Return of the Trilogy

Saw Return of the King last night.

I may need to see it again.

I have been awash in admiration for Peter Jackson ever since the first movie of the trilogy; it's not easy to take books that Mitch Berg found completely unreadable (I made it through about 20 pages of "Fellowship" before I put it down for good), and turn them into movies that are not only monumental and epic, but genuinely touching on a human as well as philosophical level.

And Return of the King is touching, in a way that amazed me, even as I sat and watched it

Oh, there are flaws; there is so much material to jam in there that some things seem jagged (what happened to Saruman? How did Eomir kill the "unkillable" Nasgul? How does that Elf ship sail with no crew?), and some character denouements get very short shrift. I'm told the extended version, which will probably clock at a butt-numbing 4.5 hours, will fix some of that.

Still, it's a wonderful movie - for different reasons than "Two Towers". The second movie was an epic adaptation of Christ's story to a situation parallelling the world in the middle of the 20th century; redemption and salvation beyond death.

"ROTK", despite having bigger and more cataclysmic battles than Helm's Deep, has a smaller focus - on Sam, who started the series almost as comic relief, and ends as the focal point of the story. And it's wonderful.

Because after two films that focused on the larger than life - the arthurian Aragorn, the etherial Elves, the Christlike Gandolf - the "Return of the King" is about the return, not so much of Aragorn to the throne, but of the real king of this story, the little guy - literally, the hobbit, Sam - from his immersion in war between good and evil, back to the precious mundanity he spent so long trying to protect from unspeakable evil.

And this is the beauty of the story - in the end, like so much of the greatest Western art, it's the little guy that overturns the immense evil. It's the peasants lining up behind the priest at Tolstoy's Borodino, in War and Peace (as good a parallel to the battle of Helms Deep as exists in Western Literature), or Private Ryan, or Stanislaus Schmajzner in Escape from Sobibor (a true story and not really literature, but the story's elements play like literature, if you've never read the book), or Gary Cooper in High Noon - it's the little figures that are the most interesting story, and the most important ones.

I'm starting to read Garth's Tolkein and the Great War - and it's interesting seeing the parallels between Tolkein's experiences in the war and incidents in the movie (which I assume are the tip of the iceberg compared to the books) - the doomed charge on Os Giliath (sp?), with it's references to the New Model Army in the Somme, was revelatory.

ROTK is sad and intense in a way that the other two weren't. It's more personal.

And in the end, I think it's the movie of the three that I'll like the most. It certainly has the lessons our society needs.