Film
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
- Director
- Peter Jackson
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 201 mins
The final instalment of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien trilogy drives the violent fantasy epic towards its denouement, introducing new challenges and fearsome creatures for the sundry scattered hobbits, elves, dwarves and humans to overcome, while deepening its underlying themes of friendship, loyalty and honour.
Such is the scale of the seamless spectacle that in lesser hands it might have overwhelmed the emotional dimensions of the story. Yet the emotional intensity and psychological depth of the quieter, more intimate scenes allows them to more than hold their own. The final, more reflective scenes are both tragic and reconciliatory, stressing both the need for peace and the price that has been paid for it.
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