If anyone were to ask me what my favorite movie is, my immediate answer would be The Lord of the Rings trilogy. If anyone were to tell me that’s cheating, and I’d have to pick one of the three as my absolute favorite, it would be The Return of the King.
Of course, the great thing about Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is that anyone could pick any of the three installments as their favorite, and they would be right. Each one offers that same sense of grandeur, hope, bravery, sacrifice, friendship, love, and magic that is hard to find in movies and shows nowadays. People resonate with different scenes, and each Lord of the Rings movie offers something for everyone.
Maybe your favorite scene is the one where Sam follows Frodo at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, and Frodo, in turn, saves Sam from drowning. Perhaps the scenes that make you giddy more than any others are the march of the Ents on Isengard and the arrival of the Rohirrim at Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. Or maybe, like me, you’ll never be able to get over the Lighting of the Beacons, Faramir’s last ride, the lead-up to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, “I am no man,” Aragorn’s speech at the Black Gate, or Sam using the last of his strength to carry Frodo up Mount Doom.
The Return of the King is everything to me.
So, when I went to see The Return of the King live in concert last weekend, I came prepared. I’d watched the extended editions of Fellowship and The Two Towers the week before, and I was ready to once again be blown away by the masterpiece that is Return of the King. I knew, of course, that the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra would be playing Howard Shore’s magnificent score to accompany the theatrical edition of the film instead of the director’s cut, but in all honesty, I can’t remember the last time I watched the theatrical versions of these movies—even the marathon I went to in London a few years ago was an extended edition marathon.
What a difference an hour makes
Once the fighting at Minas Tirith starts, you really start to see the difference between the theatrical version of the film, which is already a whopping 3 hours and 21 minutes long, and the extended edition, which has a runtime of 4 hours and 23 minutes. Logistically, I understand why the theatrical version had to be so much shorter, but even watching it like this, in concert, as beautiful and mind-blowing as that was, made the loss of that additional hour painfully apparent.
Of course, there are the major scenes that are missing, like Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and the ghost army overrunning the pirate ships, Frodo and Sam nearly getting caught by the Orcs once they arrive in Mordor, and Faramir and Éowyn’s meeting, just to name a few. But it’s more than that. In the last third of the film, the movie is forced to switch between Sam and Frodo’s story and Aragorn and Gondor’s story so many times and with such speed that many of the scenes, and even some of the action sequences, lose their emotional weight. Sam and Frodo’s final trek up Mount Doom feels much shorter and thus less arduous, and Aragorn’s last stand at the Black Gate feels much less dangerous.
I’m not saying this makes the theatrical versions any less deserving of praise. On the contrary—I think what Peter Jackson and the rest of the cast and crew managed to achieve is astounding no matter the version you watch. But in this day and age, when movie runtimes are constantly being dissected on social media and many potential viewers seem to feel dismayed at the idea of spending more than two hours in a cinema (the most recent contentious films beings Dune: Part 2, Oppenheimer, and Killers of the Flower Moon, all of which made excellent use of their longer runtimes), I think the difference between The Lord of the Rings theatrical editions and extended editions is an important lesson.
Shorter isn’t necessarily always better. Some stories just need more time to breathe, to make the audience feel what the characters are feeling, and to immerse you into their world. The Lord of the Rings is steeped in Tolkien’s imagined history—those brief moments of respite from the fighting, during which characters reflect on legend and myth and the things and places and people they love, are what makes it feel so real, lived in, and above all, genuine. Not all movies need to be more than three (or four) hours long, but those that are that long usually have pretty great reason to be, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is absolutely one of them.
(featured image: New Line Cinema)
