The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Review

Peter Jackson had ten hours of accumulated debt to pay and he pays nearly all of it. Pelennor Fields remains the high-water mark of the practical-and-digital hybrid era: real horses, real Rohirrim, Weta's crowd simulation filling in behind them, and Andrew Lesnie shooting the charge at dawn so the light does half the emotional work. Howard Shore lets themes withheld for two films finally bloom, and the Rohan horn call is the best use of a leitmotif in modern blockbuster scoring.

Sean Astin does the trilogy's quietest heavy lifting, and Sam carrying Frodo up Mount Doom works because Astin has been playing patient exhaustion for three films. Andy Serkis and the Gollum pipeline permanently changed what performance capture could carry. The cost is structural: the Denethor material is broad, Aragorn's kingship arrives more by proclamation than by drama, and the film ends four or five times because the book does. Those seams are visible and forgivable. Nothing else in fantasy has matched this combination of scale, sincerity and craft.