All right. So now I’ve seen The Return of the King . . . and good gods, where do I begin?
So yes, Peter Jackson got a lot of things right. Yes, the movie’s gorgeous. Yes, it’s a better treatment of the book than anyone could have hoped it might be in the beginning. All that’s so, and you can read about it at length in plenty of other places, which is why I’m not going to talk about that.
What I am on about are all the things the movie makers got massively wrong. I spent a good quarter of the movie in a Highly Annoyed mood which, I admit, was useful in the sentimental bits. If I started feeling slightly choked about the throat, I had only to think back on one of the omissions and commissions and the sentimentality went right away, leaving me usefully peeved for several minutes.
Before I begin, I ought to say that I’m not venting from a superficial reading. Not only have I read the canonical works more times than I probably ought to admit, I spent an entire semester in college studying Tolkien’s works (including the Silmarillion, which had just been published at the time) and their sources: the Elder Eddas, all of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, large chunks of Beowulf, and a bunch of other material I can’t recall now.
First, where in the HELL did all this business of Sméagol dumping the lembas over a cliff and then framing Sam for it come from? That incident appears NOwhere in the book. It isn’t needed. Sméagol and Sam are sugar and sand, and that by itself creates plenty of reason for their antagonism. The scriptwriters wouldn’t trust their own source material, to the loss of the film.
And that, of course, leads to the nonsense of Frodo falling for Gollum’s cheap framing job and running Sam off, so that he has to figure out he’s been had and dash back just after the nick of time, and Shelob can have a crack at Frodo on her own. Yet again, the writers run off the tracks. Guys, all you have to do is what Tolkien did: let Gollum lead Frodo and Sam both into the lair, separate ’em just enough, and bam! Shelob’s got her victim. All very neat, and no need for additional made-up angst.
I absolutely don’t know where this guff about Aragorn having to argue the King of the Dead into fighting for Gondor came from—a late-stage script doctor, perhaps, and one who should have had his license to practice rhetoric revoked. Come on, boys and girls: this is the KING OF GONDOR we’re talking about here, not Timothy goddamn Johnson from down the block! If anyone has the magical chops to summon a bunch of recreant ghosts and hold them to their word without having to put up with any backtalk, Aragorn’s it. And I found it offensively stupid to have Elrond showing up to present Andúril to Aragorn just before he takes off on the Paths of the Dead. Andúril was re-forged before the Company ever left Rivendell, for heaven’s sake! I can only suppose somebody jacked that around in order to give Elrond yet another opportunity to look pissy onscreen and issue gnomic warnings about Arwen (who doesn’t need it, because she isn’t dying, I don’t care what somebody put in the script).
As I watched all the sequences inside Minas Tirith, a line from an ancient Academia Waltz cartoon kept running through my head: “Why do I keep seeing more civilians loose in this area?” The book clearly told us that the aged, the women, and most of the children were evacuated from the city, and that Minas Tirith, just prior to the battle of Pelennor Fields, is an armed camp. There’s NO WAY the audience should see a city full of women and children, even if they dress in somber blues, browns, and blacks and try to be inconspicuous. It’s simple, guys: NO CIVILIANS IN A WAR ZONE! And particularly not when the book tells us straight out the noncombatants were evacuated from the city.
At least things kinda sailed along within sight of the story for a bit after that, until we get to the Battle of Pelennor Fields and watch the film lose control of the entire Eowyn-and-Merry-battle-the-Witch-King sequence. A-hem, folks; it was supposed to go like this: the evil of the Witch King takes out Eowyn completely and almost takes out Merry, although he stays enough at himself that he, not Eowyn, comforts the dying Théoden, who dies with no clue that his niece is wounded and unconscious(!) only a few feet away. Then the whole boiling of them are carted back to the city to sit on the back burner, so to speak, until Aragorn has time to drop by and show everyone that he picked up some practical witch-doctoring somewhere along the way. (I bet he cures scrofula on the side, too.) After which we lose the Faramir/Eowyn romance entirely; I suppose the writers thought we couldn’t keep up with all the relationships. Hooey. Anyone who can keep track of the plot lines in a modern soap opera can easily sort out Faramir and Eowyn from Aragorn and Arwen.
And lordy, they made a mess of the battle at the Black Gate. If all the armies of the West onscreen were as many as a thousand, I’ll eat a palantír without butter or salt. Most of those warriors were computer-generated anyway, so why not spend a few more clock cycles and beef up the force to the five thousand and some the book specifies? And I really missed the Mouth of Sauron, who should have been allowed his place. That scene gives a great opportunity for Aragorn to act menacing and kingly, Gandalf to act menacing and wizardly, and Frodo to get his mithril shirt and Sting back later on.
Aragorn’s coronation was one of those gut-twisting mixtures of got-it-right and got-it-wrong. The crown itself, while it was definitely cool and all Art Deco, isn’t what Tolkien described. What he intended sounds rather like it should belong to Brünnhilde, a pointy helmet with wings at the sides. Arwen does not show up for the coronation, which happens at the beginning of May. She arrives a month and a half later, in time for a Midsummer’s Day wedding. And the hobbits should certainly not be dressed in their everyday clothes at the coronation; Merry should be wearing the livery of Rohan and Pippin the livery of Gondor, and Frodo and Sam ought to be in ceremonial robes of the finest that could be put together in six weeks and with the force of the king’s command behind it. There is such a thing as too much egalitarianism, particularly when we’re supposedly talking about a feudal society.
The last thing that vexed me hugely about the movie was one of the points that fans will argue about from now until Fimbulwinter: the decision to leave out the Scouring of the Shire. They shun’t’na done it. I don’t care if the movie is running to three hours and a half already, leaving out the Scouring means that Saruman drops suddenly and inexplicably out of the story altogether, and we’re left with no idea of exactly why everyone was making such a fuss about him. Which isn’t to mention that the Scouring also provides a fine example of Marc Antony’s dictum that “The evil that men do lives after them,” if only Jackson had let it.
There now. That’s better.
The incendiary rainstorm misdirects a gelatinous machine tool. Fnord.
