The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) or Peter Jackson’s crazy bet
The final opus of the trilogy celebrates its 20th anniversary today.
The king’s return was released in France on December 17, 2003, and attracted no less than 7.3 million spectators.
To celebrate the anniversary of this very popular blockbuster, First invites you to dive back into the archives. During the summer of 2015, the editorial team chose this film from the special 40 Years of Blockbusters file to represent the year 2003. Enjoy reading!
The Lord of the Rings – The Rings of Power: Unfinished Tales and Legends (review)
On February 29, 2004, a film directed by a New Zealand filmmaker caused a sensation at the Oscars by winning eleven statuettes, equaling the record of Ben-Hur And Titanic.
Beyond the thrill of seeing a work of heroic fantasy prevail for the first time at the prestigious ceremony, this success of the Return of the King above all rewards the colossal work carried out over nearly ten years by Peter Jackson (you will have recognized it) and its teams to adapt the legendary literary trilogy of Lord of the Ringspublished fifty years earlier by JRR Tolkien.
Filmed in one go (between October 1999 and December 2000) and released one year apart (Christmas 2001 for The Fellowship of the RingChristmas 2002 for The Two Towers and Christmas 2003 for The king’s return), the three films offered the spectacle of a work in progress permanent and have been able to establish a relationship of familiarity with the public which will inspire many studios.
Fruit of the vision of an obsessive author entirely devoted to his project, the trilogy therefore finds its artistic culmination with The king’s return, which tells the end of a quest for the hobbit Frodo Baggins to triumph over adversity and evil temptations. Finally achieving the ideal of total entertainment that he had been seeking since the beginnings of the trilogy, Peter Jacksonwhose destiny now seems to merge with that of Aragorn, is logically crowned by Hollywood which will follow in its footsteps and embrace a new way of approaching the production of blockbusters.
From 1995, the thirty-year-old Peter Jacksonrenowned for the horrific Bad Tastethe gore Braindead or the tragically romantic Celestial Creatures, had set out to bring Tolkien’s universe to the screen. Charged by the formidable brothers Bob And Harvey Weinstein – surrounded by cardboard pulp Fiction – to tell the story of Lord of the Rings through two films (and a budget of 75 million dollars), Peter Jackson working hard on the script with his partner Fran Walsh and their colleague Philippa Boyensrecruits the legendary illustrators of Middle Earth Alan Lee And John Howe and leans with his comrade Richard Taylor, head of the New Zealand special effects company Weta Workshop, on the visual and organic development of the creatures (Orcs, Elves and other Nazgûl) imagined by Tolkien. But when $15 million has already been spent by Miramax, the Weinstein brothers realize that the initial budget will explode and order Jackson to tell the story of the Shire, Mordor, Rohan, Gondor and the ring unique in a single film, removing key sequences like the Battle of Helm’s Deep. But Jackson clings to his initial ambition and has just a month to find another Hollywood studio.
Upon meeting New Line Cinema, he was so convincing that the studio spontaneously asked him to make three films. The adventure then takes on a scale to which Peter Jackson did not dare to dream and the final budget of the trilogy will amount to 285 million dollars. Already authors of drastic adaptation choices when it was a question of making only two films, Jackson and his screenwriters give birth to a story which presents some major differences with Tolkien’s novels, notably with the aim of creating greater tension dramatic.
In fact, this struggle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil borrows almost as much in its approach to narrative structure from the cinematographic trilogies of George Lucas (Star Wars) And Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones) than to Tolkien’s literary universe itself. The intrepid Frodo (Elijah Wood), the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the clairvoyant Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) thus become the heroes of a fairly new type of blockbuster, mixing political developments, furious battles, wild romanticism and contemplation of marvelous landscapes or magical creatures, elements to which is added a tendency towards gritty humor (the floodgates of Nain Gimli) and the most unbridled spectacular (how can we forget the images of Legolas riding his shield?).
The Lord of the Rings: Peter Jackson accuses Harvey Weinstein of having blacklisted Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd
The fact of having shot the three films simultaneously obviously facilitated production but also gave Peter Jackson an unprecedented perspective on its creation. Obtaining aesthetic unity and coherence in the acting of the actors, the director can also increase in power over the episodes and gradually master the editing effects and the quality of the special effects.
Returning various sequences several months before the release of each part and delivering extremely careful long versions to fans each fall, Peter Jackson refines his live-action trilogy and manages, after a second film somewhat criticized for its floating rhythm, to surpass himself with The king’s return, which accumulates epic sequences of crazy intensity: Gandalf’s arrival on horseback at Minas Tirith thus reveals in successive stages the architecture of the fortress and creates, through this crossing of increasingly impressive levels, a memorable sensory vertigo , six years before the return of 3D to Hollywood. The Path of the Dead sequence, where Peter Jackson takes great pleasure in plunging his Aragorn-Legolas-Gimli trio into an almost cartoonish aesthetic (wasn’t the filmmaker’s last film before the trilogy called Ghosts against ghosts ?), also contrasts with the heaviness which sometimes characterized the setting up of the plot in the two previous parts. We will also mention the moment when the warning lights of Gondor are rekindled, which is reminiscent of the flamboyance of the epics of David Lean.
Because The king’s return indeed aimed to build a bridge between Tolkien’s imagination and a certain Hollywood classicism: these fires which communicate with each other and form a united chain then symbolize on the screen the cohesion which united the collaborators of the trilogy (which included at the height of the project seven simultaneous film teams) and embody the hope that has never ceased to animate Peter Jackson (who is said to have slept four hours a night due to the amount of work required).
John Howe, illustrator of Lord of the Rings: “Kaamelott, I think it’s brilliant”
Luxury showcase for digital effects from Weta Digital (The king’s return contains nearly 1,500 of them alone), the trilogy designed the character of Gollum entirely in computer-generated images from the capture of the actor’s movements Andy Serkis and developed software to improve the behavioral realism of thousands of digital characters during battle scenes. But even more than the technology, it is the method of production of Peter Jackson which is validated with the critical and public triumph of the third film.
The same year 2003 thus recorded the release six months apart of the two sequels of Matrix, Matrix Reloaded And Matrix Revolutionswhich benefited from combined filming on the model of Lord of the Rings. But the success will be less important than that of Return of the King, a global hit which undeniably benefits from the bond it has created with the public by appearing three consecutive Christmases on the bill. With $1.1 billion worldwide, the final part of the trilogy took second place at the all-time box office at the time behind Titanic.
With its filming schedule much more innovative than that of the Star Wars prelogy (including the final part, Revenge of the Sithwill be released in 2005), the trilogy of Peter Jackson therefore marks the spirits. If some believe that The Lord of the Rings prepared the ground for the future triumph of Game Of Thrones and influenced Marvel for its great battle plan of the 2010s which consists of producing several films per year by crossing universes, plots and characters, we remember above all that The king’s return internationally recognized the iconoclastic talent of a visionary New Zealand director who insisted on shooting all three films in his own country.
After a detour through King Kong And Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson returned to Tolkien’s universe by producing the Tolkien trilogy on the same principle. Hobbit (released on Christmas 2012, Christmas 2013 and Christmas 2014). The technical challenges were more advanced this time (3D and HFR) and the public success was still there, but the filmmaker has not completely rediscovered the magic or the breath of his legendary initial trilogy. You can’t do your life’s work every four mornings.
Damien Leblanc (@damien_leblanc)
Viggo Mortensen criticizes Peter Jackson: too many digital special effects in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
