It’s cool being an elf

By the time you read this the third and final part of the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King will finally (about time!) have been shown. We are among the last among the Hollywood-crazed countries to see the movie so I bet the anticipation by LOTR fanatics must have been so consuming. The queues of restless audiences in the movie houses must be deadlier than an army of marauding Orcs. At Alabang Town Center, just to accommodate the crowd, there are screenings as late – or as early – as 12:30 a.m., which means you finish the movie at around 4 a.m. Now that’s as major as a gimik.

I planned to write this in time for the first day of screening but decided to move it another week, hoping that by then a lot of people would have seen it and thus could understand what I’m babbling about. Also, I could let out something that might spoil your excitement in watching the movie (I hope you don’t get meaner than a bunch of Uruk-hai).

Although we had long clamored to see Peter Jackson’s final take on this JR Tolkien masterpiece a lot of us don’t really want this journey to end.

I promised myself last year that I wouldn’t wait for the long delayed showing of the trilogy here, let’s just say a year of waiting is more than enough, and waiting another month for the screening while most of the globe has seen it already was just no-no. Even if those advance screening tickets were really hard to come by, not to mention that they cost P500 on the average, I was able to get some at the last minute. So I was one of the lucky blokes able to see ROTK along with the rest of the globe just before Christmas.

And definitely, I resolved not to get the pirated copies since this film is definitely worth seeing on the giant screen, and we wouldn’t like to see shadows crossing the screen, would we?

The movie led me to appreciate the author J.R. Tolkien even if I don’t have the energy and the patience to finish all his books.

So what can I say about the movie? They say it could beat Star Wars and Matrix any time. The ROTK really rounded up the trilogy, a third part doing justice to the first and second parts. Star Wars and Matrix didn’t quite live up to the hype, and turned out to be inferior. The Return of the King, however, turned out to be an epic achievement for Jackson.

It’s a model of epic storytelling – the burden of carrying the ring of power weighs more heavily on Frodo who has become an emotional wreck. Another sidekick who is in the same but worse state as Frodo, Smeagol aka Gollum, is still a far bigger moral and physical wreck, and yet is a subject of great fascination for us viewers, since no CGI has created this kind of impact before. Girls still swoon over Aragorn and Legolas (too bad he’s not much the focus on this movie) for the last time, and Gimli the Dwarf is still comic relief.

Aside from Frodo and Sam’s adventures, the other members of the Fellowship face an even bigger battle after Helms Deep, the final war now comes to Gondor, in its capital Minas Tirith across the Pelennor Fields. Special visual effects come alive as Rohirrim and Gondorians face off Sauron’s forces, the Orcs and Easterlings (humans who sided with Sauron with their larger-than-life-Oliphaunts). This is where heroes will rise in the most unexpected of forms.

As expected, the film is riveting and though we have heard praises about it, in some ways, it wasn’t what I’d expected. It might be spectacular, but it’s still not perfect and has some flaws. Though I complained a bit that the movie was way too long (at times it was really draining) it was the least of the flaws. The Return of the King has pageantry and purpose, but it’s not quite the greatest show on Middle Earth. For me, the Two Towers gave me more jaw-dropping suspense, and it had more emotionally packed scenes, and since it was our first time to see that kind of grandiose imagery of a battle scene, the final war in the third installment doesn’t really give you that much a surprise anymore, though they say the battle in Two Towers is like two kids fighting in a playground if you compare it to the battle in Pelennor Fields.

I guess the biggest flaw a lot of audiences must have seen and questioned was the cutting of the evil wizard Saruman from the film, he who has been instrumental in the two first films since this is the only high ranking antagonist we actually see – a villain who has a face – thus giving the movies greater excitement, so you’ve sensed this large void in the film. But I’ve read Saruman and his sidekick Worm Tongue will be included in the extended DVD version. Sadly, the elves and the dwarves don’t have much of a role in ROTK, not much for diversity, so it’s man again who is the champ.

The multiple endings can really play tricks on your bladder since you were oh so ready to go to the loo but you later found it ain’t over yet – it’s a given because the books do have multiple endings.

Some of the graphics are a bit below par like in the Army of the Dead advancing on the Orcs, the "dead guys" did look a bit off and fake (at least the giant elephants weren’t). And the kissing scene between Aragorn and Arwen had no spark, it wasn’t that romantic. I guess it was already a given that Jackson focused and was engrossed more on the battle scenes.

I remember receiving an e-mail from a reader around last year during the filming of the Two Towers. He was obviously a great admirer of Tolkien, and he stated that probably we were more fans of Peter Jackson than of Tolkien, and were just in great awe of his cinematic masterpiece than of Tolkien’s books. Maybe he’s right, but these films weren’t really made for Tolkien purists who are dissatisfied when the film doesn’t go by the book. This is Tolkien’s saga as interpreted by Jackson’s fertile imagination, and these films can probably be as true to the books in terms of both spirit and narrative as any movie version could be. Peter Jackson’s works on Tolkien are a far more faithful adaptation than anyone thought could be made from his novels.

So now that the adventure is over, even with the multiple endings, it is not quite clear what happened to some of the characters. Thanks to the book I accidentally stumbled upon in Powerbooks, Tolkien: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, it helped me understand more fully Tolkien’s made-up realm. Here are some of the info about what happened to the characters after the War of the Ring.

After the war, Gimli had taken many dwarves out of the kingdom under the mountain into the Glittering Caves, the caverns beneath Helms Deep, and was named Lord of Aglarond. He remained Lord of the Caves for over a century until he let others govern and go to the realm of his great friend Legolas, Lord of Ithilien. After the death of Aragorn, the two boarded an Elven ship and sailed over the Great Sea to the Undying Lands. Samwise Gamgee, as seen in the movie, inherited Bag End, and was elected mayor of Hobbiton seven times. After the death of his wife, he also boarded an Elven ship to the Undying Lands to join Frodo. The warrior maiden Eowyn married Faramir, the Steward of Gondor. The elf Arwen, since being married to a mortal, suffered the same fate as all mortals, but she and Aragorn sired several daughters and a son. She died a year after Aragorn’s death.

And what’s this mention of the Sailing to the West, towards the Undying Lands the Elves are going to that we have heard so many times in the movie but we don’t quite know of fully? During the Third Age of the Sun (during the War of the Rings), the mortal world was forever separated from the Undying Lands. Only the magical ships of the Elves were permitted to sail the Straight Road in the West to reach it. At the Fourth Age of the Sun (after the War), when the last of the Elven ship finally reached its shores, the Undying Lands vanished into another dimension, beyond human understanding.

Now we have known a lot about Tolkien’s masterpiece, we can’t help but be in awe of how brilliant his mind was. It seemed his world had truly existed and we have become part of his world even for a short three hours. It’s not that easy to say, "!@#@#$ wow!" over something with this magnitude and really mean it, but we did.

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Friendster the author (since most of the mails I get go there anyway now) at ketsupluis@hotmail.com.