While this triangular relationship is brilliantly handled, the political relationship between Aragorn, Denethor and Farmair -- and the romantic relationship between Aragorn, Eowyn and Arwen -- is botched somewhat spectacularly, and this is at the heart of Return of the King's failure to move its audience. In the latter case it resorts to some of the worst cliches of Hollywood romance, with no attempt to re-create the chivalric ethos in which Tolkien's characters exist. In the former, the exposition required to make any sense of the relationship of Aragorn to Gondor and its family of high stewards would have probably required a whole separate instalment.
The huge scale of Return of the King tends to overwhelm individual characters, and despite the best efforts of John Nobel as Denethor and David Wenham as Faramir to inject some human drama into the Gondor sequences, this is no competition for the amazing costumes and computer graphics of the massed army standing at the gate.
This is not to say that Jackson does not plug away at the drama. He does, but with the exception of Aragorn's exhortation before the Black Gate -- when the ranks of Gondor and Rohan face off against insuperable odds and there is a speech worthy of Kenneth Branagh's St. Crispin's Day oration in Henry V -- it often seems rather stilted.
This is more than a pity, as Jackson -- having decided that the back story of Gordor is simply not possible to bring to the screen -- tries to see everything else in simplified psychological terms. What we end up with are cardboard cutouts. What is highlighted is simply the race against time, with the armies simply holding out to buy time for Frodo as he battles his way to Mount Doom. Here again we have Hollywoodization at work, with these simple structures taking the place of real story-telling.
It is also rather unsettling to see the repetition of certain screen effects, not least the "army of the dead," who sweep over the soldiers of Sauron in almost exactly the same way as the "army of Anubis" in The Mummy Returns, and their king is a ghostly graphic who seems to have escaped from Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. No matter how well executed, these effects have little longevity and their reuse in LOTR diminishes it -- but this is probably because the series has given us unrealistic expectations of what it can achieve.
All the spectacle fails to make up for this glossing over of detail, which ultimately undermines it as a serious representation of the original work. The DVDs may go some way to remedying this, as they have considerable added footage, but that would be a subject for a separate review.
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