2586 words
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is one of the greatest and most successful films in the history of cinema. Based off the novel written by the genius author, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won all 11 Academy Awards that it was nominated for that year. These are just reward for director Peter Jackson as creating this movie proved to be extremely challenging for him. Jackson would find that it would be very difficult for him to transfer Tolkien’s, long, loved, and complicated novel to a film. Jackson would find the solutions to many of the problems in bringing this story to the big screen, while being extremely successful in preserving the essentials of the story and keeping Tolkien’s world views in the film.
For Jackson’s last film in the trilogy, The Return of the King, Thomas Shippey, a Tolkien scholar, predicted that it would be very difficult for Jackson to transfer this masterpiece from the pages of the book to the silver screen. In an article featured in “World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma,” Shippey states that the main problem that he foresees for the last film is how it will end. Shippey avers that although the ending in the novel, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, works perfectly for a literary ending, with Sam returning home and stating “Well, I’m back”, it would be terribly anticlimactic if Jackson chose to end his epic movie saga this way.
Shippey then begins to predict how Jackson may choose to end the film, with ideas such as ending with the ceremonies at the Field of Cormallen, paralleling what George Lucas did in Star Wars IV: A New Hope. This ending would make sense to the reader, although it would leave out five chapters in the novel and possibly disappoint many readers of the novel. Another possible ending would be to end with the ship carrying the last of the elves, Frodo, Bilbo, and Gandalf sailing off to the Grey Havens into sunset. This would make a lot more sense from a film stand point, while also allowing Jackson to portray those other five chapters in the film.
The ending of the novel would be a challenge for Jackson because he wanted to make an ending that the viewers of the film would appreciate as well as a film that follows the novel as close as possible. Contrary to what Shippey predicted, Jackson actually chose to end his movie saga exactly the way that Tolkien had, with Sam’s final words. Despite what Shippey thought would happen, the ending to The Return of the King did work in the film, and the audience greatly accepted and appreciated it.
Jackson had a list of problems in turning the The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King novel into a film. One of the problems that Jackson faced was how to film things that would be very difficult to portray in any film, such as the massive battles between the forces of Mordor and the armies of Gondor. In the Battle of Pelannor Fields, Jackson would have to show hundreds of thousands of troops fighting, and to make it even harder, some would have to be on horses or elephants. To solve this problem, Jackson had to use state of the art CGI graphics with help from the many people that were working in his CGI department. His team would spend hours developing a single combat unit and then copy and paste them all over a background to achieve the thousands of troops effect. This is not to say that Jackson did not use real actors too. For the Riders of Rohan attack against the orcs besieging Minas Tirith, Jackson used hundreds of local farmers and horse riders dressed as the Rohirrim in the assault and only used the CGI graphics in the pan view scenes. This same effect was also used when Faramir tries to retake Osgiliath. In his charge towards the city, all of the horse riders that were in the scene were real actors. One can only wonder the amount of success that this movie would achieved if they did not have the CGI graphics that they used or the large amounts of real actors.
Jackson also had the problem of portraying things in the film that are barely talked about or even described in the novel. One of these things was the battering ram called Grond. In the novel, Grond is only talked about on one page; when he is used to break the great gate of Minus Tirth. It is vaguely described as looking like a swinging log with the face of a wolf mixed with black steel. To try to put this into the film, Jackson allowed his design team to pretty much create what they thought it would look like. They created something that does follow what Tolkien describes, but it is still their own creation. For the creatures that pull Grond, Tolkien says nothing about them besides calling them great beasts. In this case, Tolkien’s design team was allowed to fully create anything that they wanted that they believed would be able to and be worthy enough to pull Grond. They ended up creating a dinosaur like creature that bears a resemblance to a creature in Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.
Being a movie that is based off a 406-page novel, many wondered whether Jackson would be able to succeed in preserving the essentials of Tolkien’s masterpiece. It became a real challenge for Jackson to attempt to put this very long book into a film. Jackson was already pressed to fit the film into the allotted time limit because there were still scenes in The Two Towers that he had to show. But for many aspects of Tolkien’s work, Jackson is extremely successful in bringing the book to film. The plot of The Return of the King very much mirrors the novel which it is based off of. Jackson stated that he copied as much as he could put into the film but obliviously, some things had to be cut from the film. The chapters, or parts of chapters, that were cut from the films are chapters that do not directly affect the main plot of destroying the Ring.
One major part of the story that did not make a way into the film were the events that happened in the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire”. In this chapter, Frodo and the rest of the hobbits return home to the Shire and find it in chaos, with the hobbits enslaved by Saruman and Wormtongue. Frodo and his companions lead a group of free hobbits to revolt against Saruman, which leads to Saruman’s and Wormtongue’s death. They eventually restore the destroyed Shire to its original beauty with the help of Sam’s gift from Galadriel, elf tree seeds. Jackson chooses to leave out this part of the story because he knew movie viewers would not sit through a whole new miniature conflict after the major antagonist of the story had been destroyed. Jackson however does pay homage to this scene in the novel, in the first film The Fellowship of the Ring. In the scene where the Fellowship is in Lothorien, when Frodo gazes into Galadriel’s mirror, he sees the scene of “The Scouring of the Shire” as a vision of what will happen if he fails. Jackson also chooses to kill Saruman and Wormtongue exactly the same way that they were killed in the novel, except that Legalas fired the arrow that killed Wormtongue instead of the hobbits.
Although I understand Jackson’s logic for removing this chapter, I still feel that it is a shame and it was against Tolkien’s vision because this chapter really depicts how Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin have changed from their journey since the beginning of the book. I think the lesson that Tolkien was trying to show with this was that war changes a person’s mentality and sometimes physically; for instance, how Merry and Pippin grew taller. This chapter also shows that war can affect anything, and nothing is guaranteed to be safe from it. This is presented when the Shire was attacked and enslaved, even though it is a general hobbit belief that if they leave the world alone, it will leave them alone. It was also an interesting point that Tolkien chose to end the War of the Ring exactly where the adventure began, on the doorsteps of Frodo’s home, Bag End. I do think that Jackson does not exactly portray Tolkien’s vision of the novel’s ending and the important themes depicted in the book that are realized through this chapter. Although, to properly film this chapter would have probably made the film 5 hours long and this would have almost definitely have affected the success of the film.
Jackson does do a great job with preserving the essentials of Tolkien’s story because many of the lines in the movie come, directly from the novel. At the end of the chapter “The Siege of Gondor”, when the Witch-King rides into Minas Tirth, the conversation between him and Gandalf is put directly into the film, word for word. The film even has the Witch-King raise his sword into the air and flames shoot up from it, just like in the novel. There were also instances when Jackson wanted to use a line that a character had in the novel, but was unable to put it into the movie in a way that would make logical sense. So Jackson would just give that whole line, without any change, to another character in the film. This was case with the dialogue that Faramir had at the house of the healing, in the novel The Return of the King, with Eowyn about a dream he had. Jackson did not think it was right to give this line to Faramir but he wanted to include it in the film because it was actually a dream that Tolkien had that he wrote into the novel. Jackson decided to give the line to Eowyn in a scene in The Two Towers between Aragorn and her, in which she says exactly what Faramir says. This helped incorporate Tolkien’s thoughts into the film, while making Jackson successful at keeping the essentials of the novel.
Jackson also stays true to Tolkien’s worldview in his novel in that he portrays that it should not just be assumed that good wins over evil. Tolkien wanted to make the reader unsure if good would truly succeed at the end of the book. This is why Tolkien wrote many suspenseful parts in his book, keeping the reader on edge so that the reader was never comfortable in knowing that the hero would be safe. Jackson stays true to this as much as he can because he also has a lot of suspenseful scenes to keep the viewer on the edge of his seat in the film. Many times throughout The Return of the King, Jackson does make it seem like Frodo will fail. At the conclusion in Mount Doom, it is not hard for the viewer to believe that Frodo fails when he becomes corrupted and Gollum takes the Ring. Ultimately at the film’s and novel’s conclusion, we find out that there is a happy ending to the story, but it was never guaranteed to happen.
According to Shippey, Tolkien was always keeping the reader bewildered throughout the whole novel by just having something happen and then explaining it later. Although Jackson does do this in a few scenes throughout the trilogy, Jackson does not do it nearly enough as Tolkien did. The scene when Shelob stabs Frodo is one of the few scenes in The Return of the King where the viewer is bewildered because they think that Frodo is dead. The viewers then learn that Frodo is just paralyzed. In this same scene, we think that the orcs do get the Ring from Frodo at this point and that the forces of good have failed. But again, the viewers find out later that Sam has the Ring. Tolkien did this type of thing many times throughout his novel.
Jackson also had the challenge of trying to put Tolkien’s world views into the film. According to Tolkein in his article, “On Fairy-Stories”, states that he has been a lover of fairy tale stories since he learned how to read and this is evident because he has written one of the greatest fairy tale stories of all time. Tolkien also states in this article his hatred of machinery and how it can not be part of a fairy tale because Tolkein was always a fan of nature and he believed that machinery was destroying it. It is because of this belief of Tolkien’s that Jackson puts machinery in the movie as a tool of Saruman, suggesting that machinery is evil. This idea can be seen in the movie because Saruman uses machinery to destroy all of the beauty of Isengard and uses it to wage war on the people of Rohan. By doing this, Jackson has paid homage to one of Tolkein’s core world views.
Another challenge that Jackson had when making a film out of the book was that the book is sometimes hard to follow because Tolkien is confusing at times and does not describe things perfectly. One part of the novel The Return of the King that was especially confusing is how Aragorn arrives at Minas Tirith. It was hard to understand what his character has been doing, why he is coming by boat, and who are all of these people that he was with. This is because Aragorn just disappears from the novel for a while, off doing some task, and then just appears in the battle. It is never deeply described what he exactly did. Jackson solved this problem by just making the movie easier to follow. For this scene, Jackson kept having the story cut to Aragorn after he leaves the Riders of Rohan camp, so the audience would not lose track of him, and they would know exactly what he was doing. Although Aragorn arriving by boat to the Battle at Pelennor was a surprise to the orcs and the viewers, the viewers understood why he is on the boat even if they did not see it because the last time the viewers saw Aragorn he was making an attack on the Black Fleet.
Transferring a long, epic novel that is beloved worldwide into a film would prove to be quite a challenge. Director Peter Jackson however, is extremely successful in transferring J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King into a film. He solved many of the challenges by heavily editing Tolkien’s novel, while still having the main plot of destroying the One Ring almost perfectly preserved throughout the film. Although there were some cuts that just had to be made, the film very much mirrors the novel, even to the point where the characters in the film say the exact same lines as the their respective characters in the novel. Aside from doing an amazing job in making a film based off Tolkien’s novel, Jackson also managed to make just a superior film that is loved by all, even those who have not read the books. It is just a pure masterpiece.
I used the Shippey article, Tolkien’s Fairy Tale article, and The Return of the King film and novel.
