How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, and take hold.

I saw Return of the King one more time over the holidays. This time I was most struck by the consistency between the three movies. It's not just that all three have a consistently high quality, there's something deeper then that. All three have the same cinematic feel. This is very rare, even among sequels done by most of the same people. This is easily explained though. They made them all at the same time so they had all the same people, and those people didn't get to go off and do other projects to break up the flow. Plus Peter Jackson exerted a huge amount of creative control over the whole process, so while there were lots of contributors it was his vision the whole way though.

Major Spoiler Warning...

I do have one real complaint with Return of the King though. I need to thank Mike and Stacey for helping me flush this one out. The ending of RotK is a bit ridiculous. I enjoyed it, but it was kind of like the gag where a guy is trying to get in a car and the car keeps lurching forward. This movie had, by our count, eight endings:

Ending 1: Frodo and Sam calapse on the rock. They have destroyed the ring, saved middle earth, believed that the quest would take their lives, accepted that, and now fondly remember home.

Ending 2: Frodo awakes in Rivendel and is reaquainted with the fellowship (as an aside, remember that Frodo has seen none of these people since he parted with the fellowship at the end of the first movie, as an audience it's easy to forget that.)

Ending 3: The crowning of the king on top of Minas Tirith.

Ending 4: The map overlay of how far they had traveled, which nicely sums up the whole adventure.

Ending 5: Sam's Wedding

Ending 6: Frodo finishing the book in Bag End.

Ending 7: Ship sailing into the sunset.

Ending 8: Sam back with his wife and kids.

(Note that for this analysis I'm going to try to do it from a movie watcher perspective instead of from the perspective of someone who has read the books.)

This is just stupid.

I understand why they can't end with Ending 1, and normally a false ending like that wouldn't be too bad, except for the huge number that follow. Ending 2 is important to reintroduce the characters, but doesn't really capture the power that that moment should have had. As proof of this I didn't remember that Frodo hadn't seen any of these people for a long time until I sat down and thought about it later.

I understand you want to see Aragorn crowned king, see him and Arwen reunited, and show the respect everyone has for the hobbits. So ending 3 is good, and I think it would have been fine to end it on the fade out from Minas Tirith. But then to taunt us even further they fade from Minas Tirith into a map and do a little voiceover showing the magnatude of the adventure, and solidifying it's importance. This would have been a great ending.

But people want to see the hobbits back in the shire showing that life is back to normal. And we want to see if Sam get's the girl. So Sam's wedding would have wrapped that up. Or even when Frodo finishes the book, that would have been fine as well.

But where I really get frustrated is when they go, have their big good bye, and a frickin' ship sails into the sunset! Seriously, if that's not an ending I don't know what is. But no, they come back to the Shire and show Sam moving on with his life.

All of these have music and acting cues that they are the ending. The also all have some sort of fade out or fade to black. They're fine and I like seeing them all (except the last one) but they really do jerk the audience around way too much. I'd like to think that the extended edition will fill in some of the rough spots like the other extended editions have, but deep down I'm afraid they'll add another 3-4 endings.

And as usual, Roger Ebert has a few good words to say about the subject:

You know those people who can't wait to stand up at the exact moment they sense a movie is over, and put on their coats and race out of the theater, blocking the end titles and credit cookies for the rest of us? This movie drove them nuts.

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