AMG Review of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - The Complete Recordings

William Ruhlmann
All Music Guide

If J.R.R. Tolkien's -The Lord of the Rings trilogy was considered unfilmable from its publication in 1954-1955 to the early years of the 21th century (not counting a 1978 animated version that only covered about half of it), that was both because the required special effects didn't seem technically possible and because it was hard to see how the sprawling story could be condensed into the confines of a two-hour movie. The special effects problem was overcome eventually, but it took director Peter Jackson to make a virtue out of the structural issue. Why make it into one small film? Why not three big ones that could be promoted as a major cinematic franchise à la #Star Wars? Jackson's insight didn't stop there, however. In the era of the DVD, he took his already lengthy treatments of #The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), #The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), and #The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) and made them even longer as videos after their theatrical runs were over. Similarly, the soundtrack albums featuring the scores composed by Howard Shore have been superseded by multi-disc "complete" versions, of which this is the third. In theaters, #The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ran three hours and ten minutes; Jackson added another hour for the DVD version. Spread across four CDs, Shore here turns in a version of his score running just short of three hours and 50 minutes. As with the books and the films, the sheer length is perhaps the most impressive thing, impressive enough to garner two Oscars, one for the score and the other for the song "Into the West" (which is embedded in a track called "Days of the Ring" on the fourth disc). Employing the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Shore creates an old-fashioned big-budget movie score, not unlike the sort of thing that used to accompany biblical epics around the time the books were first published. The cues support moments of cinematic spectacle and close intimacy in ways that audiences have been trained to understand. Musically, it all seems to come to a climax by the end of the third disc, with the fourth filled by low-key pastoral themes as if to accompany a calm coda to the film (maybe they play under all those endless credits). It's hard to believe that this is really the end of the epic saga, but at least it comes to a thoroughly exhausted conclusion.