In fact, the same delicate balance between romantic solemnity and a bumptious, irreverent vigor prevails among the film's screenwriters. To judge by their commentary, Walsh and Boyens were the keepers of the flame when it comes to the first element, while Jackson spoke up for the latter. (Walsh, Jackson's wife, also directed some of the film's most intimate scenes, including some tender moments between Frodo and Sam during their journey through Gondor.) The two women seem to know Tolkien's mythos backward and forward (including the dauntingly complicated sagas recorded in "The Silmarillion"); Jackson could always be relied upon to insert a joke or a severed head on a spike when the going got too serious. It's a shame theatrical audiences missed a bit of pure Jacksoniana, the film's depiction of the Mouth of Sauron, a character whose entire face is covered by an iron mask except for an enormous, hideous mouth.

Possibly the only special effect in any of the three films that doesn't really work is the army of the dead that Aragorn musters to defeat the army of Mordor at Pelennor Fields. The translucent ghosts have a rakish, jovial quality that recalls the unscary specters in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion ride, and they never inspire in the audience the kind of dread that the characters who meet them are said to suffer. So it's a relief to learn from the commentary that Jackson & Co. aren't entirely happy with them either. (Though the extended edition does include a grisly bit with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli fleeing the Paths of the Dead through an avalanche of skulls, and this helps a bit.)

One variation from the novel that Jackson, Walsh and Boyens contemplated, partially shot and eventually abandoned, is particularly intriguing. Feeling that they needed a climactic battle between Aragorn and Sauron, they originally planned for the two to fight hand-to-hand at the Black Gate. It sounds dubious, until you learn that they had the swarms of Sauron's orc armies parting on the battlefield to reveal the Dark Lord stepping forth in one of his past incarnations: Annatar, a very tall, very beautiful man. It's such a good idea, I almost wish they'd gone through with it. Some footage and the concept art for those scenes are included in the appendixes disks.

The appendixes also feature several hours more of documentaries, and if you think you've had about enough of these already after consuming similar offerings on the two previous DVDs, guess again. One of the best among them concerns a little-celebrated aspect of the films that is, in fact, a key to their authenticity: horses and horsemanship. Computer-generated monsters, however masterfully executed, nudge any film toward the unreal; a thousand living, breathing, magnificent animals like those who perform in "The Lord of the Rings" pull it back to earth again. The mixture of real horses and CGI effects in the film's stupendous battle scenes are exactly what keeps them from coming across as high-end video games.

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