The Return Of The King was the last time a blockbuster could be weird, personal, and Best Picture

https://film.avclub.com/the-return-of-the-king-was-the-last-time-a-blockbuster-1846074880

“Fantasy is the one genre that’s never been done especially well,” Peter Jackson told The Los Angeles Times. “After 100 years of cinema, there’s not a lot of new ground for storytelling. We can all point to great musicals or horror films, but no one’s ever really nailed fantasy. So that’s the challenge. I want to see if I can pull it off.”

When the director of Bad Taste, Meet The Feebles, and Dead Alive made these claims, it was 1998, and the Times was reporting that he and New Line Cinema had a wildly ambitious plan to make a three-movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings novels, filming all three parts of the trilogy simultaneously over the course of a year. Jackson’s basic thesis is debatable, and it ignores things like The Wizard Of Oz, The Princess Bride, and The NeverEnding Story, as well as virtually everything that Hayao Miyazaki ever made. But the point stands. He was trying to do something that nobody had ever done before: a stirring and straight-faced fantasy adventure, told on a Lawrence Of Arabia scale. And Jackson pulled it off.

Imagine the confidence. Peter Jackson was 36 years old in 1998. He’d only made one Hollywood movie: The Frighteners, a fascinating but messy genre-salad vision that came out a couple of weeks after Independence Day and got obliterated at the box office. Before that, in New Zealand, Jackson had made three splattery, slapsticky low-budget films and one dark, acclaimed drama. Jackson had cast Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures, her first film, which might’ve given him some juice in the year after Titanic, but he’d never proven himself as a sure-bet filmmaker—one worth hundreds of millions of a studio’s money. And yet New Line still staked its entire existence on Jackson’s take on the Tolkien epic that had proven resistant to adaptation for decades. Smart move.

Two completed attempts to put Lord Of The Rings on the screen preceded Jackson’s, but both were animated: a Ralph Bakshi film that covered The Fellowship Of The Ring and some of The Two Towers in 1978, and a TV version of The Return Of The King—which was not a sequel to Bakshi’s film, but rather a follow-up to Rankin-Bass’ take on The Hobbit—two years later. Neither was considered a success, though Bakshi’s Lord Of The Rings was what introduced Jackson to the story. Tolkien had sold the rights in the late ’60s, and other directors had considered live-action versions. But before the advent of digital effects, the whole otherworldly spectacle of Middle Earth was too much for anyone to take on. “This is really the first time you could visualize Tolkien’s imagination on film,” Jackson said in 1998. “The technology has really existed only in the past two or three years.”

Jackson knew about technology. For his early horror films, he’d made his gore the old-fashioned way, with supermarket products. But Jackson had started working with the New Zealand special-effects company Weta Workshop, and he’d seen what the company could do. (The Frighteners includes a nasty CGI ghoul that looks a whole lot like the Ringwraiths in his Tolkien films.) In convincing New Line to make The Lord Of The Rings, Jackson’s demo reel was just as important as his script. The studio had picked up the project after Miramax balked at the budget for a proposed two-part adaptation; New Line exceeded Jackson’s expectations by suggesting he do it in three films. (Miramax founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein still got executive producer credits, and it always sucks to see their names fade up, especially when you’re not expecting them.)

It’s still fun to think about how hard The Fellowship Of The Ring hit when it came out around Christmas of 2001. I’d never been a Tolkien guy. Once, at the urging of a girl I’d been seeing, I made it part of the way through the first book, but it lost me once Tom Bombadil showed up. I just was not on that wavelength. But Jackson’s movie immersed me immediately. I couldn’t believe that I was watching something that vast and majestic and cool. Driving home from the theater, I remember rhapsodizing about what I’d just seen, wishing it had existed when I’d been a kid. I bought in. Jackson just crumbled your resistance.

Watching the Lord Of The Rings series now, it’s remarkable how sincere it is. Since he shot all three movies at once, Jackson didn’t have to focus-group the later installments, building them around what the studio might’ve decided that audiences responded to. Instead, he plays everything straight, letting every moment breathe, giving the feeling of awe a chance to sink in. There’s no Han Solo figure in The Lord Of The Rings, nobody responding to all the pomp with a cocked eyebrow. Instead, the funniest character in the whole trilogy is Gimli, the gung-ho dwarf warrior who pops because he’s extremely psyched about all the cool shit he gets to do.