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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
A new DVD saves Middle Earth fans going through serious withdrawal this winter, the first in three years without a "Lord of the Rings" movie.
Dec 16, 2004 | All but the most ardent Middle Earth lovers among us were feeling a bit burnt out by the time "The Return of the King" swept the Oscars earlier this year. One of the chief symptoms of Tolkien mania is the feeling that you just can't get enough of the stuff, but in reality that's rarely the case. The parade of awards felt predictable, every aspect of the professor's creation seemed thoroughly explored and it was time for a rest.
But then, how empty November felt this time around, the first year in three without a "Lord of the Rings" installment to look forward to. It's time, as people are so wont to say in the movies. So here comes the extended DVD edition of "The Return of the King," with 50 minutes of footage not included in the theatrical release. Combine it with the extended editions of the two previous films, and you have just over 11 hours of Peter Jackson's epic masterpiece. If there's a better antidote to holiday tensions than a marathon session with all three DVDs and your parents' new widescreen TV, it's probably illegal.
The added footage in "The Return of the King" restores some favorite scenes from the book, particularly Gandalf's confrontation with the Witch King of Angmar (aka, the Lord of the Nazgul), Eowyn and Faramir's blossoming romance while both are recovering from the siege of Minas Tirith, Aragorn using a palantir (seeing stone) to challenge Sauron to the final battle at the Black Gate of Mordor, and a parlay with the person called the Mouth of Sauron just before that battle.
All are welcome and well executed. But viewers who listen to the commentary track with Jackson and his co-screenwriters, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, also learn why they wound up getting cut anyway. Mostly, it was to trim the run time of the theatrical release, but also, the trio argues, because some scenes that work well in prose -- particularly the Witch King's taunting of Gandalf -- fall flat as cinema.
The Witch King's menace gets undercut, they insist, when he simply flies away (to deal with the newly arrived horsemen of Rohan) after shattering Gandalf's staff. Perhaps I'm too influenced by the novel (in which the Witch King is an unforgettable nightmare figure), but in this case, I think they're wrong.
Some of the added footage fills out the back story, the history of Gondor and so on. Other bits offer far less, and actually undermine the film. The great ingenuity of Tolkien's book is the way it combines the heroic diction of ancient sagas with a more homely, modern style of storytelling. The mixture has to be gotten just right. Too much of the high-flown stuff could sound over-the-top and ridiculous, and too much comedy undermines the grandeur.
Take, for example, a newly added drinking game between Gimli and Legolas at the great hall of Edoras. On the one hand, it furthers the unfortunate strategy of using the dwarf for comic relief. Purists hate this aspect of the films, though a small amount of it -- less than we get even in the theatrical release of "The Two Towers," say -- does seem welcome. But Gimli and Legolas are two of the trickiest characters because their good-natured bickering threatens to turn them into caricatures who can't, then, command serious consideration in the great battle sequences. The drinking game scene is a step too far in that direction. (By contrast, since Dominic Monaghan's Merry and Billy Boyd's Pippin are basically comic characters rather than warriors, their courage in a pinch always comes across as an unexpected outpouring of gallantry, and is all the more stirring for that.)
