“Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” is one of the greatest and most success films in the history of cinema. Based of the novel written by the genius author, J.R.R. Tolkien, “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” won all 11 Academy Awards it was nominated for that year. This is a just reward for director Peter Jackson as creating this movie proved to be extremely challenging for him. Jackson would find it would very difficult for him to transfer Tolkien’s epic, long, loved, and semi-complicated novel to film. Jackson would find the solutions to many problems in bringing the story to the big screen and have great success in preserving the essentials of the story while keeping Tolkien’s views in the film.
For Jackson’s last film in the trilogy, “Return of the King”, Thomas Shippey, a Tolkien scholar, predicted that it will 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 he last film is how it will end. Shippey states that although the ending in the novel, “Lord of the Rings: 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 choose to end his epic movie saga this way.
Shippey then begins to predict how Jackson may choose to end the film, 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 5 chapters in the novel and possibly disappointing many reader’s of the novel. Another possible ending, would be to end with the ship sailing off to the Grey Havens in the 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. Contrary to what Shippey predicted, Jackson actually choose to end his movie saga exactly the way that Tolkien choose to, with Sam’s final words. Despite what Shippey thought would happen, the ending to “Return of the King” did work in the film and the audience greatly accepted it.
Jackson had a list of problems in turning the “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” novel into a film. One of these 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 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 attacking Minus Tirth, 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 we charging towards the city were real actors. One can only wonder the amount of success that this movie would achieve if they did not have the CGI graphics that they used.
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 such 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 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 they wanted that they believed would be able and worthy enough to pull Grond.
