BrilliantEditor and I went to see Return of the King tonight. There was a lot of Orc blood in it. And there were a fair number of severed heads in many species.
I must confess that I often feel more sadness when they kill animals than when they kill people. The horses and elephants have nothing to do with it, do they? They don't have an opinion. They don't care about the politics. They just don't want people to burn the fields of crops. They also don't want to wear armor, as far as I can tell. Poor darlings.
But as for the title, the return and return etcetera of the king: There were so many endings for the movie. More than would even be warranted by the many story lines needing to come together.
I suppose the plot is like the book, but in a book you can look ahead and see that there are ten more pages. In a movie there's no way to know what's coming next. It just keeps coming.
So here's sort of how it goes, in case you're looking for an ending to _your_ movie.
The bad things go away which makes everyone pretty close to being safe.
The king steps into his rightful leadership role.
All characters prove their worth and show how their presence was necessary.
The king gets his crown and the girl and the little heroes are recognized.
The little heroes go home and things are happy in the Shire.
The largest of the little heroes is liberated from his shackles of memory and limitation.
Everyone goes their separate ways.
The second largest of the little heroes is shown with his family.
In between each ending there's a black screen. I heard people shuffling as if preparing to leave. And then, "HELLO!" another ending appeared.
But at the real ending of the movie, there's a white screen. Which always makes me think, oh, okay, here we are. This is the big deal.
In this case, if the big deal is that the movie is over, then my interpretation of black and white is correct.
But the world isn't ever black and white, now, is it?
Posted by dotty at December 19, 2003 10:27 PM