The final instalment of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings opened in America on my birthday. I have long been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkein's fantasy about Hobbits and Sauron and the 'ring of power'.
I even remember telling a Cambridge don during my interview at Cambridge that Tolkein was one of the foremost literary geniuses of our age. He was a bit bemused by this ('fanciful' I seem to remember was his judgement of Tolkein's work) but I stand by my assessment. As a story, The Lord of the Rings is without parallel in modern literature, at least in the way it tackles the great themes of good and evil, suffering, heroism and adventure. Nothing in The Lord of the Rings is real; much of it is true.
I confess, then, to mild disappointment with Jackson's final foray in The Return of the King (or as our local cinema listed it Lord of the Rings 3). The Lord of the Rings captivated many Americans. In some places movie theatres showed back-to-back viewings of all three instalments, culminating in the just past midnight first playing of The Return of the King. That takes some stamina, especially as they were running the extra length uncut versions, each coming in at a heavyweight four plus hours. With an hour between shows, that amounts to 14 hours in a movie theatre. Tickets to even this entertainment marathon were hard to come by.
