A very middling earth

Return Of The King - directed by Peter Jackson

Please bear with me. There is a theory in cosmology called the Strong Anthropic Argument that runs like this: the Earth is on the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way, and the Milky Way, in turn, is a galaxy on the outer edge of an ever-expanding universe. It follows that only on this planet has sufficient time elapsed since the Big Bang for intelligent life to evolve; and therefore we can conclude that God must be the Great Director who has staged the whole multi-trillion star production.

Something like this theory underpins all the brouhaha surrounding Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy - but no one troubles to make it explicit. This is the Strong Filmic Argument: for Jackson's adaptations of JRR Tolkien's books to be made with the right degree of verisimilitude, there had to evolve special-effects technology of the kind there now is, and it therefore follows that Jackson's films are amazingly good and the director is a genius. The trouble with this argument is that it depends on a failure of imagination. In the case of the Earth, it is quite possible that there is another planet supporting intelligent life on the far side of the universe, while in the case of Lord of the Rings, it's equally conceivable that there could be a much better trilogy of adaptations.

In fact, there haven't been any other films of Tolkien's masterwork - unless you count a bizarre 1978 feature-length cartoon using manipulated stills of actors - so Jackson has the cosmos to himself.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think The Return of the King, any more than its prequels, is a bad film. But you have to ask yourself if it is truly great when, less than an hour in, you begin wondering if the Lady Arwen's slight over-bite is really comme il faut for an elf. And I went on wondering it for the next two-and-a-half hours, as well; through several massive battles featuring hundreds of thousands of computer-generated orcs, trolls, ghosts and oliphants.

Indeed, my anxiety about Liv Tyler's orthodontistry was only interrupted by my concern for the latter creatures, giant multi-tusked mammoths who get espaliered by the arrows of the humans. Come the credits, I was half-hoping for one that read "No oliphants were harmed during the making of this movie".

No, I don't think it is a bad film and, unlike a lot of other sniffy adults, I'm not a hater of all things Tolkien. I like any work that generates a wholly consistent and believable alternative world, and that is what this reclusive Oxford don managed to do brilliantly. In the book he provided mock-anthropological "back stories" to explain the existence and character of the other hominid species - hobbits, elfs and orcs - that inhabit Middle-earth. It is to Jackson's credit that he manages, for the most part, to give the films a look which both conveys and complements that complexity.

It is said that the original "two towers" were an ugly water tower and a factory chimney, which stood near Tolkien's childhood home in suburban Birmingham. On that basis the evil land of Mordor becomes the Black Country and the Shire is in the Cotswolds.

Jackson certainly seems to think it is, because in depicting Frodo and Sam's bosky homeland he veers into twee, just as when fashioning the Elfish redoubt of Rivendel he cannot but help evoke all those ghastly gifte shoppes which flog New Age trinkets. Minas Tirith, the capital of Gondor, is by contrast, a fusion of a hilltop Provençal town and Windsor Castle, but writ large - very, very large.

If I dwell on the look of Return of the King, it is because the narrative is slim. Apart from the subplot concerning the succession to the throne of Gondor, and the love affair between its heir, Aragorn, and the aforementioned goofy Arwen, this Sega-saga is pure heroics: battles, journeys and the final destruction of that pesky bauble. And while the performances are creditable, they aren't sufficiently dynamic to make the computer-generated thespians look any less believable than the flesh-and-blood ones. If we accept Smeagol's artificial presence - and we do - then it makes it that much easier to accept Elijah Wood's wooden-toy performance, or Ian McKellen's wizard histrionics.

At one or two moments, when men (and a single woman, Eowyn the only feminist in Middle-earth, doomed to a sexless life by her mannish ways) were charging into battle, I felt a stirring that might have been an emotion, but not so strongly that it disrupted my appetite for more special effects, the very Pringles of contemporary cinema. That Peter Jackson has been computer-enabled to make this film may be seen, in retrospect, as no more of a marvel than that cheap, non-unionised labour made it possible for Cecil B DeMille to build humungous sets for his Cleopatra and then fill them with wet-back Egyptians.

Lastly, can I suggest something to cinemas which will be screening this film over the next few weeks to children who have still-smaller bladders than me. It's called an interval and, far from being innovative, used to be standard in a long feature. This is a long feature, a very, very long feature, a feature so long that its beginning lies back in ancient times when ...