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AND NOW
OUR STORY ENDS...
the return of the king
DECEMBER 17 WILL SEE THE WORLDWIDE RELEASE OF THE RETURN OF THE KING, THE THIRD AND FINAL PART OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS FILM TRILOGY. NICK RODDICK PONDERS SOME OF THE REASONS FOR THE EXTRAORDINARY SUCCESS OF WHAT ONCE SEEMED A DISTINCTLY
FOOLHARDY UNDERTAKING.
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Writing about The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers this time last year, I remember saying that, for all the scale of the production - the thousands of extras, the tons of steel beaten into breastplates, the googols of megabites that had gone into the CGI parts of The Fellowship of the Ring - its success wasn’t really a result of the wow factor: it had to do with the fact that it had touched something in audiences.
Now, with Towers surpassing Fellowship in commercial success and critical acclaim, it’s clear that we’re dealing with something different again. Subtly different, maybe, but different all the same. The word that comes to mind is ‘epic’, but epic not in the sense that sixties producer Samuel Bronson (over)used the word - not just big casts, big sets and budgets that pretended to be bigger than they were. In fact, not really ‘big’ at all. The Lord of the Rings trilogy has become epic in the original sense of the word: a long, journey-based tale featuring the exploits of larger-than-life characters who experience a series of setbacks before finally assuming the nobility for which they were always destined.
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