Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - Review

Like I've mentioned before in my previous Lord of the Rings reviews, there is very little that hasn't been said about these movies. So instead, I'm going to focus more on my story with this film. I mentioned in my Fellowship of the Ring review that the Lord of the Rings franchise was too violent in my mother's eyes for me to see when it came out (I was 8 at the time). We were more of a Harry Potter family because she believed that it was more family oriented. So I grew up with Harry Potter, not Lord of the Rings even though they were both being released at the same time. Also in 2003, I went to a little theatre in my small town from the 1940's to watch a movie which would become my favourite movie of all time, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. So I remember watching the oscars that year, even though I had no clue what some of the other films were that year like Mystic River or Master and Commander, and seeing Lord of the Rings sweep the entire show. I remember being angry that it "stole" all the awards from my favourite movie, Pirates of the Caribbean. I would eventually watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was about 11 or 12, about the same time I started to get interested in Star Wars, and Return of the King would become and still is my favourite in the trilogy. Why? Because this movie is the very definition of epic. The battle of Gondor is so huge with all the orcs and armies of Rohan and Gondor fighting all together. I would have thought that scene was epic enough if it ended at that, but Peter Jackson gives us, in my opinion, one of the best battle scenes, if not the best battle scene in film history when the giant elephants come into battle with the horses of Rohan. I remember watching that as a kid and being completely blown away. The amount of heart-pumping action, excitement mixed with fear is like nothing I've ever seen in a motion picture. This is a movie that you need to see on a big screen with a big sound system because everything about this movie is huge. Not to mention that this wraps up all loose ends along all three movies, which includes Frodo and Sam's quest into Mordor. While in Two Towers, watching Frodo and Sam aimlessly walk around wasn't the most exciting stuff to watch, in Return of the King, it felt like sudden death overtime. They are so close and they have come so far, you honestly feel like cheering for them to get to Mount Doom like you would for a sports team in the dying seconds of overtime. A thought crossed my mind when watching Aragorn and friends fight with one last effort at the Black Gate of Mordor and that was, "I wonder if Star Wars 9 will have this big and epic of an ending?" As a huge Star Wars fan, if we got a version of the Return of the King in the Star Wars universe, that would be amazing. All in all, this movie is so grand and so exciting and heart-wrenching and emotional and any other words to describe a perfect movie, that it deserves nothing but the best score a movie can get. While Star Wars might be my favourite trilogy, there is no denying that Return of the King is a perfect movie!