Rating:

The films in the Lord of the Rings trilogy were doubtless the second most eagerly anticipated movie-going experience of my life. They were first, however, in terms of the actual payoff being worth the anticipation. The Phantom Menace, I’m afraid, was a letdown of biblical proportions and made all that excitement and pre-release hype seem like so much foolishness. These three films, however, managed to exceed even my high expectations. As a fan of Tolkien since practically the womb, I had been waiting with bated breath for live action film versions of my beloved stories, and lord almighty I was not disappointed. As good as the movies were in theaters, they managed to be enhanced even further by the DVD release of the “special extended editions.” Unlike the disgusting travesties that were the special editions of Star Wars, these are composed of footage made for the films and trimmed for time from the theatrical release; there’s none of this going back decades after the fact and adding stupid special effects that contribute nothing to the story. And so, for the next twelve hours or so, we will take a look at the saga that is the extended version of The Lord of the Rings.

The movie starts with complete darkness and some talking. I’m getting a little nervous at this point, because narration is a sure way to get me to fall asleep, but I can’t bear to tune out this picture already, twenty seconds in, so let’s give it a chance. Some broad with a scary voice is telling us all about the history of these Rings of Power that I assume will be important to the plot somehow. It would seem that somebody named Sauron—who must be a really, really bad dude because he practically has “dinosaur” right in his name, plus he has a helmet that looks like a horse’s skull—made a really big, bad Ring that dominates all the others and makes your average Ring of Power look like a Cracker Jack decoder ring. About forty million people whack each other with swords, and then one guy with both a sword and a beard cuts Sauron’s fingers right off and takes the Ring with them. For one reason or another, having his jewelry fall off makes Sauron explode and send a scary shockwave in all directions, knocking the last alliance of elves and men right on its collective butt. The bearded guy takes the Ring with him, but soon thereafter foolishly decides to get shot in the back by a monster and lets the Ring float away down the river. The Ring lies there for a billion years or so until somebody with a grubby hand takes it away. This grub-guy (Gollum is his name) takes the Ring away into the mountains instead of doing something useful like using it to kill everyone in the world. Well, that’s his prerogative, I guess, but it seems like a waste. Then, five hundred years or so later, along comes some little guy in a red vest with brass buttons, and he takes the Ring for his very own self. The scary-voiced lady makes a real final-sounding statement, and finally, seven and a half minutes in, it’s time to start the movie proper.

Oh wait, no. I guess now we need to see Introduction: Phase Two. That same little guy we just saw take the ring is sitting in his messy home (there are maps strewn every damn place) and writing in some gigantic book in his thin, spidery hand (now there’s a specific Tolkien reference for you). He writes a chapter in his book—and, conveniently for us, speaks aloud while he does it—all about his people, the hobbits. The gist of things is that they’re wee folk who eat a lot and are not very good at swinging sledgehammers. They also seem to spend much of their time erecting signs that say “Happy Birthday, Bilbo Baggins,” which I assume will be important later.

Aaah, now that we’re more than ten minutes in, it really is time to start the movie. Some filthy old man in a dirty grey cloak is riding along in a wagon. He’s soon revealed to be a wizard named Gandalf, and the sassy young punk who’s talking to him is revealed to be a hobbit named Frodo Baggins, played—for some reason—by Elijah Wood. Oh, wait a second, Bilbo’s narration is still going on. Is this the movie, or is it some ancillary part of the introduction? I can’t tell anymore. The movie’s barely underway and my mind is already boggled; I don’t know how I’ll react when they start bringing in Balrogs and whatnot. In any case, the wizard shoots some fireworks at a bunch of little hobbit kids (a distinct difference from the book, where not a squib or cracker was forthcoming), and on we go.

Gandalf struts his way on up to Bilbo’s house and demands entrance like he owns the place. Bilbo makes himself some snacks while Gandalf whacks his head on the light fixture and the door frame like an idiot. Ha ha, it’s wacky, this fantasy epic! It seems that they’ve kinda stripped this wizard of whatever dignity he is supposed to have and the movie’s not yet twenty minutes gone, but I guess director Peter Jackson knows more about dignity than I do. After all, he directed both Meet the Feebles, which featured puppets that fuck, and Dead-Alive, a movie in which a woman is turned into a zombie after being bitten by a Sumatran Rat Monkey. With those credentials, I’m not gonna argue. Anyway, Gandalf pops a squat at Bilbo’s table, and in the process he bumps into it with his knee, making half of it shake and clearly giving away the forced perspective trick that makes the actor playing Bilbo look smaller than he is. Forget this movie, all the magic is ruined!

After Gandalf and Bilbo smoke some of “the finest weed in the South Farthing” (whoa ho!), Bilbo’s big ol’ birthday shebang gets underway. About fifty million hobbits are dancing around like screwballs, including one named Fatty Bolger who is not important and one named Sam who is. Also, Fatty Bolger is not related to Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. Or maybe he is! No, no, the Scarecrow was too tall to be a hobbit. Two more hobbits come along and steal some of Gandalf’s fireworks, making a big dragon-shaped explosion in the process, and I’d wonder why we were shown this seemingly pointless scene if Gandalf didn’t thereafter address the two thieves by their full names. Only important characters would get close-ups while someone as mighty as a wizard speaks their names, so I guess we’ll be seeing more of Peregrin Took (yeah, right, what kind of name is that?) and Meriadoc Brandybuck (oh, please). By the way, all the assembled hobbits run away from this terrifying dragon, even though it is clearly just a firework. So I guess in addition to being fat, hobbits are also ‘tards.

Bilbo makes a speech of some sort (if I were at a birthday party and somebody made a damn speech, I would punch him and steal his presents), which he concludes by slipping on his Ring and disappearing from sight. Sneaky, sneaky! Oh yeah, that’s important. The Ring makes you disappear. Unless you’re Sauron, in which case you don’t. Which is explained easily enough by saying…okay, I lied, it’s never explained. Bilbo makes his invisible way back to his house and sets out to leave forever, bequeathing his house and all his earthly belongings to Elijah freaking Wood. Included in the gifts to Frodo is Bilbo’s Ring, although he seems to have a hard time leaving it behind. Hmm, getting rid of the Ring is hard for people to do. I bet that will turn out to be important some time in the course of this six hundred and fifteen hour feature. Anyway, Gandalf finally talks Bilbo into leaving the Ring behind by growing really big and talking in a deep voice. If some grungy old man suddenly inflated to Brobdingnagian proportions in my living room, I’d listen to him, too.

In comes Frodo, shouting out Bilbo’s name. Of course, Bilbo’s nowhere to be found and suddenly Frodo is a homeowner, so that’s cool for him. Gandalf tells Frodo to keep this fancy pants ring secret and safe and then hauls ass out of the house. I’m sure Frodo is hoping this stinky old creepazoid is out of his life forever, but no such luck. While Gandalf tears off across the countryside, some scary dudes in black cloaks start tearing off in the opposite direction. Just where they’re going isn’t clear…oh, wait, it’s precisely clear. Just before they ship out, we hear Gollum’s voice calling out, clearly under duress, “Shire! Baggins!” Uh oh. Bad news for Frodo Baggins of the Shire. He finally gets the house to himself and immediately he’s got hooded weirdos after him. Gandalf reaches his destination and, in a scene that is sure to be recounted in the history of dynamite action sequences, sits down and reads some dusty old parchments.

Sensing that no audience wants to see a wizard with a big nose reading, we cut to a bar, where Meriadoc and Peregrin (hereafter Merry and Pippin) are dancing and singing in a drunken revelry and everyone else is acting like a rumor-mongering old man. This scene might be a little too fun for the viewers, so it quickly ends and Frodo returns home from the bar only to find that Gandalf has invaded his house again and, for some reason, opened all the windows and strewn papers everywhere. Gandalf demands to see the Ring and tosses it right into the fire. Pretty ballsy for someone who doesn’t even own the thing. Or, apparently, even have his own house. The fire reveals that there are secret markings on the Ring and that must mean it’s the One Ring of Sauron, which is bad news for Frodo because Sauron probably wants it back. And if he gets it, he’ll cover all the land in darkness or something, whatever, let’s get on with it, shall we?

Naturally, Gandalf is too much of a sissy to do anything with the Ring himself, so he demands that Frodo take it away. He suggests taking it to what is surely the safest place in the world: Some seedy bar. And so Frodo sets off for an inn called The Prancing Pony, and with him he takes his gardener, a chunky sumbitch named Samwise Gamgee. Sam, for short. Gandalf leaves the two poor slobs to fend for themselves while he rides off to do god knows what. They all think Gandalf is so great and wise, but he really seems like something of a dick to me. In any case, as the hobbits trudge through the wilderness, they pass a company of elves, who have got the right idea and are leaving the world and, by extension this movie, forever. One of the elves is of course named Gildor, and he talks at great length with Frodo and pronounces him an elf-friend. Except none of that happens in the movie; here, they just stroll on by in the distance without so much as a “hello.”

Oh, now we see what Gandalf is up to all this time. He’s running off to have a chat with another creepy old man named Saruman. I guess he’s a wizard, too, because he also carries a big stick. He speaks softly, too, so I guess he’s got the whole package. Saruman is played by Christopher Lee, who’s been in about forty jillion movies and is best known for playing Dracula in the Hammer Studios horror movies. Why Gandalf ever trusts someone who is clearly Dracula is a mystery to me, but the damn fool tells him all about the Ring and where it can be found. Wanting the Ring for himself, Saruman decides to get Gandalf out of the picture, so he whacks him about a bit with some magic, makes him spin around on the floor like Curly, and then shoots him a million feet in the air to the top of a tower, Rapunzel style. Man, is he a bad guy or what? He’s so bad, he actually is having dealings with Sauron. What a butthole!

Back in the thrill-a-minute sequences of Frodo and Sam walking slowly across the New Zealand landscape, they run into Merry and Pippin who immediately lead them right over a cliff. Three of the hobbits are content to dickdance around at the bottom of the hill for a while, but since Frodo is the brains of the outfit he advises getting off the road since it’s doing really weird things where the foreground gets closer but the background gets farther away like that shot in Jaws. And it’s a good thing they hid when they did, because right about then along comes one of those scary guys in the cloaks, sniffing around and looking for something. Something…named Frodo! After getting about three inches away from Frodo, he decides to just give up and ride away. I feel pretty sorry for Sauron if these are his top lackeys. Of course, it’s so hard to get good minions these days.

Milliseconds later the sun sets and the hobbits run through the darkness to a ferry, which they take across the river, cleverly leaving the black rider stuck on the bank because he may be magic but his horse sure ain’t! He’s gonna have to look for a bridge, the fool. This buys the hobbits enough time to walk past ugly gatekeepers and directors making cameos to make it to the seedy bar where they expect to meet up with Gandalf. Of course, Gandalf is trapped in a tall tower waiting for Prince Charming to save his aged ass, but the wee hobbits don’t know that. Once in the seedy bar, Frodo manages to almost immediately fuck up by accidentally putting on the Ring. One thing he wasn’t supposed to do, and he does it at the first greasy spoon he comes to. And this is our hero, folks. He disappears and sends the bar into an uproar. While none of the patrons of the bar can see him when he’s got the Ring on, there are some people who can. Those people are the black riders who are after him and Sauron himself, so way to really blow it, Frodo.

Frodo pulls off the ring and is accosted by a guy with a nasal voice that folks ’round those parts call Strider. I call him Weps from Crimson Tide, but either way is good. Since the black riders are right on Frodo’s tail, he helps the hobbits elude them by cleverly putting pillows under the blankets in their room. Ah ha, an entirely original and innovative ruse! The black riders are completely fooled by this, a trick that wouldn’t give my senile grandmother a moment’s pause. Once again, these are our villain’s top men. Middle-Earth, land of the nimrods.

While all that’s going on, Weps—I mean, Strider—gives us some more information about the black riders, but exposition is boring, so let’s skip it. Suffice to say, the black riders are called Nazgûl, which is a shorter term. Strider leads the hobbits through the wilderness, announcing to anyone who cares to listen that he is making for the house of Elrond in Rivendell. I thought “Rivendell” was just a song by Rush, but apparently it has something to do with The Lord of the Rings, too. You learn something new every day. Our intrepid band marches across fields, through marshes, and across about five hundred more fields.

Meanwhile, Saruman is knocking down trees for no reason and Gandalf is getting rained on. When I started writing about this scene I thought it would be important, but it turns out I’ve been fooled. So, onward.

Strider, in a brilliant move for such a cunning outdoorsman, decides to set up camp on the highest ground around at the only visible landmark for leagues in every direction. The Ringwraiths (another easier to type word for the black riders) may be dumb, but they manage to muster up the sense to look in the only conceivable place to look and what do they find but our heroes, caught with their guard down. In a move that makes even Strider’s decision to set up base camp under the flashing neon sign that says “Hobbits Here” seem positively brilliant, Frodo puts on the Ring while he sits just inches away from a horde of Ringwraiths. Now that the Ringwraiths are able to get a crystal clear look at him, one of them stabs Frodo a good ‘un right in the shoulder (Aah, the shoulder! The most vital part of a person!) and is about to take the Ring when Strider strides in and saves everyone’s bacon by fending off the Ringwraiths with a flaming torch.

Frodo’s stab wound may just be in the shoulder, but he was stabbed with a “Morgul blade” (whatever), which means he needs some elvish healing and he needs it quick, so these people had better haul ass to Rivendell tout suite. While all this is going on, Saruman is equipping an army of orcs with some seriously badass weaponry, not to mention hatching some mud-babies that grow up to be incredible super-orcs. The outlook is not good for our heroes now, that’s for sure. Fortunately, none of them have so far done much in the way of endearing themselves to the audience.

At just this convenient time, an elvish babe shows up to help out our heroes. Fancy meeting her here, just when they need an elf and a quick steed to get Frodo to Elrond’s pimpin’ pad in Rivendell. Throughout all of this, Frodo’s face is covered in gross pus and snot, and he’s constantly wheezing and moaning. So be ready for a thousand close-ups of that. The hot elf chick—Arwen, she’s called—puts Frodo on her horse and goes shag-assin’ across the terrain, hoping to get to Rivendell before the Nazgûl can find them and have their way with her. Oh, yeah, and probably kill Frodo, too. Since Frodo’s a good guy and we’ve still got more than two and a half movies to go, Arwen manages to make it across a river just in time for a gigantic tsunami to come along and wash the Ringwraiths away to who knows where. So it seems they’re out of the picture…for now! MWAHAHAHAHA!!

Frodo wheezes and whines some more, blah blah blah, they make it to Rivendell and big daddy Elrond cures him up right. I’m glad, too, because if I had to look at that slime-encrusted face for another second I’d probably barf all over my eight dollar shoes. Frodo wakes up in Rivendell to find Gandalf staring at him. Whaaa? Last time we saw Gandalf he was sitting on top of a tower talking to insects in the rain, so what the hell is this? Oh, wait, nevermind, here’s the explanation. He escaped on the back of an eagle. The lord of the eagles, in fact, a big ass bird named Gwaihir. This will probably come up again later.

Hey, guess who else is in Rivendell! It’s Bilbo! He and Frodo hug each other and play ass-grab for a while, and since everybody’s here, it’s time for a secret council. At this council we get introduced to a bunch of new characters, so here’s the quick rundown. There’s Legolas Greenleaf, an elf who looks like a real fairy, if you catch my meaning. There’s Gimli the dwarf, played by Sallah from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And there’s Boromir, a man from Gondor. He’s played by 006, the bad guy from GoldenEye, so I’m not sure I trust him. You probably shouldn’t, either. Oh, and we also find out that the guy we’ve come to know as Strider is actually Aragorn, and he is heir to the throne of Gondor. Boromir is heir to the temporary-leadership-position of Gondor, so he’s not exactly too happy about Aragorn being around. It’s called dramatic tension, folks.

At this secret council, Boromir drones on and on about some dream he had, as if he’s a damn Biblical prophet or something. Gandalf talks really loud and makes the whole world shake. Everyone else throws in their two cents about what they should do with this Ring. They talk and talk and talk for like ten minutes and finally decide they have to destroy the Ring. Unfortunately, you can’t just drop this puppy down the Dispose-All. No, you have to take the Ring right into the heart of Sauron’s territory (which is called Mordor—subtle wordplay, eh?) and chuck it into the fiery mountain where it was made. What a pain in the ass! The council quickly degenerates into a fight, with nobody willing to trust anybody else with having the Ring long enough to take it to Mordor. So, naturally, our wee hero Frodo volunteers to take it. Gandalf agrees to go with him, not to mention Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas. Boromir also decides to go, because he seems pretty lustful when it comes to that Ring and I don’t think he can bear to let a gorgeous thing like that out of his sight. Also tagging along will be the other hobbits, Sam, Merry and Pippin. What a ragtag bunch of freaks. Middle-Earth is totally doomed.

Oh, there’s also some kind of love story thing going on between Aragorn and Arwen, but nobody likes a romantic subplot, least of all me.

Now that our fellowship is formed and we’re nearly two hours into the movie, it’s probably time for them to go thundering out of Rivendell and get started on their quest, wouldn’t you say? Well, if you’d said that, you’ve obviously learned nothing about this film’s pacing in the last 105 minutes. Instead, we’re treated to a scene of Aragorn moping around while kneeling at his mother’s grave and Bilbo giving even more gifts to Frodo. This time he hands him a fancy pants sword and an even fancier pantsier coat of chain mail, made from super-light, super-strong mithril. Also, Bilbo turns into a puppet-monster for a second or so when he sees the Ring, but that’s to be expected.

Okay, now I think it’s finally time for the company to really set out on their quest. Most of their quest consists, as before, of walking slowly across very scenic fields and plains of New Zealand, which is fine for a travel guide video but tends to get on my nerves when all I want to see is an orc eat somebody. Anyway, because of some particularly mean-spirited birds, the company is no longer able to take the scenic route and so must make their way through a snowy mountain pass. As they’re traveling along the pass, Frodo drops the Ring right on the ground. Boy, some Ring bearer they’ve got here. I know for certain I wouldn’t entrust this chump with the safety of my entire future. Anyway, Boromir picks up the Ring and takes a long, loving gander at it before giving it back to Frodo, which I get the feeling is really significant. Let’s watch and find out, won’t we?

Saruman—remember him?—quickly finds out that the fellowship is trying to go through the mountain pass, so he uses his Patented Old Man Magic to cause a bunch of avalanches, effectively blocking that route. This leaves the fellowship with little choice but to take the road under the mountains, through the so-called mines of Moria. Gandalf doesn’t seem to like this idea, but Gimli is all for it; now, who are we going to believe, some old man we’ve never seen before or one of Indiana Jones’ very best friends? Just as our band of variously sized weirdos is about to head into Moria, they get attacked by some kind of tentacled lake-monster that wants to send them all to their doom. What’s the monster like? Well, one of the special effects guys who worked on the movie described this monster’s mouth as “a bizarre sphincter,” and he wasn’t even trying to be funny, so there’s no way my pathetic vocabulary is going to top that.

The fellowship meanders through the mine, chatting about this and that and occasionally being followed by Gollum, which leads them to dish out one of the movie’s major morals about pity and mercy being important. Sure, that’s a nice thought, but I’d rather see some limbs getting hacked than some diplomats showing mercy, so can we please get to an action sequence? Our nine travelers eventually reach a room with a big stone coffin in the middle, which is, of course, chock full of one dead dwarf. This makes Gimli break down and cry like a girl; if you’ve never seen the man who shouted “Marcus Brody, sir!” weeping uncontrollably, believe you me ’tis a sight to behold. While Gimli is throwing his tantrum, Pippin knocks a skeleton down a well and makes enough noise to wake up every goddamn orc for miles.

Ah, here we go! Let the fighting begin! About forty jillion orcs bust into the room with blades drawn and start attacking with all their might. The heroes fight back with swords and arrows, and they seem to be doing a swell job of it; Aragorn even scores a nicely spurting decapitation that was definitely not in the theatrical release of the picture. Just when it looks like our heroes have everything under control and this action showcase will be ending all too soon, in marches one humongous son of a bitch, the cave troll. He wields a club about the size of the late Marlon Brando, and he swings it at the good guys with extreme prejudice. Legolas, who is apparently Captain Cool of the Awesome Alliance in spite of having girlish blond hair, runs right up onto the troll’s back and starts shooting arrows directly into his head, but even that is not enough to stop this giganto. The troll gets Frodo stuck in a corner and, just when the time is right, runs him right through with a giant pig-sticker. Once this bad shit has gone down, we’re treated to shot after shot of Frodo writhing in pain, wheezing and gasping like an emphysema-stricken grandfather, until finally lying down, presumably dead. You know that episode of Family Guy where Peter is running home and he falls down and starts holding his knee, inhaling sharply in pain for at least a minute? That comical, over-the-top exaggeration is exactly what Elijah Wood’s performance is like any time Frodo gets hurt. Warms the heart, doesn’t it? Anyway, Frodo being I guess dead strengthens everyone else’s resolve, so they quickly finish off the cave troll and go back to look at Frodo’s stinky old corpse. Oh, but looky loo, he’s not dead, he had his mithril chain mail on, huzzahs are in order, on to the next fight.

Just when fifty million orcs have surrounded the fellowship and are about to eat them whole, they all simultaneously remember that they left their irons turned on at home and run off because holy shit here comes the Balrog. Nobody wants to mess around with a Balrog, so all and sundry put eggs in their shoes and beat it. They run down a broken old staircase (man, Moria is a dump!) and across a bridge before they can no longer outrun this horrific monster, and Gandalf turns around to have himself a one-on-one showdown with the Balrog. Oh, by the way, a Balrog is some kind of lit-on-fire shadow monster. You were probably wondering. You rarely see them in zoos these days, after all. Gandalf almost emerges the victor when he knocks the Balrog down a big hole, but at the last seconds the Balrog reaches out and pulls him over the side as well.

Well, shit, Gandalf’s dead. But at least now I only have eight characters to worry about, so I guess there’s some good in it. In fact, there’s a lot of good in it because that pointy hat was starting to get on my nerves. Anyhoo, our remaining good guys make it out of the mine and emerge on the other side of the mountains. Everyone does some more of that running briskly across the landscape that’s come to be synonymous with the Lord of the Rings films before finally arriving in Lothlórien, a city where wood-elves do their wood-elfy business: lounging around being ethereal, braiding their long hair, making toys, the usual. This is the part of the movie where I usually fall asleep. Partly this is because it is definitely the least interesting part of The Fellowship of the Ring (the same is true in the book, and they spend three damn chapters there), and partly this is because Lothlórien is supposed to make you fall asleep. It’s so damn tranquil it’s ridiculous.

In Lothlórien we meet an elf lady named Galadriel, who turns out to be the narrator with the scary voice from back at the beginning. While the company cools its collective heels in Lothlórien, Galadriel shows Frodo a mirror with some scary stuff in it and he offers her the Ring but she won’t take it because she already has a pretty nice one and because it will make her turn into a shiny blue monster, which is not at all how I pictured it from reading the book. None of it’s really all that interesting, so I’m just going to try desperately to stay awake through the rest of this sequence. Oh, hey, one more thing. Galadriel gives everyone in the fellowship some nice gifts, but I don’t want to go through them all now. If and when they come up later, then and only then will you find out about them. So deal with it, bitches.

All right, we’ve finally left Sleepy Tree Town and are heading down the river in some flimsy looking canoes. Unfortunately, Saruman has dispatched his whole army of super-orcs to hunt down the fellowship, kidnap the hobbits and kill and eat the rest. To be honest I don’t think I’d want to eat Gimli, but orcs have less discriminating palates than I, it would seem. Just in case things were about to get exciting, everyone stops to talk for a while, and man oh man oh man am I about to pass out. When the fellowship stops a second time without doing any fighting, Frodo goes wandering off by himself, and Boromir decides to follow him. Hmmm, could this mean things that have been earlier foreshadowed are about to be paid off? Well, let’s take a gander…oh, oh, there it is! Boromir totally just tried to tackle Frodo, steal the Ring, and run back home to the city of Minas Tirith with it. Frodo, deciding once again to break the only rule set for him, puts on the Ring and escapes from Boromir under cover of invisibility. Being knocked to the ground by a big bearded man tends to change a person, so Frodo realizes that he can no longer trust anyone in the fellowship to resist the temptation of the Ring and decides to set off for Mordor all on his own.

Conveniently for him and the intensely bored audience is that just at this moment, Saruman’s orcs attack in full force, occupying the rest of the fellowship so they don’t notice Frodo slipping away. A big fight scene ensues. At one point, Legolas shoots an arrow right through one orc and into another. Then, immediately afterward, he draws another arrow, stabs a guy in the face with it, then puts it in his bow and shoots someone with it. He’s doing all this awesome stuff, but he still looks like a little Nancy, doesn’t he? Gimli axes a bunch of orcs in the gut and Aragorn and Boromir are just annihilating people right and left. Boromir even cuts off an orc’s arm and it starts squirting in true Monty Python fashion. So that’s nice. Of course, Boromir also gets three arrows shot into his body and dies, so I guess that’s not nice. Boromir was the last line of defense for Merry and Pippin, so once he’s down for the count some orcs pick them up and carry them away to god knows where.

Aragorn gets involved in a real knock-down drag-out with the chief of the super-orcs. Aragorn stabs him in the leg, but the monster is so nasty he just pulls out the knife, licks it clean and throws it back at our hero, who whacks it out of the air with his sword, baseball style. All in all that’s pretty awesome, and it’s only made more awesome by Aragorn neatly slicing off the orc’s head with one quick swing. Once the bad guys have been thus disposed of, our remaining heroes—Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas—put Boromir’s body in one of the canoes and send it tumbling over a waterfall. Knowing that Frodo must undertake this last part of his quest alone, the three of them decide to hunt the orcs that took Merry and Pippin, and off they go into film two.

While all this has been going down, Frodo still has not yet managed to successfully run off because, as you’ve probably noticed, everything in this movie happens really slowly. He’s gone so slowly, in fact, that he’s given chunky old Master Samwise enough time to catch up with Frodo and tell him he can’t leave without taking his faithful gardener with him. And then Sam manages to almost immediately drown and needs Frodo to save his bacon, so the message is clear: Frodo is in serious trouble, because he has been saddled with a completely helpless loser. Oh joy. Well, don’t worry, there’s only about seven hours and forty-five minutes left.

Hold on to your hats, it’s time for a flashback! All the way back to Moria we go, thankfully skipping over all that boring time in Lothlórien, and we revisit Gandalf’s fatal battle with the Balrog of Morgoth. Of course, a flashback to something we’ve already seen would just be boring (This movie? Boring? Surely not!), so we stay with Gandalf longer than before, watching him shit right in the face of the laws of physics by falling faster than the Balrog and catching up with it. He is a magical wizard, but still. Galileio would be so pissd. Anyhoo, Gandalf pops a squat right on the Balrog’s chest and chops him a good one with his sword until they both go kersplatting on the ground. And then, Frodo wakes up! So I guess we are to take this flashback as a dream Frodo was having. But are we supposed to believe the things we saw? Frodo could not possibly have known about the things he was dreaming, as he didn’t see them, so are they fact or mere fiction? It’s questions like these that, sadly, must go unanswered.

Now that Frodo’s got his sleepy ass up, he and Sam plod around some rocky outcroppings for about ninety-five minutes, walking and bantering. They complain about having nothing to eat buy elvish waybread, which is ungrateful if you ask me. I mean, the elves were nice enough to equip them with a load of magic food, but no, whine whine whine. Nasty hobbits. Speaking of nasty hobbits, it’s now time to introduce Frodo and Sam’s new companion, Gollum. He busts onto the scene by trying to kill everyone and steal the Ring. He’s a grody, skinny little CG monster. He’s not so distractingly cartoony as, say, that fat fry cook in Attack of the Clones, but he’s still computer animation and appears as such. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to accept him; he’ll be in the film for the next thirty thousand minutes.

Gollum screams and cries and moans even more than E.T., and just when it’s about to be so annoying that I turn off this movie and put on Godzilla vs. Megalon instead, Frodo steps in and saves the day by saying they’ll untie Gollum if he’ll promise to shut up, be good, and lead the two hobbits into Mordor. And off they go, three jolly wanderers.

Now, I hope you guys like running! If there’s nothing you love more than shot after shot after shot of people running across open terrain, hoo boy are you in luck. First we see orcs and superorcs running about with Merry and Pippin in tow. Well, that’s not fair, the orcs don’t just run. They also grunt and slobber. Yaaay! Next up is a big run-fest from Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas. While they run, Gimli spouts one pathetic one-liner after another. Apparently, he has gone from stout, noble dwarf to Laffy Joe, The Comedy Relief Midget. I’m more than a bit upset about this. I mean, humorous interludes are not exactly prevalent in Tolkien’s novels. And, even if they were, they wouldn’t be pathetic jokes like these. Give me a break.

Saruman, meanwhile, is up to his old tricks. He’s burning down stuff, chopping trees, and making more and more super-orcs. In addition to his super-orcs, he’s also demanding the allegiance of and giving motivational speeches to some ugly looking men. And, as always, he’s planning to rule the world. But that’s what you’d expect from an old man who looks like Cher with a beard. Seriously, he does. Just look at the guy. But, regardless of how much he looks like Cher, he sends out a force to massacre the people of Rohan. I guess they succeed, although you don’t really see it. You see people raising the alarm, you see some dead guys lying in water, so I suppose we’re meant to put two and two together. One of the guys lying in the water but not quite dead is the king’s son, and he’s found by the king’s nephew, a handsome guy named Éomer. Éomer rushes back to tell the king all about how Saruman’s forces are killing everybody, even trying to kill his son, but the king’s advisor, a creepy bugger named Wormtongue will have none of it. Wormtongue tells the king that Saruman is pretty great and that they should kick Éomer right out of the place, so they do. Also, Wormtongue is played by that little guy who stutters and kills himself in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So there you have it.

That was all getting a little confusing, so let’s get back to a known commodity: Running! Woo hoo! More, more! Let’s just run for the next hour and a half, why not? What could be more exciting? Well, anything would be more exciting, I guess, but still. Let’s run! The orcs run until they can run no more, then get busy fighting amongst themselves and with some revenge-seeking soldiers of Rohan, giving Merry and Pippin the opportunity to make an escape attempt. The heroes, on the other hand, keep running until they are accosted by the very same band of Rohan’s soliders. It’s revealed that the whole army of orcs was killed and no hobbits were found, so our three heroes are afraid Merry and Pippin were killed, but we of the audience aren’t dummies. We know they escaped, so let’s get the hell on with it already.

The manner of their escape was by crawling away, cleverly cutting the ropes that bound them, and hustling off into the forest where they meet a big ol’ walking, talking, bearded tree by the name of (get ready) Treebeard. This man-tree is voiced by John Rhys-Davies, who also plays Gimli. Now, I dearly love John Rhys-Davies, but I object to this choice. Treebeard is clearly speaking with the same voice as Gimli and it tends to break the reality of the scene. Of course, a talking tree would tend to break reality anyway, but there you have it. Anyway, Treebeard’s gimmick is that he walks slowly, talks slowly, and pretty much does everything else in the world slowly. Hurrah! What this movie needed, with its serious pacing issues, was a character who is as slow as possible in all situations. It’s a rip-roaring good time. Treebeard is totally pissed about the way the orcs have been cutting down trees. Thinking the two hobbits are orcs themselves, he drops them at the feet of a white wizard for judgment, and Merry and Pippin look to be just about up shit creek with not a single paddle betwixt them.

Back in the A story, Gollum leads Frodo and Sam through a nasty marsh full of stinkiness and corpses and scary looking water-ghosts. It’s in this sequence, shortly after Gollum saves Frodo’s life after he swan dives into the corpse-water like a big goober, that we get a major turn in Gollum’s character. Frodo calls Gollum by his proper name, Sméagol, and that seems to rouse something in Gollum, something of the person he used to be all those centuries ago, before the Ring came to him and before he turned into a real nasty little bugger. Of course, he barely has time to remember that he used to be a nice guy when the Nazgûl show up again, but this time they’re mounted upon gigantic dragons that squeal and soar through the air. That’s pretty scary, and spells definite bad news for our cutesy-poo hobbits.

The B story, meanwhile, follows Gimli, Legolas and Aragorn as they follow the trail of Merry and Pippin into the forest. As they march, Gimli makes a joke about squirrel droppings that I’ve never even noticed before. And, let me tell you, I’m glad I hadn’t heard it until now, because it is distinctly un-Tolkien like. Anyway, the three come across a white wizard and draw their weapons, but the wizard blasts the blades to oblivion. And then he reveals himself to be Gandalf, no longer clad in grey but in shimmering white, and not at all as dead as we’d been led to believe. This reminds me of that quote so often attributed to Mark Twain, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Unfortunately, that’s not quite what Mark Twain actually said. Mark Twain is misquoted or just given totally false attributions more often than any figure in history, and it sickens me. Next time you think you’ve got a Mark Twain quote, do some more thorough checking; it’s just as likely to be something some schmo on the internet made up and attached Twain’s name to just to give it some kind of credence. But that’s neither here nor there. What is here is Gandalf’s explanation of how he manages to be alive just now. He tells of his fight with the Balrog, how he killed it but how the fight also killed him. Then he tells of how he flew through some cosmic space-time type thing and magically came back to life. If you wanted a satisfactory explanation, I’m sorry; this burlap sack of crap is the best you’re gonna get. Gandalf and his three companions make haste for Edoras, the heap-big city of Rohan where King Théoden and all those other characters we met earlier reside.

Since something as fast-paced as characters making haste might be too exciting for our delicate constitutions, it’s high time we visit again with Merry, Pippin and Treebeard. Treebeard talks and talks and talks and Merry and Pippin fall asleep and I’m not far behind them. Fortunately, this plodding misery comes to an end soon, and we find Frodo, Sam and Gollum have arrived at the Black Gate of Mordor. Vast armies are marching through the Gate (and this is a serious Gate, not the type of thing you can just bust down and stroll through), thousands of armed soldiers, any one of whom could stab Frodo and Sam quite nicely should they be discovered. And so, naturally, Sam takes this opportunity to fall down a cliffside and make a whole bunch of noise, forcing Frodo to run after him and save his bacon by covering him with a magical elven cloak that makes its wearer invisible, apparently. Neat. I wish they’d brought that up sooner so it wouldn’t seem like such an incredible cheat. After bringing them all this way, Gollum finally pipes up and says in his puke-inducing voice that the hobbits shouldn’t go that way, and there’s a much more secret alternate route that he probably should have brought up ages ago. Ha ha, he’s a wacky one, that Gollum!

At this point, Gandalf and his cronies ride up to Edoras, and my DVD player tells me this scene will last for eleven and a half minutes, so I’m hunkering down for a long ride. King Théoden is all old and gross and won’t do anything except sit on his throne making wheezy sounds. It seems that Saruman—and his agent Wormtongue—has been poisoning Théoden’s mind and turning him into a nasty old sumbitch. Now, this brings up an interesting point: Why would anyone ever, under any circumstances, listen to a person whose very name was Wormtongue. Clearly, he’s not the sort to be trusted. Why, though, would I expect any of these characters to do something smart? So far, none have proven themselves to be particularly brainy. Intelligence aside, Gandalf doesn’t like having anyone around who looks even grosser and older than he does, so he whips up a steaming batch of White Wizard magic and rescues Théoden from Saruman’s spell, leaving the king far younger and slightly less gross. Since Théoden feels all better now and can wield his sword again like an old pro, he kicks Wormtongue right the hell out of his hall, leaving him to run off crying to Saruman. Since he’s finally perked up again, everyone takes this opportunity to inform Théoden of the death of his son and send him back into an ever deepening spiral of depression. In fact, he’s so depressed he starts droning on and on about these hard to spell flowers, and if I ever get that depressed, I would hope someone would just cleave my skull with a hefty bludgeon.

It finally comes to Théoden’s attention, after he’s done crying his eyes out and giving flower speeches, that oh yeah, part of his kingdom is getting annihilated by Saruman’s forces and maybe he should do something about it. Instead of fighting, he pusses out and orders his people to evacuate to a mountain stronghold called Helm’s Deep, and at the same time Gimli gives us a nice foamy burp. Tolkien, meanwhile, spins in his grave so quickly that it actually affects the earth’s rotation. While Aragorn prepares to go with the people of Rohan, Gandalf rides off to parts unknown. He claims he’ll be back in five days. So, in movie time, that will only translate to about forty thousand hours.

Over in the mildly interesting part of the picture, Gollum has a startlingly edited conversation with himself. His two halves, the nastier Gollum and the marginally more pleasant, trying-to-be-good Sméagol, argue with one another. Gollum is all about making Sméagol feel bad, calling him a thief and a murderer and suggesting he’s pretty useless. Sméagol fights back and ostensibly frees himself from the grip of his awful Gollum personality. To celebrate his new found niceness, he catches some rabbits for the hobbits to eat, and then he and Sam bitch back and forth for several decades about how to eat. In any case, things seem to be looking up in terms of Sméagol’s inner conflict. But there are a lot of feet of film left. Plenty of time for verrrrrrry slow character change and development.

Frodo and Sam take a peek over the edge of a cliff at yet another army of nasty looking men heading toward Mordor, answering the Dark Lord’s call. While the two hobbits are staring all agape at these bad guys, a small band of mysterious Robin Hood types appear seemingly out of nowhere, kill all the soldiers and immediately take Frodo and Sam prisoner, because Frodo and Sam are just about the least clever adventurers I’ve ever seen. And with that, the third disc of The Lord of the Rings screeches to a halt, meaning we’re approximately halfway through. Yeah, that’s right, only halfway. But don’t worry, there are a lot of boring parts I’m just going to skip right over coming up soon, so the time will fly by.

A good example of the stuff I’m going to skip is the romantic thing going on between Aragorn and Arwen, told through flashbacks, dreams and psychic visions and stuff. There’s some of it right about now, but I ain’t gonna talk about it. If somebody doesn’t swing a sword pretty soon, I think I’m going to die.

All right, here we go. A bunch of orcs riding on nasty wolf-beasts called wargs attack the people of Rohan as they flee toward Helm’s Deep. The warrior men stay to do battle while the women and children scuttle off to hide. Legolas does his Captain Awesome routine, Gimli hits stuff with his axe as he so often does, and Théoden stabs a warg right in the mouth. Aragorn jumps up on a passing warg and starts fighting the orc that rides it, and in all the excitement and hullabaloo of the battle he fails to realize that the warg is about to run right off the side of a cliff, and over they go, presumably to die in a mushy, splattery way. The rest of the good guys, though, deal with the wargs and eventually make it to the safety of Helm’s Deep. But perhaps it is not so safe as they think! Ha ho!

Since Helm’s Deep maybe isn’t so safe, what with Saruman sending out about five hundred billion bad guys, it’s a good thing Aragorn isn’t dead after all, but rather peacefully floating down a river and getting rescued by a horse. There’s no way the people of Rohan could be victorious without this particular dark-haired, nasal-voiced hero and heir to the throne of Gondor. So Aragorn, too, arrives at Helm’s Deep. All the good guys are holed up in a fortress, every bad guy in the world is on the way…hopefully we’ll reach an exciting battle sequence before too many more weeks have gone by.

Oh, hey, remember those Robin Hood and Merry Men guys who kidnapped Frodo and Sam? It turns out they’re lead by a guy named Faramir, a captain of Gondor. He knows full well that war is coming on all fronts, with Saruman from one direction and Sauron from the other. Faramir breaks the news to the two hobbits that he is Boromir’s brother and that Boromir is just as dead as a doornail. Of course, we in the audience have known this for eons now, but Frodo and Sam take it kinda hard. He was a protector, after all, and now he’s nothing but a rotting old corpse.

Faramir’s also got this idea that he should kill Gollum, who ran off when Frodo and Sam got captured but has since reappeared and begun skulking around singing to himself about fish. Frodo demands that Gollum not be killed, so instead Faramir’s men just capture him and beat him within an inch of his life. But they don’t kill him, and god bless loopholes! During his severe beating, Gollum starts talking to himself and revealing that Frodo’s got the Ring, which is bad news. Well, it’s bad news since in this movie they have completely changed everything about Faramir’s character. In the book, Faramir knew the Ring could only be used for evil and would lead to his country’s downfall. Here, he acts like a total jackass in spite of the chunky warnings of Sam Gamgee and keeps Frodo and Sam hostage and hauls them off to Osgiliath in Gondor.

For the next eighty days, the people in Helm’s Deep prepare for the battle that bears down on them. It’s a long, slow tension-building rise to the climactic action sequence; I’ve heard director Peter Jackson compare it to the beginning of the movie Zulu, which also spends a lot of time gearing up to the final gigantic attack. Of course, the movie Zulu is also really boring, in spite of having such excellent people as Richard Burton and Michael Caine. So make of that what you will. As part of all the pre-battle excitement, a host of elves arrives to help out the people of Rohan, one more cooperative alliance between men and elves, a thing which has not happened since the last age. Whoopee. Also, it starts to rain, because a battle in dry weather isn’t the least bit exciting and everyone knows it.

The orcs arrive, it’s a tense standoff between good guys and bad guys, but it’s just a lot of noise being made—no one’s actually been given an order to attack on either side. Finally, a man from Rohan named Butterfingers McGee accidentally fires an arrow and kills an orc but good. From that point forward, the shit is on. Arrows and swords fly everywhere and it’s one impaling after another. Elves, orcs and men are getting killed right and left, and Gimli’s hitting a few baddies right in the tallywhacker with his axe. Some of the orcs bring in Saruman’s secret weapon, some huge goddamn bombs, and they blast a big hole in the wall of Helm’s Deep. Lemme tell ya, if you thought the good guys were in trouble before…well, shit, sheriff, now it pretty much looks like they don’t stand a chance. More and more orcs storm the place, Aragorn performs another of his patented squirting decapitations, and Legolas skateboards down a staircase on a shield. Some people, they think this newest Legolas trick is cool. I, on the other hand think it is bogus, a bit too modern in style for the world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

Orcs with a battering ram knock a hole in the primary gate of Helm’s Deep, making the situation look even worse for our good guys. It’s only at this point that Théoden actually gets his sword out and starts fighting, the lazy twat. He lets countless senior citizens and pre-teens fight and die before he so much as draws his blade. Our three main heroes keep killing bad guys one after another; any one of Legolas, Aragorn or Gimli kills more than any five regular Rohan people.

Théoden, Legolas, Aragorn and a host of other people ride out of Helm’s Deep on horses, right into the thick of battle, figuring that if they’re going to go out they’d better do it in a blaze of glory. Fortunately for them—and for everyone—just as they choose to ride out it happens to be dawn on the fifth day, and who should sidle his ephemeral white ass up but Gandalf. With him rides the exiled Éomer and all the men loyal to him and to the safety of Rohan. They come in to save the day just in time, like a bunch of little deus ex machinas on horseback, and the evil forces of Saruman are defeated.

While all this is going on, Faramir has arrived in Osgiliath with Frodo and Sam just in time for the city to be bombarded by enemy forces, including some of those wicked scary Ringwraiths on dragon-monsters. Faramir is still intent on taking the Ring even among all this destruction until Samwise the Stouthearted gives him a dressing down just chock full of hobbit sass. Faramir then comes to see the error of his ways. Of course, with Faramir not planning to take the Ring anymore, Frodo is forced to resume his quest for himself and he starts by bitching and moaning about how he can’t do it just because it is slowly destroying him from within both physically and psychologically and because every evil monster on the face of the planet is after him. Well, boo hoo, little master, boo fuckin’ hoo. After a motivational speech from Sam, the two hobbits resume their quest with Gollum in tow.

Oh, and hey! Remember the whole Treebeard, Merry and Pippin plot from way back? Intercut during all that battling were some unexciting scenes of the three of them talking and going to a gathering of more of Treebeard’s kind. Long story short, the tree-people decide to storm Isengard, where Saruman’s fortress is located, to repay the evil wizard for all that tree-chopping and forest-burning he’d been unilaterally condoning earlier. I guess the lesson here is plain: Environmental irresponsibility leads to ambulatory trees throwing huge stones at your big, scary tower. Anyway, the whole place is pretty wrecked up and Saruman and his gross buddy Wormtongue are trapped up at the top of the tower. It’s bad news for him, of course, because I don’t see Treebeard and his friends letting them out any time soon.

As this chapter of the story winds down, Gandalf belts out a nice, summarizing line: “The battle for Helm’s Deep is over; the battle for Middle Earth is about to begin.” He might as well have said: “Theater goers, please return next year for more exciting swordplay!” Anyway, we’ve got more important things to deal with right now, as we overhear Gollum talking to himself about his plans for Frodo and Sam. The path through which he plans to lead them is guarded by some kind of nasty lady-beast with which Gollum is well acquainted. If all goes well, that particular nastiness will kill the two hobbits and eat them up, throwing away bones, clothing, and perhaps if there’s any jewelry Gollum could take it away for her, maybe? All I can say is: Uh oh!

Man oh man, if you thought that first flashback was all you were going to get, rest assured that you are a God damned fool. Now it’s time for the flashback to end all flashbacks, going back some five hundred years to a time before Gollum got all gross and lanky and was just a regular old dude named Sméagol. It tells us all about how he came to possess the Ring; Sméagol’s best dear friend fell in a river, found the thing, and Sméagol promptly killed him and took it away. Since he was now a filthy murderer, no one wanted to talk to him much anymore for fear of strangulation, and so we see Gollum’s gradual descent into awfulness from the ordinary but still ugly hobbit he once was to the truly monstrous CG creature he becomes.

Back to the present, Frodo and Sam talk about something, blah blah blah, let’s get on to an interesting scene. In fact, this next bit is the only interesting scene of the early part of this third movie in the trilogy. Naturally, that being the case, it was cut out of the theatrical release of Return of the King and is available only on the extended DVD release. Our big victorious heroes from the battle of Helm’s Deep arrive at the ruined Isengard to have a few choice words with Saruman. Here they find Merry and Pippin eating, drinking and smoking, making them by far the easiest characters for me to relate with. But what Merry and Pippin are doing is not important. What is important is Saruman’s windblown hair and scary dialogue. Gandalf knows that Saruman was deep in Sauron’s council and wants to know a thing or two about what the Dark Lord might be planning, but since Saruman’s a real bastard he just hints around that an attack will come soon and everyone will die, tee hee hee. While the two wizards are bantering back and forth, Wormtongue slinks up and Théoden offers to treat him fairly, since he used to be a good guy way back in the day. Wormtongue doesn’t really have the courage to come back to the side of good and righteousness, but he does have the courage to stab Saruman right in the back and send him toppling off of his tower to land right on a conveniently placed spike. In all his tumbling, he drops a nice shiny rock that he’s been using like a crystal ball to find out what Sauron is doing, which is awfully fortuitous for our heroes.

And now, for the next two hours or so, very little that interests me happens. You may think I am exaggerating because I have said that nothing interesting is going on about six million times already, but it’s quite true. When I saw this movie in the theater, I feared it would never become enjoyable. The first truly exciting scene in the theatrical version was in Shelob’s lair—we’ll come to it later—and on this extended DVD that sequence does not occur until about two and a half hours into the film. So I’ll take this time when I don’t care about most of what’s happening on screen to just talk about The Lord of the Rings in general—things I liked, things I didn’t like, things about the books, my thoughts and whatnot.

Oh, wait! Here’s a thing I don’t like that’s directly related to what’s happening on screen right now. Gimli and Legolas are engaged in a drinking game and not only does Gimli burp again, but here he actually farts. A fucking fart joke in The Lord of the Rings. Lord have mercy. I have never in my life encountered something so out of place. Pukeatronic.

But anyway, let’s talk about some stuff. I remember when the first movie was released in theaters in 2001 there was much disappointed talk about the character of Tom Bombadil—a very iconic element of the book—being totally omitted. I, on the other hand, wasn’t at all upset about that, and I’m a pretty big Tolkien fan. Bombadil was iconic, sure, but he’s ultimately not that important and certainly not that interesting. He comes across as more of a goofy stoner than an integral character. When it comes to omissions that upset me, it was the fact that there was no Shelob in The Two Towers that most riled me up. The “Shelob’s Lair” chapter is my favorite part of the middle novel; when I saw The Two Towers in theaters and the credits rolled when Frodo and Sam were still miles away from reaching that point, I thought was going to shit bricks right there in my seat. Of course, Shelob did appear in Return of the King, and, after seeing it, I realized that it’s a much better place for her in terms of the movies’ timeline. But at the time of The Two Towers‘ release, not seeing her was just so surprising I didn’t know what to think.

The Two Towers had another surprise in the complete 180 degree change of the character of Faramir from someone who knows he shouldn’t mess with the Ring and says so right away, with no intention of ever taking it, to a real villainous sort who take Frodo and Sam waaay off course in an effort to steal the thing. I was a tad upset by that, but who am I to do anything about it?

While we’re on the subject of The Two Towers, let’s not forget the most memorable character it really introduces, Gollum. Overall, I’m pleased with Gollum. I wish there would have been another way to achieve that character besides computer animation. An excellent job was done rendering him, but even still there are times when you just can’t ignore the fact that Gollum is a drawing, not a thing. I’ll forgive it, though, I guess. Also, there are moments in the film when I wish Gollum had a voice not quite so gratingly irritating, but I’m sure most people wish that I were less gratingly irritating, so maybe I shouldn’t complain. And, by the way, this scene in Return of the King where Gollum is talking to his reflection is nothing but a rehash of the renowned schizophrenia scene in The Two Towers. It doesn’t really give us any new information, and it isn’t done quite as well as the first one was, either. Take it out of there, I say.

The whole Arwen and Aragorn romance is another thing I could have done without. It is mentioned in the book, but it’s dealt with explicitly only very briefly before the elf-maiden returns to the story near the end of Return of the King. The story of their romance is included in the books, but only in the extra appendices. Tolkien knew it wasn’t directly important to the main story of the War of the Ring, and so it was relegated to the extra facts portion of the book. I’m sure it was made so much more prominent in the movies to attract the attention of more female audience members—which makes good business sense, I suppose—but all it accomplishes with me is boring me to death.

But in spite of all the complaining I’m doing about the pacing of these films and such, they really are tremendous. The filmmakers went to unimaginable lengths to make Middle Earth seem real, and to keep it consistent with Tolkien’s description of the design of things whenever possible. Everything was constructed in minute detail—heck, that cave troll even has a big cave troll penis under his loin cloth! And I’m serious! The acting is fine all around (although sometimes I wish Elijah Wood wouldn’t go quite so far with the gasping and the slobbering every time he gets hurt) and the costuming and makeup is above reproach. Helm’s Deep is an absolutely amazing battle. The siege of Gondor is good too, but I find it less exciting than Helm’s Deep; by the time Return of the King came around, it felt to me like the epic scale sword fighting had all been done before and we were just revisiting old territory. But that is probably no fault of the actual battle. If the siege of Gondor had come first, I’m sure I would have deemed it the more exciting of the two.

Anyway, The Lord of the Rings is one of my best friends. It’s right up there with Star Wars and Star Trek on the list of things that have kept me company longer than anything else and have never let me down. Even when people I’ve known have disappointed me with their stupid actions or gone through periods when they were just awful, Gandalf Greyhame was always there acting just as strong and true as always. I’m a nerd, you see. A friendless, socially inept, talentless nerd.

Okay, let’s get up to speed. Gandalf and Pippin rode off to Minas Tirith in Gondor, where Pippin entered into the service of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. Merry has entered into the service of Théoden and rides with the people of Rohan, who come to the aid of Gondor. Osgiliath has fallen to the forces of Mordor and the orcs are now on their way to Minas Tirith. There, I told you in four lines what took two bloody hours of screen time. And what have Frodo, Sam and Gollum been doing during all this? Mostly, they’ve been climbing up dirty rocks and arguing with each other. You can imagine how exciting that must be. Clever Gollum has been slowly convincing Frodo that Sam is trying to take the ring from him. Through an elaborate ploy, he also makes Frodo believe that Sam the fatty ate all their food and, as punishment, Frodo tells him to go the fuck away and never come back. Perhaps we’re rid of Sam the crybaby turd forever.

Instead of riding all the way to Gondor with Théoden and his men, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli take an alternate route underneath a mountain through something called the Paths of the Dead. This eerie cavern is just filled to bursting with icky ghosts, who are apparently unable to rest in peace until they fulfill a long-standing oath to the king of Gondor who, fortunately, just happens to be Lord Aragorn. Aragorn enlists the service of all the ghosty-johns to help him kick some ass in Gondor, and then almost drowns in a truly awesome avalanche of skulls. But don’t worry folks, he makes it. He’s the hero. He and his army of dead folks steal some boats belonging to bad guys and set sail for Gondor.

Speaking of Gondor, some serious shit is about to go down. An enormous army of orcs waits outside the walls of Minas Tirith. They make their presence known by firing the heads of dead Gondorians out of a catapult and over the city’s walls. This is one of my favorite moments from the book, and if the whole movie had been nothing but catapulted heads, I’d have been okay with that. Because man. Then they start catapulting rocks, which isn’t quite as cool, but is still good because it knocks big ass holes into walls. I mean, big-ass holes, not big assholes. It’s an important distinction. Anyway, the people of Minas Tirith fire back a few boulders of their own, trebuchet style, and a gigantic battle would seem to be underway. It doesn’t help the good guys much that the Nazgûl have returned, flying in on their horrifying hellmonsters and destroying everything in sight. Their big bad leader, the Lord of the Nazgûl, is particularly ready for battle, because he’s put on a scary, pointy helmet and that means business.

With the aid of big towers pushed by trolls, swarms of orcs climb up and over the walls of the city and start leaving carnage every which way. Gandalf is swinging his sword and his staff at them, knocking down one after another, and even young Pippin is engaging in some fancy-pants sword related tomfooleries. Needing desperately to break down the gates of Minas Tirith so they can really get in and do some serious damage, the orcs bring up Grond, the holy shit biggest battering ram you ever did see in this or any other lifetime. Plus, it’s shaped like a wolf’s head for added fun time excitement!

Meanwhile, Gollum leads Frodo, now free of that goofball Sam, into a dark, stinky tunnel that seems pretty damn scary. Gollum is awfully keen on having Frodo go in there, so it’s safe to assume this is where he’s really up to something. The tunnel is full of sticky webs and nasty old skeletons, all of which seems to be leading up to one bad-ass arachnid. While Frodo is off in his tunnel, Sam gets about three hundred yards toward home by himself and decides, no, he’d probably better turn around and stay with Frodo since Gollum was trying to separate them in the first place and maybe there was a reason for it. Sam’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he gets there eventually. And he’s just in time, too, because Frodo is now forced to flee from one hell of a big spider. That’s right, it’s Shelob, the big, mean spider monster I so desperately wanted to see in The Two Towers. She’s quick, she’s huge, and she’s hungry for hobbit juices. Frodo barely makes it out of her tunnel in time, losing his sword in the process and then rolling out of the hole covered in spider webs, just like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, except Harrison Ford is about a million Megafonzies cooler than Elijah Wood. Gollum, upset that his plan for getting Frodo eaten didn’t work out, attacks the hobbit and tries to take the Ring all by himself, but Frodo makes quick work of him, throwing him off the edge of a cliff. Do you think he was thrown off the cliff and out of the picture forever? No, only an idiot would think that, just you wait.

Frodo slowly creeps along through the hills, slowly continuing his quest. Apparently he forgot that spiders do not have to stay in their own personal tunnels, which is too bad for him, because just when you least expect it Shelob creeps up quiet as a mouse and jabs Frodo a good one with her stinger. She wraps the hobbit up in her sticky web and prepares to do god knows what to him when Sam returns just in time, wielding the sword Frodo dropped before. Sam deals some fearsome blows to Shelob, chopping her legs and kicking her face and even grabbing her fangs, which is the last part of a giant spider I would touch. Stab, stab, stab goes Samwise, cutting Shelob time and again until he delivers a fatal blow to her abdomen. Killing giant spiders is all well and good, but it would have been nice if he’d shown up on time. I mean, Frodo pretty much appears to be dead. Good job, Sam. Just then, some orcs appear so Sam grabs the Ring and runs off to hide. Fortunately, one of the approaching monsters is Explainer Joe the Exposition Orc, who explains that oh, wait, Frodo isn’t dead after all, just stunned. And his plumage is beautiful. So the orcs carry off Frodo, and Sam heads off to the chubby rescue once again.

The orcs continue to bombard Minas Tirith and begin using their big lupine battering ram to bust down the gate of the city. The gate falls, and a billion orcs and trolls come rolling in, fighting fighting fighting all the time. Everything is burning, everyone is getting stabbed, it is definitely a bad scene. Meanwhile Denethor, Gondor’s batshit crazy steward, is doing something loony with Faramir, who he thinks is dead, but I’m not really interested in talking about that part. Suffice to say, Denethor ends up on fire and jumps off a cliff to his death. Awww, and he was my favorite character!

And now, finally, the forces of Rohan show up. It’s about time those slowpokes got there. Coming to the rescue after pretty much everything is already ruined seems to be a theme in this part of the film. So into battle come the riders of Rohan, hewing orc necks like it was going out of style. Even Merry proves himself to be a brave little soldier, doing his fair share of stabbing. With the forces of Rohan and Gondor combined, it looks like the good guys are starting to kick some serious ass, but the looking good is not to last. Suddenly from over the horizon come more huge armies of ugly, mean-spirited men from the South, many of whom are riding on gigantic elephant-style beasts. Bigger than office blocks, these monsters, with lots of extra spikes tied to their tusks. Elephants start to fall over, horses get their faces stepped on, and lots of people get shot with arrows. It’s one exciting free-for-all after another, this thing. At this dramatic juncture, in swoops the Lord of the Nazgûl to totally waste Théoden and attempt to do the same to his niece, Éowyn. She’s down on the ground and wounded, the Lord of the Nazgûl is big and strong, and things look pretty damn bad. But let’s not forget about Merry, who sneaks up and stabs the Lord of the Nazgûl in the leg, giving Éowyn the edge she needs to stab the bad guy right in the face. Score one for the halfling! Huzzahs are in order!

It’s about this time that Aragorn and his buddies show up on their boat, somehow sailing right into the middle of this field where the battle is raging. He, Legolas and Gimli begin kicking patootie like they always do, and their legion of ghostly followers just swarms over the whole place, killing every bad guy that gets in the way. Legolas climbs up on an elephant, kills it and surfs down its trunk, once again pissing me off because Legolas is way too much like a modern day punk teenager sometimes. Teenagers. How I loathe them, with their cargo pants and their cellular phones. Anyway, thanks to the ghosts, pretty soon every bad guy inside and outside of Minas Tirith is dead and the battle is over. Aragorn stays true to his word and releases all the ghosts to go rest peacefully, even though he really should keep them around because the good guys are about to ride off into another battle they’re even less likely to win. And where will this battle be? Why, right at the very gates of Mordor, that’s where! Onward!

Wait a minute, did I say onward? What I meant was, back to the story about Frodo and Sam. The orcs paw over Frodo and take all his stuff, even his fancy chain-mail shirt, and they’re probably going to kill him, too, for all we know, but Sam busts in and saves his bacon. He stabs a few orcs and acts like a real sword-swinging hero. It’s about time he stopped being a pussy. Frodo and Sam escape from this orc-infested tower and begin the final leg of their journey across Mordor’s plains to the fires of Mount doom. They don orc armor to better avoid being noticed because apparently all the orcs are mentally retarded and don’t realize that these people who are half their size and look nothing like them just don’t belong. It would seem that even the filmmakers, who seem to be kind of oblivious a lot of the time, realized that this notion was just completely ridiculous, because before more than a few minutes have gone by Frodo and Sam break away from the company of orcs they were hiding amongst, and shortly thereafter they shed their goofy, beak-nosed armor entirely.

The good guy armies arrive at the gates of Mordor and demand that the lord of the black land come forth. Of course, Sauron doesn’t answer to just anybody’s beck and call, so instead out comes one of his lieutenants who has a really goofy helmet and a mouth so eerily off-putting and large that you just might have to puke in the nearest trash can. This guy talks a lot of sass and then whips out Frodo’s chain mail shirt, leading everyone to believe that the wee little hobbit has been killed. This pisses pretty much everyone off, so Aragorn rides forward, decapitates the gross lieutenant, and musters his troops to ride right the hell into the thick of things. More swords are slung, orcs are fighting men, Aragorn’s fighting trolls, it’s all very exciting. One of the Nazgûl swoops down to do serious damage, and it looks like things are pretty much sunk for the good guys, when in fly the eagles, who earlier rescued Gandalf and now fend off the airborne Ringwraiths.

Meanwhile, Frodo has made it almost all the way to the end of his quest when he decides to just fall down on the ground and refuse to go any further. Right at the foot of Mount Doom he is, and instead of continuing, he just decides to lie down and let the shit hit the fan all over Middle Earth. Poor fat, out of shape, huffy-puffy Sam has to pick up Frodo’s lazy ass for him and carry him to the mountain’s fire. They’ve made it within feet of their final destination when guess who shows up again, that’s right it’s Gollum, oh my goodness what a surprise. He jumps out of the rocks and attacks the two hobbits, trying once again to take the Ring for himself. Apparently, this new threat strengthens Frodo’s resolve and gives him what he needs to run the rest of the way into the mountain to the Crack of Doom. Of course, once Frodo gets there, dangling the Ring right over the edge of a cliff above the fire that will destroy it, he decides that after all that toil and hardship, he’s not going to do what he came to do and he’s just gonna keep that pretty little thing for himself. He slides it on, disappears, and oh shit is this bad news or what. As soon as Frodo puts on the Ring, Sauron knows exactly where he is, and the Nazgûl fly after him as quick as they can. However quick they may be, though, Gollum is closer, and in he runs, jumping up on the invisible Frodo and carefully feeling around for his finger. Gollum finds it, grabs hold, and bites of the finger with a sickening crunch. If that isn’t gross and terrible, I don’t know what is. Frodo, pretty pissed about having his finger taken and even more pissed about having his Ring taken, rushes at Gollum trying to get it back, and in the struggle, whoops, there goes Gollum over the edge, and he takes the Ring with him right into the fire. That son of a bitch is destroyed.

Which means its time for everything to start exploding and shooting lava everywhere, meaning it looks like Frodo and Sam are pretty much gonna die. Sauron’s dark tower explodes and falls to ruin, his armies scatter to the four winds, and the day is pretty much saved. Well, except for Frodo and Sam, who are still sitting there with all that lava and fire barreling down on them at a million miles an hour. There’s absolutely no way out of this one…except, of course, for the eagles! Every time you write yourself into a corner, just bring in the unstoppable eagles to save the day, that’s the lesson Tolkien teaches us. The eagles swoop in, pick up Frodo and Sam, and fly away with them to safety. Sure it stretches belief, but whatever, at least this is almost over.

Frodo wakes up in a bed in Minas Tirith, essentially recovered from his arduous journey. (Or is he? Stay tuned!) One by one his friends from the original fellowship come in to see him, everyone shares a good laugh, it’s very touching and nice, and with that the screen fades to black and you’d probably think it’s over.

But you would probably be a dumb cunt, because it ain’t even close to over. Get ready for a denouement extravaganza like you have never seen before. First, Aragorn is crowned king of Gondor and gets the recognition he so richly deserves. Then he marries Arwen and gets the poontang he so richly deserves. The hobbits then return home and enjoy themselves at the Green Dragon pub they love so much. Then Sam goes and hits on this babe, and seconds later they’re getting married. Okay, maybe that’s it.

Nope, nope, now it’s time for Frodo to cry about how you can’t resume your old life. That being the case, he heads for the Grey Havens, from which point he will leave Middle Earth forever. With him will go Bilbo and Gandalf and Elrond and even Galadriel. It’s a pretty big honor to get to hop on a boat with elves and go to their super-special Undying Lands, so I guess congratulations are in order. At the harbor, just before getting on the boat, Frodo says his goodbyes to his old hobbit friends, and everyone has a good cry. It’s very touching and all that. Can bring a tear to the eye of a grown man, provided he didn’t fall asleep eight hours ago. Anyway, you know what’s kind of bogus? They’re setting off for the Undying Lands, but really what they’re doing is dying. That’s right, Frodo, Gandalf, Bilbo, all of ‘em. Everyone on that boat is pretty much dying in a way that completely blurs the line between the literal and the metaphorical. And that, my friends, is what makes The Lord of the Rings the saddest fucking book ever published. There’s no happy ending for the people who most deserve it, just like in life. What a bummer. Well, surely that touching sequence will be the movie’s final scene, what with all the emotion and such.

Ha ha, of course not! Hollywood hasn’t the courage to end with a kick in the gut like that, even with all the down-under New Zealand influence in this movie. So we go back to see Sam with his happy wife and and children before the end title card finally comes up. And yes, believe it or not, after all that time and after the thirty-five minutes of after-the-climax business, The Lord of the Rings has come to a close. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to stand up and attempt to remove the cobwebs that now bind me tightly to this chair. And I really have to pee.