The theme of good versus evil is eternal, much like that of fun versus boredom. It thus has been and always thus will be, as our forbears had predestined. Thus, again and again in the name of good and justice legions of unseen producers and directors armed with cameras set out to do the right thing.
Perhaps they all swear mentally that this time around it will not be boring. But enough of this ambiguity.
As Professor Tolkien noted in his The Hobbit, “the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it.” Now, dear moviegoers, try to guess who is the most dreadful monster in The Return of the King.
An objection from Gollum: “This is no riddle, but a question. It’s my precious.” But who cares about a hissing and wrinkled gray cartoon character?
Thus, who is the most dreadful monster in the final episode of The Lord of the Rings?
Could that be the chief Orc with a benign tumor the size of half his head? The Winged Nazgul? Shelob the She-Spider? The glowing Eye of Sauron? Gollum? One need not think too hard.
The new film by Peter Jackson is a huge and overcrowded monster with an unbelievable runtime of three-and-a-half hours. In all, 210 minutes of mass fencing, mountain climbing, and eloquent dialogs. All the major plot lines of the epic have been filmed with a diligence that matches only the size of film’s budget. Someone is climbing a volcano, others are fighting. A multitude of horses, orcs, armor, cold steel, and thousands of pink and pale green unshaven faces. In general, it is a historical costume film at its best.
Consider for example the siege of Gondor and the onslaught of sooty goblins. But the scene looks so familiar it hurts. Half-naked bald trolls with topknots on their heads, wooden towers, drumbeats... Bingo! A scene from With Fire and Sword. It’s so obvious: the Gondor army with its shining hauberks and skins looks like the Polish gentry; Sauron’s wild army are living Cossacks from Jerzy Hoffman’s blockbuster. Full face many of the orcs resemble the legendary actor Milliar who starred as all Koshcheis the Deathless in the classic Soviet movies. Yet Jackson’s orcs are not as funny.
This saga conjures up many other memories. Of course, the director faced a major challenge of filming something relatively new in the genre of historical costume legend. This he could have done by employing just a bit of imagination, replacing the canonical line plots with original visual liberty (which is often seen, for example, in the movies by the fervent visionary Terry Gilliam. Suffice it to recall his screen adaptation of “Baron Munchausen”). But let us not forget the sacred idol of screenplays, texts, and plot lines. Anything can happen provided the characters say nothing wrong or speak where they are expected to. Also one cannot make the film shorter by trimming the obviously redundant scenes such as the extremely protracted and boring final. But what kind of imagination is there to speak of in such a pragmatic endeavor as shooting a film to be nominated for an Oscar? And Jackson is no Gilliam, even though he will garner an undeservedly greater number of statuettes.
In a word, unable to shoot something original, the wannabe Oscar holder has done what is usually done in such cases. He has painstakingly reproduced the plot, filled dialogs with pathos and scenes with special effects. The first creates an effect of an extreme ly amorphous quality, with events changing in rapid succession and fusing into a homogeneous mass; whole groups of characters vanish without a trace; many episodes seem incomplete; as for the final, see above. As to the dialogs, sometimes you get the impression (which is typical when you watch this film) that you have already seen and heard this. The characters’ cues are replete with the monumental style so familiar from the front pages of Pravda and novels on World War II and the Civil War. Granted, the special effects have been made with gusto. But any virtual tricks are only packaging, a shell under which you look for something meaningful, for example, the character’s personality. There are no personalities. Actors who are not bad in general had nothing to act out, with their roles limited to the memorized cues about duty, duty, and once again duty, sincere looks, glycerin tears, and illusory fights.
Of course, it would be unjust to call the film conscious quoting of the author. It is just that in the absence of original and unconventional solutions one tends to think about the inescapable feature of any average movie, that is, clich О . The movies’ scale, runtime, and budget do not help here: there are more clich О s anyway. That is why The Return of the King appears to be such a Golem built out of different cinematographic body parts, so cumbersome and awkward, tiring and tired of itself. Orcs, men, elves, hobbits, trolls, elephants, and nazguls fight an unequal battle with this monster for three-and-a-half hours. But even the forces of the Black Master together with Gandalf’s magic will not suffice to win this battle, which is unequal from the outset.
The fable has yet again suffered a defeat.
