Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King

After the galloping intelligence displayed in the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings series, your fear may be that Peter Jackson would become cautious and unimaginative with the last episode of his trilogy.

Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King Director: Peter Jackson Cast: Sean Astin, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood, Orlando Bloom   After the galloping intelligence displayed in the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings series, your fear may be that Peter Jackson would become cautious and unimaginative with the last episode of his trilogy. But Jackson crushes any such fear. His King is a meticulous and prodigious vision made by a director who was not hamstrung by heavy use of computer special-effects imagery. The final installment follows the hobbit Frodo (Elijah Wood), increasingly fevered as the ring exercises its power over him, on the last leg of his perilous journey to Mordor to destroy the sinister object. The wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), in a voice sodden with mellow sadness, believes that Frodo is on a suicide mission. Jackson takes his time with the story, but he's not sloughing off here. Rather he is building toward a more than solid conclusion. The grandiloquence that sustained the second installment, The Two Towers, with its pounding and operatic martial fury can be found here. By its end, King glides to the gentle bonhomie that opened the Ring movies, but its epilogue is tinged with regret: "You can't go back. Some wounds don't heal."