Book to Movie: Lord of the Rings The Return of the King – What’s the Difference?

Previously in What’s the Difference? the Cinefix team have covered The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. So it is time to wrap up their coverage of Lord of the Rings with The Return of the King… and enough partings to make you think you are a hairdresser.

A lot of epic stuff happens in the last third of the Lord of the Rings. A lot of tearful goodbyes happen as well. Honestly, when you are reading the paper version you reach the first ending and can’t figure out why there are so many pages left. By the third ending you start wondering if it will ever end.

As I’ve previously discussed for the other instalments, I think the movie is a fantastic adaptation. The minor changes, like Sam not putting on the ring, don’t make much difference – but that one didn’t make much sense either. The major differences are actually quite welcome. Except one.

First I’d like to comment on Sam not wearing the ring. I actually thought that whilst being a minor point, it was also very important to his character and the later act of carrying Frodo. Sam experienced just for a short moment the burden Frodo bore. It helped him redouble his efforts. And also made for a more believable way for Sam to infiltrate the Orc camp.

The major difference that I thought should have been in the film was the reclaiming of The Shire from Saruman. Obviously we’d already had too many endings and needed another one like an extra hole in our heads. But the heroes returned from war to a village ignorant/indifferent to the war and the sacrifice – can anyone say Vietnam vet myths? That isn’t really a happy ending. By having the heroes come home and expel the evil from their village as well, it would have shown their growth as warriors, but also tied their sacrifice to the people they had defended…. Plus, it would have been another action scene in a boring section of the film.

Now that Cinefix have finished with Lord of the Rings it is hard to know what they will cover next. Fingers crossed that is a 6 video coverage of the 3 movie adaptation of the 1 book story The Hobbit.

Edit: Since posting this article I’ve come across a video that explains why the ending of The Return of the King feels so long. The video below argues that it isn’t too long, but rather there is a gap between when the plot finishes and where the story does.

Of course, there is a 30 minute gap between the plot finishing and the story ending. The tension has been resolved so the film feels to drag on, entering Ending Fatigue. 30 minutes out of 558 is 10.7% of your run time devoted to that gap. That’s a lot of time. If they had managed to use less screen time for the story ending/s then we wouldn’t have noticed. Or if people were first watching the films in a marathon, such that 30 minutes out of +9 hours feels shorter, then they’d notice less.