We’ve now reached the 20th anniversary of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the final part of director Peter Jackson’s trilogy-length adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic. Two years ago, to mark the 20th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring, I revisited the trilogy to assess what it did well, what it got wrong, and why it endures. The look of the films, their score, and (for the most part) their casting remain impeccable and immersive. Some of the trilogy’s deviations from the source material are understandable, given the medium of film; others are less forgivable (I outlined some of them here).
However imperfect the film trilogy is, however, it is faithful enough to the spirit of Tolkien’s work to inspire people to seek that work out. As I wrote, “whatever complaints one may have about it, the deserved and enduring popularity of his original trilogy will continue to point new generations of readers to Tolkien’s work,” which is “a virtue in itself.”
I am an example of this. Though only eight years old when the first Lord of the Rings film came out, I was allowed to see Return of the King in theaters, at age 10, after having had to wait to watch the first two on DVD. I hadn’t read the books when the first two had come out, but when a grade-school classmate bet me that I couldn’t read them all before the release of the third, I had a point to prove, so I did. My lifelong love of fantasy literature began in earnest with this process. And it somewhat spoiled me, frankly: When I looked to other works in the genre, I tended to find them wanting in comparison. It was enough to inspire me to try to tackle The Silmarillion as an 11-year-old (I got through about 30 pages of it before I lost track of all the elves and wouldn’t read it all until much later) and to attempt to learn Elvish (I had about gotten the alphabet before giving up).
Anyway, you can read my assessment of the trilogy at 20 here. And you can buy The Lord of the Rings just about anywhere — which you should, if you haven’t already.