Articles & Interviews
Entertainmwent Weekly Dec. 26, 2003/Jan. 2, 2004
The Lord of the Rings
Ring in the year, Ring out the year. It was 365 days bewitched by hobbits and elves, wizards and…swords with pretty names. Last December’s The Two Towers ushered in 2003 as the No. 1 movie. Now the swooping, epic finale to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, is poised to take the box office crown through December and right into the new year again.
For three years, this scramble through Middle-earth has kept us dazzled with heroes who bear pointy ears, fuzzy feet, and tight, fated smiles. We worried. We rejoiced. Most important, we believed, and for that, the artists who created The Lord of the Rings are our Entertainers of the Year.
What an audacious, swaggering wager it was. Rather than tiptoe through the trilogy, New Line Cinema decided to film all three movies at once, over 15 months, at about $100 million each. The cast? Respected, but hardly marquee. Add to this J.R.R. Tolkien’s prickly fan base, which was sure to shred any adaptation, and the fact that just a few years ago, fantasy was a joke.
Heading the enterprise: producer-writer-director Peter Jackson. At the time, the New Zealander (who insisted on filming in his homeland) boasted a resume that included one chilly jewel of an art-house film, Heavenly Creatures, and a bonanza of blood-splatting horror flicks. Not one of his movies had grossed more than $17 million.
No matter: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers have become two of the most beloved movies ever—together grossing $1.8 billion worldwide (even Tolkienists hurrahed). King now looks primed to join the pantheon. Not that anyone who has worked with Jackson doubted it. “It’s just something that’s in his blood,” says Elijah Wood, who plays Frodo. “He absolutely was overwhelmed with passion to make these movies. And he set up this incredible team to support him.” Jackson’s design and computer graphics folks created the toy town of Hobbiton in film 1 and the freaky arachnid in film 3, and tended to the tiniest details. Example: Two guys spent months assembling 12.5 million rings for an army’s worth of chain mail.
The cast too was inspired. Consider wood, who crossed with pure grace from child actor to tortured hobbit, and Ian McKellan, who, as the clever, crotchety wizard Gandalf, is the only actor to earn an Oscar nod thus far: One lucky role call came with Viggo Mortensen, who hopped a plane to New Zealand when Jackson decided to recast his Aragorn. He began his haunting, haunted turn as the king-to-be days later. Mortensen credits a generous fellowship on and off screen for the trilogy’s warmth: “The way the movies were made was in the spirit of Tolkien, which is about community.”
Naturally, the Oscar question resurfaces. Fellowship and Two Towers earned a combined 19 nods, but took home just six. This past year, director Jackson wasn’t even nominated. “After what he’s accomplished in the seven years of working on these things, it would be a shame if he wasn’t acknowledged,” Wood says. “Because I think it is pretty extraordinary.”
King certainly has what the Academy craves: an epic story and a great, thumping heart. At it’s center is the bond between Sean Astin’s loyal Sam and Wood’s frightened, failing Frodo. Who but the Dark Lord Sauron could keep clear-eyed when, lost on Mount Doom, Sam says to his master, “I can’t carry [the Ring], but I can carry you”? Jackson remembers weeping while he watched his actors film the scene. “It’s always satisfying when you can feel it happening when you’re shooting, and you haven’t got the music and the sound effects and the context even—but you can just feel the moment playing,” he says. “We’ve had to wait very patiently for four years to finally let everyone else see it.”
The passionate turns don’t come only from flesh-and-blood actors. Screenwriters Jackson, partner Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens continued playing with Gollum’s dual personality (their own quite clever extrapolation), as F/X masterminds rendered the creature ever more believable. Add a voice lent by actor Andy Serkis, whose movements and expressions were the basis for Gollum’s design, and the result is a soul-chilling creation, an enlightened blend of person and pixel. Such is Jackson’s gift: stunning CGI that doesn’t feel or look gimmicky. “It’s hard to say ‘Don’t make the effects draw attention to themselves’ when it’s a shot of 15 huge elephant creatures stamping over a battlefield,” Jackson says. “But I wanted it to be smooth; I wanted it to feel effortless.”
Done and done. And…done. A fitting end, since King has always been Jackson’s favorite of the Tolkien trilogy. “I like the spirit of heroism,” he says. “It’s about gibing everything you have—including possibly your life—to help your friends.”
Even more moving is the realization that epics end. Perhaps the greatest tribute we an pay to Jackson, his cast, and his creative team is this: Nine hours later, they’ve left us wanting more.—Gillian Flynn
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Best and Worst: The Best – #1 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
by Lisa Schwarzbaum (The Best):
“Well, I’m back.” That’s Sam the hobbit speaking, succinctly marking his place at the end of The Return of the King. But it’s also me speaking—and millions like me—back for one last time in thrall to the movie magic that mortals have conjured in The Lord of the Rings. Out of J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary epic, New Zealand director Peter Jackson has fashioned a cinematic masterwork, a trilogy that has stood as a classic since our first glimpse of the bucolic Shire in The Fellowship of the Ring, back in 2001. And in his concluding chapter, Jackson has established a new template of grandeur for the Big Finish: a 200-minute saga that feels huge but scaled for humans, massive but urgent. The Return of the King is a visual spectacle, a state-of-the-art display of technical flair, and a showpiece of plot density and narrative rhythms. But even as the thousandth monstrous orc falls, what moves us more is our identification with the stakes these mythical characters are fighting for, men and elves and hobbits alike—notions of enslavement and freedom made powerfully relevant by the grace of the filmmaker’s storytelling. The digitally created monsters are awesome; the organically created feeling of pertinence to our own embattled world is even more profound. It’s why we feel we too have alighted from a transforming journey at the trilogy’s end. And why we’ll keep coming back to reexperience the voyage.
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Best and Worst: The Best – #8 The Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King
By Owen Gleiberman
War—what is it good for? How about injecting a bit of juice into J.R.R. Tolkien. The battle scenes, full of orc blood and swooping camera armies the size of cities , suggest what Sergei Eisenstein might have imagined if he’d had CGI. Peter Jackson’s direction goes beyond its previous dark dazzle, achieving awe in its movement and scale. It seems clear, all right, that what we’ve really been watching is one big movie—an epic clash between good and evil in which the expository opening act just happened to be six hours long. As a non-fan of the trilogy’s rambling first two parts, I could point out that the dramatic interplay of trust and betrayal that unfolds among Frodo, Sam, and Gollum as they make their way toward Mount Doom resembles nothing so much as…actual, tense scenes of interpersonal conflict within the motion picture. Real drama! At last! The feeling of culmination, however, is palpable, as these diminutive folk navigate impossible ledges and odds, all to toss a ring of temptation into hellfire. Many have noted an eerie parallel between the LOTR trilogy and our own current spirit of global crisis. Now that the war of civilization in Middle-earth is over; perhaps someone in Hollywood will be bold enough to make a movie about the one happing on our Earth, right here, right now.
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DVD – Discs of the Year by Scott Brown
#4 – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers-Special Extended Edition (new line, PG-13)
We wants it, Precious, yes. We needs it. More documentaries, more commentarieses—especially the parts where Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan rib the fat hobbit and the elf! We likes that Precious, yes. Oh, give us hourses and hourses of featurettes we will actually watch end to end, yes, Precious, because they are so well produced and absorbing! Ahem. Sorry to go all Smeagol on you, gentle reader, but it’s hard to convey the deep and utterly warranted fan-lust for more, more, more Ringsiana. Incredibly, director Peter Jackson and his DVD team can actually supply it, in satisfying quantities. It was a fair question: After the giant Fellowship discs and a flotilla of news stories, could the Two Towers set offer any truly valuable “added value,” aside from the three-hour-plus extended cut itself? Yes, Precious, it can. (Though, for purists, it’s enough to see the trees of Fanghorn Forest show up to save the day at the Battle of Helm’s Deep.) The masterstroke was the producers’ wise decision to make characters of the actors, designers, and crew—thanks to some sharp editing, you’ll find their quest nearly as absorbing as Frodo’s.
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