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Throughout the movie, Jackson portrays evil as ugly and monstrous, never as subtle and alluring. Tolkien's novel demonstrates, by contrast, that our virtues tempt us even more than our vices. This is the subtle attraction of evil, not the obvious blandishments of ordinary sins. Gandalf's pity, Galadriel's beauty, Boromir's bravery, Saruman's desire for order—these are the good things which, if linked with absolute coercive power, become utterly evil, as in Saruman's case. Yet here we neither see nor hear anything of Saruman, the once-exalted wizard who has utterly ruined himself by seeking alliance with Sauron.

Neither are we shown the terrible social and political price that evil exacts. In the absence of the Company during their year-long Quest, Tolkien reveals that the Shire has been invaded and inveigled by Saruman and his henchmen. They have turned it into a grim industrialized and bureaucratized state devoid of all joy and delight. "This is worse than Mordor!" Sam Gamgee confesses in an exceedingly dark declaration. Refusing such moral and spiritual realism, Jackson has the eight remaining Walkers return to a Shire just as pristine and idyllic as they had left it.

Jackson's The Return of the King does manage to convey the majesty and solemnity of Aragorn's crowning as the true King of Gondor, but then film immediately undercuts the dignity of the event by having Aragorn give his future queen, the elven-maiden Arwen, a prolonged Hollywood kiss. Yet the battle scenes are magnificent. The winged Nazgûl with their deafening shrieks are truly terrorizing, and the giant oliphaunts—with their deadly swaggering tusks and their huge wooden towers manned by dozens of archers—remain fearsome even in their fall. Jackson also succeeds in having Aragorn resuscitate the Sleeping Dead, who are then able to atone for their earlier betrayals by fighting valiantly against the forces of Sauron. Yet these digitally-realized triumphs are examples of what Aristotle called spectacle—an excitation of the visual senses that should enhance moral and religious insight, not obliterate it.

Yet Jackson is to be praised for the wrenching melancholy of the otherwise playful Pippin as he is made to sing a Shire song in strange and dreadful land. Jackson also catches the bitter-sweet quality of the novel's end, where Tolkien shows that true victories over evil are won not for the sake of the valiant but for the little people—the unheralded and the defenseless. So drastically have the hobbits been altered by their grueling Quest that Sam and Merry and Pippin will never be able to resume the care-free lives that they once lived. Jackson also captures the poignancy of Gandalf and Frodo's final parting for Valinor, the elven-realm where they will find peace and rest from their long labors.

The lesson to be learned from this seriously-flawed adaptation of The Return of the King is that the movies—like the Frank Peretti novels and the Left Behind books—often tempt us with their quick and obvious solutions to evils that require great subtlety to discern and even greater patience to remedy. The Lord of the Rings abjures such deadly allurements by its very length, some 1200 pages. The reading of it requires a disciplined act of devotion and discrimination. So do all of the other good things in life, although this movie, alas, does not.

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December (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47