That the special effects are still the best thing about The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in its Extended Edition is not what I had hoped to be writing after the Extended Edition of the film's immediate predecessor, The Two Towers, snatched a melancholy gem from the jaws of mediocrity. Alas, this is an incurable film until such time as Peter Jackson is moved to shorten its deadening coda; Jackson's own defense of the multi-tiered epilogue--essentially that, Hey, it coulda been worse (he shot additional postscripts excerpted ever-so-briefly in one of the documentaries on the new DVD)--is his pride talking, and indeed it must sting to be second-guessed at the tail-end of a relatively turbulence-free courtship of the masses. But the attenuated finale creates a paradox in that the film feels unfinished, not like The Last Tycoon but like a rough assembly--an impression compounded by The Return of the King's exasperating Extended Edition. (All four hours and eleven minutes of it.) For every narrative fissure sewn shut (how Aragorn came into possession of a pirate ship, for example), there's a fresh bulge at the seams. Between its prefab tension and late-film placement, a bit where Frodo and Sam must camouflage themselves as Orcs is an especial ordeal.

The most redeeming restoration is the first, Saruman's last stand, since Saruman (Christopher Lee) is casually and profoundly emasculated in the theatrical version through a consolidation of footage that proposes a Saruman too humbled by defeat to show his face or retrieve his palantir (crystal ball if you don't speak the lingo) from the moat surrounding his tower. Hammer fans will get a big kick out of Lee's death-by-impaling, while the trilogy itself no longer suffers from a discomfiting lopsidedness brought on by the offscreen resolution of a major subplot. Moreover, Saruman uses the palantir in his brief screentime to taunt the Fellowship with a premonition of doom, and in so doing throws the impossibility of their increasingly abstract mission into sharper relief. So why lift this passage in the first place? It interrupted the flow of the piece, Jackson alleges--and though I believe he believes that, I also think that being something of a ring-bearer himself, a slave to the task of bringing Middle-earth to life, drove the anarchic auteur to iconoclasm. Eliding Lee's demise whilst leaving in, among other pace retarders, the slow-motion curtain call that stops just shy of our heroic hobbits starting a pillow fight, is otherwise sheer hypocrisy. (Read Walter Chaw's review of the theatrical cut here.)

2.38:1 DVD capture: The Return of the King - Extended Edition

COMMENTARY LISTINGS

The Director & Writers - Peter Jackson (director, co-writer); Fran Walsh (co-writer); Philippa Boyens (co-writer) The Design Team - Grant Major (production designer); Ngila Dickson (costume designer); Richard Taylor (Weta Workshop creative supervisor); Alan Lee (concept designer/set decorator); John Howe (concept designer); Dan Hennah (supervising art director, set decorator); Chris Hennah (art department manager); Tania Rodger (Weta Workshop manager) The Production/Post-Production Team - Barrie M. Osborne (producer); Mark Ordesky (executive producer); Jamie Selkirk (editor); Annie Collins (assistant editor); Rick Porras (co-producer); Howard Shore (composer); Jim Rygiel (visual effects supervisor); Ethan Van der Ryn (supervising sound editor/co-designer); Mike Hopkins (supervising sound designer); Christian Rivers (art director); Alex Funke (visual effects DP); Joe Letteri (visual effects supervisor); Randy Cook (Weta animation designer/supervisor); Brian Van't Hul (visual effects DP) The Cast - Elijah Wood (Frodo); Ian McKellen (Gandalf); Liv Tyler (Arwen); Sean Astin (Sam); John Rhys-Davies (Gimli); Bernard Hill (Théoden); Christopher Lee (Saruman); Billy Boyd (Pippin); Dominic Monaghan (Merry); Orlando Bloom (Legolas); Hugo Weaving (Elrond); Miranda Otto (Éowyn); David Wenham (Faramir); Karl Urban (Eomer); John Noble (Denethor); Andy Serkis (Gollum); Lawrence Makoare (Witch King/Gothmog); Smeagol; Gollum

As expected, the Special Extended DVD Edition of The Return of the King spreads the film across two platters and devotes another two to the documentary "appendices," with the four discs packaged together in a cardboard slipcase/gatefold combo. Asterisks on the chapter menus denote the location of unfamiliar or reworked scenes, and a quartet of full-length yak-tracks supplements the main feature. (On that front, the set succumbs to the pitiful novelty of a character commentator (see sidebar).) Both the 2.38:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer and Dolby 5.1 EX audio represent a negligible upgrade from the stand-alone release, though you ain't heard nothing like the 6.1 DTS-ES option yet. Bigger and better than even the DTS mixes on the previous Extended Editions, it tilted a row of picture frames in another room of my house during the gauntlet preface to the beefed-up Paths of the Dead sequence.

Part Five: The War of the Ring

INTRODUCTION (2 mins.)
Peter Jackson says in his third and final intro to one of these Michael Pellerin-produced appendices that the next time we see him talking about The Lord of the Rings, he'll probably be an old man commemorating the trilogy's 25^th anniversary--"or maybe we can do something sooner than that," he teases, and indeed, the crumbs of unused material that pop up now and again on these discs suggest that if King Kong goes sour, there's enough milk left in this cash cow.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN - THE LEGACY OF MIDDLE-EARTH (30 mins.)
Do you still buy the party line that these films--or, at least, the books on which they're based--are not allegorical? Vital contributors to the conversation such as J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century biographer Tom Shippey and Tolkien's original publisher Rayner Unwin shed light on the various personal and political reverberations within The Return of the King, placing a credible amount of emphasis on "John Ronald"'s wartime friendships.

FROM BOOK TO SCRIPT

FORGING THE FINAL CHAPTER (25 mins.)
Looks like Philippa Boyens has been enjoying the fruits of her success--more power to her. Here, Boyens and Jackson ultimately defend their rejiggering of Tolkien's bilinear narrative too persuasively: in explaining how the revised chronology rendered the Mouth of Sauron sequence superfluous, they beg an unanswered question as to why it was nonetheless exhumed for the extended cut of the film. (My guess? Out of deference to Bruce Spence. (And in fairness, it is pretty badass.)) Other topics covered: the struggle to honour Tolkien's description of Gollum's death; a burst of ingenuity from Viggo Mortensen that saved reams of unusable footage; and Jack Nicholson's priceless reaction to the film's multiple endings.

ABANDONED CONCEPT: ARAGORN BATTLES SAURON (5 mins.)
Storyboards and animatics re-enact the titular climactic battle, abandoned mid-shoot because it wasn't gelling. Includes a rough pass at Frodo pushing Gollum into the fires of Mt. Doom.

DESIGNING AND BUILDING MIDDLE-EARTH

DESIGNING MIDDLE-EARTH (40 mins.)
Familiar faces Alan Lee and John Howe recapitulate the circumstances that inflated their six-week assignment into a six-year tour of duty. (Clutching his Oscar the night of last February's Academy Awards, a bemused Alan Lee tells the press that they can't breathe a sigh of relief because work on this very DVD continues apace.) Set-dresser David Kolff offers a pithy summary of Jackson's whiplash working methods in the aftermath of a spontaneous-combustion mishap ("Hopefully they don't like the idea and we have to burn down all our sets"), something I'm surprised didn't happen more often considering the sheer volume of polyurethane foam used by the production to simulate the textures of Middle-earth. Billy Boyd's idea of leaving up the backdrops that were hastily erected in a parking lot for insert shots on The Return of the King and charging admission is so surefire, you wonder why they didn't.

BIG-ATURES (20 mins.)
It must be said that this is as much a celebration of the miniatures crew as it is an inadvertent condemnation of the finishing process: models of irreproachable craftsmanship like the Grond battering ram look strangely inorganic on film, not only because we've become conditioned to assume that persuasive illusions are incubated in the mainframe, but also because they're invariably artificialized in the digital compositing/grading stages. Hardly anything in the Grey Havens tableaux is CGI, but you wouldn't know it from the overbuffed contents of the frame.

WETA WORKSHOP (47 mins.)
David Wenham says he felt like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in his suit of Gondorian armour. Once again we discover that every piece of everything was designed with a meticulous internal logic and a painstaking fidelity to Tolkien's imagination. Which sometimes meant risking comparisons to Cher.

COSTUME DESIGN (12 mins.)
Much more button-down offscreen, John "Denethor" Noble leads a discussion of his character's "vain" wardrobe, which isn't quite as unexpected as the emphasis on Éowyn's outfits from The Two Towers: were the six discs already devoted to that film insufficient? I must admit to cracking a smile at costume designer Ngila Dickson's lament that Jackson ended up using only a shot of Miranda Otto's face in a scene for which she had designed the actress the gown to end all gowns--typical dude.

DESIGN GALLERIES
Three separate galleries organized according to "The Peoples of Middle-earth," "The Realms of Middle-earth," and "Miniatures."