The Fabulous Destiny of Marked Accordingly

The Return of the King is probably the best of the three movies and, due to its liberal sprinkling of Touching Scenes in amongst the bombastic carnage, will probably be so acknowledged by the general public at large. It’s still braindead and emotionally manipulative pulp, but I found myself curiously entertained by parts of it, in spite of having the good fortune of an impromptu director’s commentary from a dimwitted cortege of Scotswomen in the seats behind mine who delighted in competing with each other to correctly identify and communicate the myriad twists and unforeseen twirls of the labyrinthine plot through sequences of excited guttural grunts. (Sample dialogue included “He’s no’ really deid!” as a still breathing Faramir is laid on a funeral pyre and “He’s gonnae steal that thingmae!” when Pippin is already stooped over the thingmae in question. And yet people will still find Pippin’s accent charming, even though it is the orcs who talk most like real Scots do.)

The problem with the three movies is that the actors have presented the characters like the mere facades that they are, carrying them on spears in front of them like shields they are afraid to dirty their hands with. So far behind the masks are the faces that nothing glimmers through the empty eye-sockets, and the actors are less human than their computer-generated opponents. Their perfunctory interchangability is too much like our own Earth to make Middle-Earth a place worth believing in.

And yet it would not have taken much to make us believe; a word, an intonation, a way of smiling we have never seen before. These are all little things as little found in these lands of hobbits as in our lands of men. Happy the person who finds them everywhere they look, but happier still the person who finds them seldom, perhaps even but once, for it is easier and sweeter by far to catch a snowflake on one’s tongue than a blizzard.