The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Peter Jackson · three films scored as one work · 2001, 2002 and 2003 · 558 minutes in their theatrical cuts · from the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien
Mode
Epic of war and quest on the scale of the historical epic, given to high fantasy; adventure, elegy and comedy of the Shire in one work
Mythos
The quest as renunciation; the ring of power; the guide’s descent, death and return; the hidden king come back to his city; the small one who carries what the mighty cannot
Phase
From a birthday party in the Shire to a departure from the Grey Havens; one line in the first film, three in the second, two in the third, converging on the Pelennor, the Black Gate and Mount Doom
Presentation
Three feature films for New Line Cinema with WingNut Films, shot in one principal photography in New Zealand; theatrical cuts of 178, 179 and 201 minutes
Register
From the comedy of the Shire to the Sammath Naur; landscape as continent, miniature as city, a sustained orchestral score with a theme for each people
Scale
A company of nine, two kingdoms at war, and one burden
Governing Proposition
A hobbit carries a ring of power across a continent to destroy it while two kingdoms go to war to buy him time, and at the mountain he cannot let it go. The wager of the films is that three films shot as one can make an audience carry a burden across years as the characters carry it across a continent, that the small errand and the great war are one action, and that power held as possession consumes the one who holds it, so that the burden is carried to its end only by help.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The first film opens before its story, on the history of the Ring: the forging of the rings of power, a war against their maker, a king’s son who takes the Ring and will not destroy it, and its loss in a river, from which it passes at last to a hobbit. Then the Shire: green hills, round doors, a birthday party for Bilbo Baggins, fireworks, comedy. The history behind the story is a prologue and no more, and what the films set at stake is the small, comic, settled life of the Shire, which the Ring’s history has already reached.
Peter Jackson directed the three films for New Line Cinema with WingNut Films, from screenplays by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Jackson, with Stephen Sinclair on The Two Towers, after J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel of 1954 to 1955. They were shot together in New Zealand, in one principal photography from late 1999 through 2000, with further shooting each year after. Andrew Lesnie photographed them; John Gilbert, Michael Horton and Jamie Selkirk edited the three in turn; Howard Shore wrote the music. Grant Major led the design, with Alan Lee and John Howe as conceptual artists, and Weta Workshop and Weta Digital made the creatures, miniatures and digital effects. Gollum is performed by Andy Serkis.
The Fellowship of the Ring was released on 19 December 2001, The Two Towers on 18 December 2002 and The Return of the King on 17 December 2003: 178, 179 and 201 minutes in their theatrical cuts, 558 minutes in all. The desk scores the three as one work, in those cuts. Each closes on a halt rather than an end, and each is weighed for what it bears in the whole. Tolkien’s novel, entered on the literature desk at 8.9, is the source; the films are judged on what they realize on the screen.
Movement II
The first film runs as a single line. Gandalf learns what Bilbo’s ring is, and Frodo carries it out of the Shire with Sam beside him; riders in black hunt them to Weathertop and the ford, and those sequences are lean. At Rivendell the Council forms a company of nine to take the Ring to the one fire that can unmake it. There Bilbo, shown the Ring again, lunges at it, and for a moment the kindly old hobbit’s face is something else. The temptation the trilogy turns on is set in one cut.
Under the mountain, in the mines of Moria, the company meets the Balrog. On the bridge of Khazad-dûm Gandalf turns and holds it with “You shall not pass”, and as it drags him down he has a last order for the others: “Fly, you fools.” The guide is lost in the underworld. In Lothlórien Galadriel is offered the Ring and refuses it, and on the river the company passes beneath the Argonath, the great carved kings, as they rise over the water.
At Amon Hen Boromir tries to take the Ring from Frodo, and then dies defending the two youngest hobbits. Frodo goes on alone, and Sam will not let him. The company is broken into three. Of the three films this is the best made and has the most necessary shape, one line drawn taut from the Shire to the river, and it rises highest for its length. It stops, as each film will, on the road.
Movement III
The second film runs three lines, intercut. Frodo and Sam go on toward Mordor with Gollum as their guide. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli cross into Rohan and converge on the fortress of Helm’s Deep. Merry and Pippin escape into the forest of the Ents and converge on Isengard. The editing holds the three in tension for three hours, and the cutting between them is the film’s argument: the war is the visible event, and the errand it shelters is the one that counts.
Gollum is the centre. Serkis’s performance and the digital image together make a creature argue with himself, Sméagol and Gollum by turns, and the addict’s divided will becomes visible, at a scale the screen had not given it before. Frodo looks at him and sees what the Ring will make of its bearer. Faramir’s detour to Osgiliath is plotting, though it gives Sam a speech there, and in it the moral world is said aloud rather than found.
In Rohan Gandalf returns, and at dawn over Helm’s Deep he rides down the slope with the Rohirrim pouring behind him. The Ents march, and the dam breaks over Isengard. The film’s costs are here too: Aragorn’s fall from a cliff and the Arwen dream after it serve a love story the trilogy does not need, and Legolas surfs a shield down a stair at Helm’s Deep, in a physics that belongs to another genre.
Movement IV
The third film opens by turning back: two hobbits fishing, a ring found in a river, and Sméagol killing his friend Déagol for it. Then two lines run on. Gondor and Rohan go to war; Frodo, Sam and Gollum climb toward the mountain. The beacons are lit from peak to peak across the White Mountains, cut to Shore’s theme, a call for help carried by fire, and the trilogy’s sublime becomes pure editing and music.
On the Pelennor Fields the city of Minas Tirith is besieged while its steward, Denethor, goes mad. Théoden leads the Rohirrim down onto the field with the cry of “Death!”, and the charge is height by any standard. Éowyn, before the Witch-king, says “I am no man”. Then the Army of the Dead pours over the field, a green tide that wins the battle at a stroke, and victory comes cheaper than the films’ law has made it anywhere else.
At the Black Gate Aragorn leads what is left of the west against Mordor, and he goes forward with “For Frodo”. The film cuts between the gate and the slope, where Frodo and Sam are climbing. It is the work’s form at its strongest: the small errand and the great war are one action, decided at the mountain and only defended at the gate.
Movement V
On the slopes of Mount Doom Frodo can go no further, and Sam lifts him: “I can carry you.” The burden cannot be carried by the one who bears it, only carried to its end, by help. At the Sammath Naur, over the fire, Frodo claims the Ring and does not give it up. The quest fails at its goal. Gollum takes the Ring from him and falls with it into the fire, and the quest is saved by the creature the films have made their own.
The codas follow: the eagles, Minas Tirith, the coronation, the Shire, the Grey Havens. Each pays a debt, and each is paced as if it were the last. The return home is a quiet scene at an inn, with no Scouring of the Shire, and the discovery that home too was damaged is lost. What the films keep is the wound that does not close: Frodo cannot stay in the Shire he saved, and he leaves from the Grey Havens.
The Return of the King won eleven Academy Awards, Best Picture among them, the first such recognition for fantasy. What followed is a matter of record: the planned multi-film franchise as the studio model, performance capture in Avatar and the Planet of the Apes films, a run of fantasy series on film and television, a film industry in New Zealand. The force was in industry and making more than in film’s ways of meaning. Nearly a quarter century on, the films are watched whole, all three in a day, and what return keeps finding is Gollum, and Frodo’s failure.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is hard on nine hours, and the theatrical cuts pass it better than their length suggests. Each film is driven by one physical errand: get the Ring out of the Shire; hold the company’s halves together while the war opens; reach the mountain while the city stands. Most scenes advance it, and the scale is compelled by the war. What could go is visible, and it holds the axis lowest of the twelve. In The Two Towers Aragorn’s fall from the cliff and the Arwen dream after it serve a love story the trilogy does not need, and Faramir’s detour to Osgiliath is plotting. In The Return of the King the Army of the Dead is a mechanism, and the codas are paced as if each were the last.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: power held as possession consumes the holder, and the burden cannot be put down by the one who carries it, only carried to its end, by help. The films disclose it through image and performance, and that counts in full. Bilbo lunges at the Ring in Rivendell. Frodo’s face, under Elijah Wood’s stillness, takes its weight across three films. Andy Serkis’s Gollum argues with himself, the addict’s divided will made visible at a scale the screen had not given it. Held a tenth below the gate by a tilt toward heroic resolution: the war is clean, the enemy faceless, and the moral world set out in speeches more than discovered. The Fellowship of the Ring sets the temptation, The Two Towers carries the deepest disclosure, in Gollum, and The Return of the King the cost.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is the trilogy’s commonest event, and height and frequency are both high. The Balrog on the bridge of Khazad-dûm; the Argonath rising over the river; Gandalf’s return at dawn over Helm’s Deep, the Rohirrim pouring down the slope behind him; the Ents’ march and the breaking of the dam; the beacons lit from peak to peak across the White Mountains; Théoden’s charge on the Pelennor; Mount Doom. Howard Shore’s score is the chief instrument in all three films. The cost is frequency’s own: the films reach for height so often, under such sustained music, that some of it is insistence, in the slow-motion farewells and the last looks of the codas, and grandeur sometimes stands in for terror. The Fellowship of the Ring rises highest for its length; The Return of the King most often.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The archetypal structure bears the load. The quest is a renunciation, not a winning; the guide goes down into the underworld, dies and returns; the hidden king comes back to his city; the small one carries what the mighty cannot. These are built into the plot, and the films gave them the images that became their standard form on screen: the Ring on Frodo’s palm, the Eye on the tower, the white tree. Gollum is the films’ own mythic figure, and he holds. The films are credited with the myth they realize, and the realization is theirs. Held near the bar because the construction is Tolkien’s, carried faithfully, and because the films thin it twice: the homecoming is a quiet scene at an inn, with no Scouring of the Shire, and the Paths of the Dead are reduced to a device.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The turn and the stake are scored together, and here they are unequal. The stake was very large: three films shot at once for one studio before the first was seen, in New Zealand, by a director known for splatter comedy and one intimate drama, Heavenly Creatures, on a scale that put the studio at risk if the first failed. The turn in the genre is real. Fantasy on film before it, Excalibur, Willow, the animated version of 1978, had been marginal, juvenile or camp; this gave high fantasy the gravity of the historical epic. What holds the axis below the gate is form. The grammar is that of Lean’s and Kurosawa’s battles and the Hollywood epic, cut to a modern pace. The swerve lies in genre standing and in production, not in what a film could be.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. Three films, each closing on a halt rather than an end, make the audience carry the burden across years as the characters carry it across a continent. The intercutting of the second and third films is the instrument of one real knowledge: the small errand and the great war are one action, decided at the mountain and only defended at the gate. The cross-cutting at the end, Frodo and Sam on the slope against Aragorn’s “For Frodo” at the Black Gate, is form doing that work. Elsewhere the form is a container: the battles could run longer or shorter without changing what the films know, and the codas are sequenced, not shaped. The Fellowship of the Ring has the most necessary shape; The Return of the King the strongest convergence and the weakest close.
Score: 8.0 / 10
A quarter century of return is evidence, and it is rich in texture: the design of each culture down to its script and armour, Shore’s system of themes, Serkis’s performance, and the planting of Gollum’s turn and of Frodo’s failure, which yield more each time they are seen. The returning audience is large and constant, and marathon viewing of all three films has become an annual custom. Gollum, and Frodo’s arc into failure, are where return still finds new meaning. What holds the axis is the gap between formal and semantic depth: the moral design is declared, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli do not change under return, and serious re-examination has gone more to the adaptation and the making than to new readings of what the films know.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2000s, and the films reorganised what popular cinema could undertake. They made high fantasy a genre of prestige, proved that a story in several parts could be planned and shot as one work, made digital crowds an ordinary instrument, and made performance capture a form of acting, with Serkis’s Gollum the case that changed the argument. The force lies in industry and technique more than in film’s ways of meaning, which holds it short of the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: eleven Academy Awards for The Return of the King, Best Picture among them, the first such recognition for fantasy; the planned multi-film franchise as the studio model of the decades after; performance capture in Avatar (2009) and the Planet of the Apes films (2011 to 2017); the fantasy series that followed; a film industry in New Zealand.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The theatrical cuts survive whole and remain in circulation. The extended editions stand beside them without replacing them, and count as additions, not losses, since the theatrical release has not been withdrawn. Presence over twenty-three to twenty-five years is of the widest kind: television and home video in every format, theatrical re-releases, marathon screenings, a tourist economy, lines held in common memory. The fabric is mixed. The miniatures and prosthetics age well; parts of the digital work, Legolas on the oliphaunt, the Army of the Dead and some composites, fix the surface to 2001 to 2003. About twenty-four years of survival set the figure at the bar; the widest presence earns a tenth, and the surface fixed to its years takes it back.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making bears weight in several departments. Andrew Lesnie photographs New Zealand as a continent. The scale of hobbits beside men, made by forced perspective, doubles and digital work, is so complete it vanishes. The miniatures of Minas Tirith, Barad-dûr and Helm’s Deep hold; the design under Alan Lee and John Howe gives each people one material language; Shore’s score is the spine. Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, Serkis’s Gollum and Sean Astin’s Sam, who carries the last hour, are the performances it rests on, and the editing of the two intercut films holds three lines in tension for six hours. The costs: some effects show their years, Legolas fights as stunt rather than combat, Gimli’s comedy lowers the register, some dialogue is stiff, and the codas lack the economy of the rest. The Fellowship of the Ring is the best made of the three, The Return of the King the most uneven.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Bilbo’s party in the Shire and the Sammath Naur. One law covers them, because the design and the score bind Hobbiton and Mordor into one world, and the hobbits’ small comedy is the thing at stake in the dark. The range is very wide, and the world’s physics, material and moral, holds across almost all of it: no film changes the rules of the Ring, of the Eye or of the cost of power. The law breaks in particular places. Legolas’s shield-surfing at Helm’s Deep and his fight on the oliphaunt belong to another genre’s physics; the jokes of dwarf-tossing play against the gravity around them; and the Army of the Dead, a green tide that wins the Pelennor at a stroke, makes victory cheaper than the films’ law makes it anywhere else.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Many orders of reality are held in one structure, and most are integrated, not listed. Consciousness: the Ring’s hold on Frodo, Boromir, Bilbo and Gollum, each a degree of one possession. Friendship and service: Sam’s, across the line of gardener and master, the films’ most achieved bond. The state: two kingdoms, a steward’s madness and a king’s return. War: the siege, the charge, and the cost to the young, Éowyn, Merry, and Faramir sent back to Osgiliath. The natural order: Isengard’s furnaces against the Ents, and the land as a character. Death and the sacred: Gandalf’s fall and return, the Grey Havens. Held from the top by what the films compress from their source: history, kept to a prologue; labour beyond Isengard’s; and the corruption of home, cut with the Scouring.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed at 8.6. A work that changed what popular cinema could undertake, in the planned work in several parts, digital crowds and performance capture as acting; a myth of renunciation built into the plot and given its standard images on screen; and many orders, from the Ring’s hold on a mind to two kingdoms at war, held in one structure.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9: each film is driven by one errand, but the cliff fall and the Arwen dream, Faramir’s detour, the Army of the Dead, the comic business and the pacing of the codas could go without loss. Above it, The Living Form at 8.0, where intercutting is the instrument of knowledge and the battles and codas are containers, and The Inner Law at 8.1, broken in places by another genre’s physics.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short and The Swerve at 8.2 three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 100.2, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the three films in their theatrical cuts, The Fellowship of the Ring (19 December 2001, 178 minutes), The Two Towers (18 December 2002, 179 minutes) and The Return of the King (17 December 2003, 201 minutes), scored as one work: directed by Peter Jackson for New Line Cinema with WingNut Films, written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, with Stephen Sinclair on The Two Towers, photographed by Andrew Lesnie, edited by John Gilbert, Michael Horton and Jamie Selkirk, with music by Howard Shore. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the theatrical cuts. The extended editions are weighed only on The Imperishable, as versions that stand beside the theatrical release; scenes found only in them, among them Saruman’s end at Orthanc, the Mouth of Sauron, Faramir’s memory of Boromir and the gift-giving in Lothlórien, are not counted anywhere else. Tolkien’s novel (1954 to 1955) is the source and is entered on the literature desk; it is not part of this work. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the running times of the extended editions, the number of scenes and each line’s share of them, the length of the codas, the number of themes in the score, the software made for the battles, a later regrading of the image for new releases, and production figures beyond the credits.