In other parts of Middle Earth, though, things are more complicated, particularly if you don't own the Two Towers director's cut and you haven't checked it out in, say, the past few days. It's after the battle at Helm's Deep and Gandalf (Ian McKellan), Aragorn (Viggo Mortenson), Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli (John Rhys-Davis) are contemplating the fact that even after their major victory, the evil power of Sauron lives to fight another day. And that can only mean one thing: Lots and lots of Orcs.

The new major setting is Minas Tirith, a white-stoned metropolis on the face of a cliff. Minas Tirith is ruled by the Steward of Gondor, who is going a little bit bonkers what with the fact that his son Boromir died in the first movie and is only around in fleeting flashbacks and the fact that Aragon is clearly right on the verge of being emotionally ready to claim the throne of Gondor. That being said, there's a big battle a-brewing and many of our favorite usual suspects get to fight, be heroic and sometimes (rarely actually) die magnificently noble deaths. Basically, every battle is huge and every battle is really important, but most important of all is the smaller (relatively) personal struggles of Sam and Frodo and Gollum.

When approaching a film of this huge length (around 210 minutes when all is said and done), it's difficult to know how to approach an evaluative process. But here goes:

Which characters, you might wonder, are better developed in this movie?

The obvious answers are supporting hobbits Merry (squished James Van Der Beek look-alike Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd). Merry and Pippin were stuck with The Two Tower's biggest plot liability, the belabored trip through the forest on the shoulder of a tree. They were never part of the second film, but here they become genuinely valiant as the series' focus shifts from the pre-established warriors to the surprising saviors. Pippin gets to fight and sing and Boyd delivers a lovely and unexpected performance. Merry is still used a bit more for comic relief, but he delivers as well.

Also better? The commanding Bernard Hill as the dignified Theoden and the lovely and resourceful Miranda Otto as warrior babe Eowyn. Eowyn's power was hinted at in the second film, but her strength comes to the fore here. However, the character is somewhat let down by what I'm guessing is an editing flaw. Her love for Aragorn seems even more desperate than in Two Towers because the future King is all distant and cold-fish. She also has the film's most obvious, "I'll bet every penny I own that that line wasn't in any of the books" moment which makes her biggest scene a little cheesier than it really needed to be. I also was a little unclear where her character ended up at the end of the film until a friend explained some things from the book that were nowhere to be seen in the movie. Given how little the women in this series do, she stands out.

I'd mention Sean Astin's Sam here, but I actually thought Astin was one of the best parts of the second film as well. By the halfway point of Return of the King, if you haven't figured out that Sam is the series' true hero, you're not paying close enough attention. Frodo is on his adventure because he possesses the ring and it possesses him. Aragorn is on his adventure because he has been running from his destiny all his life. For Gandalf, Legolas and Gimli, this is their job, fighting is what they do. But Sam, Merry and Pippin are on the quest out of devotion, love and friendship, the purest motives available. While it probably won't happen, Astin's work here is totally worthy of an Oscar nomination.

Whose parts are less effective this time around?

Legolas and Gimli immerged as both valuable fighters and even more valuable comic relief in Two Towers, but to the disappointment of teenage girls everywhere (who I've been led to believe just love John Rhys-Davies), they're non-factors this time around. At one point, Aragorn heads off into a dangerous mountain pass on yet another of his "I'm off to meet my destiny" moments and Legolas and Gimli volunteer to come along. I half expected one of them to say, "Dude, if we don't come with you, what else are we going to do in this movie?" Legolas at least has one great action scene, but Gimli isn't a second banana.

Series stalwarts Aragorn and Gandolf remain important and commanding, but as I indicated in my discussion of Sam, the story is less about them now. Sure, Aragorn about to come into some power, but he's not really that different from the guy we saw in the second movie. He gives a good battle speech and makes moon-eyes at Liv Tyler's Arwen.

Every time either Arwen, Cate Blanchett's Galadriel or Hugo Weaving's Agent Elrond Smith appeared on screen, I wanted to yell "Who are you and where'd you come from?" All three are there only as occasional impediments to the story.

The only other character of note, I guess, is Gollum. The scrawny little wretch is less impressive in this film, which is actually impressive in and of itself. In Two Towers I spent so much time being amazed at the animation and the integration of the animation with the other characters, that I sometimes lost track of what he was doing. Here, Gollum seems so perfectly natural that you just enjoy him as a fantastic character. While Andy Serkis is no more Oscar-worthy than he was in the last film, his contributions to the character should not be underestimated.

Many of the special effects fall into the Gollum category in Return of the King, which is to say that they're so beautifully rendered that you aren't distracted by them. From armies of tens of thousands, to giant battle elephants, to daunting dragons to miles of landscape and terrain that don't really exist, the effects team at Weta Digital continue to thumb their noses at those Industrial Light and Magic chumps. The Little Effects House That Could still hasn't exactly managed to master CGI humans (a scene with Legolas and an elephant never looks like anything other than a video game), but I guess they always need things to shoot for.

The individual action scenes are superior, with the Minas Tirith battle completely matching the excitement of the lengthy Helm's Deep sequence. Suspense comes courtesy of Frodo and Sam's showdown with a giant spider (not of the Wild, Wild West mechanical variety). And the ghost army rounded up by Aragorn? Just as funky as anything in Disney's The Haunted Mansion (again, I kid).

On a technical level, the major craftsmen and women have already received ample award lucre and can expect to be at it again. Howard Shore's score is everything a rousing Hollywood epic score should be, with intelligently repeated themes and occasional admirable restraint (I continue to wish they'd ditch all the faux-choral trash, but it's probably too late for that). Andrew Lesnie's cinematography is again as sweeping as you could ask for and the effects wizards continue to nicely meld New Zealand and Middle Earth.

And, of course, overseeing everything is Peter Jackson, who deserves a cumulative Oscar of some sort. We can talk all we want about the effects and the size of the whole thing, but if the Lord of the Rings weren't grounded in something recognizably human, it would have failed and sunk New Line Pictures with it. From Bad Taste to Dead Alive to Heavenly Creatures to The Frighteners, Jackson has proven time after time that not only is he a director in love with cinematic pyrotechnics (Return of the King, like its predecessors suffers occasionally from Jackson's helicopter-lust), but he's a director in love with his actors and his characters.

It's that affection that causes serious problems for me at the end of Return of the King. Or should I say, the ends of Return of the King. The movie reaches one emotional climax after another, because it needs to resolve one story after another. Or at least Jackson resolves the Frodo storyline a half-dozen times all on its own. And yet, the storylines for a handful of other characters are left nebulous. I understand that fans of the book desire certain degrees of closure and that Jackson needed closure as well. But after the second or third time that I figured the film was over, I actually began to wish that it were over.

It's a strangely clumsy conclusion for a film that mostly holds together very well. Yes, the back-and-forth shifts between the two or three different storylines gets tiring, though. And yes, I often found myself muttering, "Meanwhile, back on the Ponderosa" whenever Jackson abruptly shifted the action from an exciting battle to some characters I'd totally forgotten about. And yes, there's a sense that Jackson still has plenty of material ready for the next extended edition DVD. Still, for a film of this size, I see no reason to criticize much further.

If Return of the King had ended 20 minutes sooner, I was prepared to go to a 4.5 star rating or even 5. I'm still on the high side of 4 stars here. Taken as a unit, Lord of the Rings will go down as a special chapter in cinema history. It's a commercial and artistic achievement that loses nothing even if I acknowledge its imperfections. It was a long time in coming and now it's kinda hard to believe that it's over.





Recommended: Yes