After three viewings I'm finally settling into that comfortable, happy state of being able to remember enough to think about what I've seen.

Plenty has been written about the film's epic qualities and the exhilarating triumphant tour-de-force that it is. I hardly need to comment on the acting -- if Sean Astin and Elijah Wood seemed outstanding, they also had more screen time in which to work. Everyone else seemed equally in command of whatever they were given, whether it was the subtlest facial gestures or the most dramatic whole-body action. It has been a hallmark of these movies that they are unafraid to move between different genres, so at one moment we're watching an comic book action flick, next a horror movie, and then a subtle, understated piece of inward drama that might belong to a great art house movie. They are all well done; how the movie succeeds with the viewers depends on their willingness to adapt to all these different styles in the same story. For me it makes for a very rich experience.

I'm going to write now about the things that struck me either with pain or delight. I'll also state my position on the purism/revisionist continuum, and it is this:

Often we treat Middle-earth as if it were a real place, and as if the events that Tolkien wrote about really happened. That being so, I take the pretence further and say: With any event that happens, public or personal, there will be as many interpretations of the story as there are observers. You see it all the time in journalism (try reading five newspapers from five different countries about the same world event, if you doubt me!) and you meet it all the time in real life. (After spending a month agonising that the person of your dreams walked out of a party just as you were getting to know them as the result of some stupid remark of yours, another person at the party reveals that he left because his pager went and he was on call. A third person says no, that wasn't a work pager, that was his wife. No, that wasn't his wife, that's his business partner, actually he's gay, says another. And so on and so on. You were right there and saw his departure with your own eyes, but was your 'story' the true one?)

Tolkien's world and Tolkien's story is big enough that I can easily pretend, just for the fun of it, that all those things he wrote did really happen. He told it the way he heard it (or found it in that pit of hearsay, inaccurate recollection, skimpy research and biased observation no doubt riddled with family politics called The Red Book of Westmarch). Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens tell a different story of the same events. What fun, I get to hear a whole different interpretation of it all! I love the newness and surprise. After all, nobody's taken away the original story I always knew. Every time I return to the written page, it surprises me and moves me with its power and beauty. But so does the film. But in different ways and for different reasons.

I love the way The Return of the King is paced, the way the stories separate out then tie together closer and closer as the film progresses. There's a nice symmetry. The prologue is one storyline only (Sméagol's), and emotionally it's as much of a downward plunge as Gandalf's physical plunge in TTT. Then we pick up the Fellowship who quickly roll up into two stories: Frodo and Sam in Ithilien, and (rejoined almost immediately at Isengard) the rest of the Fellowship. And then it all unravels again into a big hank of parallel stories and you have four or five lines to follow, but this time the connections between the stories are tighter. At times it's wonderfully done, like Pippin's heart-wrenching song that carries us between the great hall at Minas Tirith and the field outside Osgiliath where Faramir's men are charging to their death, or the sequence of beacons that carry Gondor's call to Rohan. Other times the action cuts across as the characters in one story wonder what is happening to the rest of the Fellowship. Sometimes the Eye itself is the link, for we follow its gaze from one event to another.

And then towards the end, the stories have narrowed down again to just two, but the cutting between the hobbit's story in Mordor and the Army of the West outside it sets up a counterpoint of two different kinds of tension that works very well in my opinion. And then the ending, one storyline at last.

Much has been said about the many 'endings' of the film. To me the endings feel quite right. Like the rhythm of a slowing heartbeat, the story jumps forward in 'pulses' -- the awakening after Mt. Doom, the coronation, the Shire homecoming, the reflective, rueful moment between the hobbits back at the Green Dragon, Frodo's spoken coda about how he feels adrift in the Shire, the leavetaking at the Grey Havens, and finally Sam's return home. It feels like deep breaths moving towards sleep. Like your last waking moments before you drop off. Memories of the day flash past, then you drift off and jolt awake to another thought, then another, then finally you don't wake again. For such a long epic, this seems appropriate. Almost as if a long story was winding to a close but you yourself were coming adrift from it, so the action has leapt forwards and the tone changed while you were away. In the first two movies we were pulled away from the final scene by the camera rising, dragging us away from the hobbits and out of Middle-earth. Here we seem to sink slowly to rest. Some people can't cope with that. Too bad.

By this the third movie we're becoming more aware of the way things are likely to be included in the extended editions to come, so even at first viewing I passed over some of the scene-changes I didn't like with a sigh thinking 'oh well, I bet they'll add something here and it'll all make more sense next November.' Hard to say what a Tolkien newbie would make of it all. When Gandalf and the others ride up to Isengard, look at it for a moment, then decide to go away again, a voice in my head kept piping up with that line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "On second thoughts, let's not go to Camelot. 'Tis a silly place!" I know that of all things, the film makers did not want LOTR to remind anyone of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so that's a shame. The scene before the Black Gates was the same. Gallop up, issue a challenge, and run off when the gate opens. Behind the gate is pretty much the wall of orcs and trolls we all expected to see anyway. For both those scenes there's room to insert some pretty juicy drama -- Saruman's demise, and the Mouth of Sauron. I'm one of those warped Gríma-fanciers, and so I'm hungry to see any amount of Shakespearean tragedy played out between him and Christopher Lee. Dish it out, I say! Tear up the floorboards!

I really, really looked forward to Eowyn's scene with the Witchking, and it was very good. She was exactly as I imagined in the book. "Her eyes grey as the sea were hard and fell, and yet tears were on her cheek…" And as Merry saw her, "She should not die, so fair, so desperate!" Beautifully done by Miranda Otto. Well fought, and the way the Witch King crumpled up was creepy and effective. If I have a complaint, it's that the scene didn't pause to let us savour the emotion for a moment before leaping straight to the boys' heroics -- Legolas and the Mûmakil etc. Fun, that, but I wanted to spend some more time letting Eowyn's extraordinary deed sink in before rushing to the next corner of the battle.

I liked the way Eowyn and Merry in the movie relate to each other. In the book Merry doesn't realise he's sharing Dernhelm's horse with a woman. The innocent wee lad! In the film, he has a look of such glee when she scoops him up -- "Whee, you mean I'm going to sit on Eowyn's lap for 3 days?" It means we lose that Macbeth-like moment of shock when Dernhelm reveals herself to the Witchking, who says, "No living man may hinder me!" (A misleading prophecy like "No man of woman born shall harm Macbeth…") I'm not sure audiences really got the full shock value of that. But then we see all the more clearly Merry's progress from thinking that this battle is going to be a bit of a lark, to the terrified realisation of what war really is.

There were so many good Rohirrim moments….I was so moved by the charge of the riders of Rohan, but then I knew I would be. For some people horses are just a pathetic forerunner of the motorbikes and cars we've replaced them with, but the film makers knew how to film their power and courage. Horses can't act, really -- their excitement, terror, fierceness and the trust with which they fling themselves towards whatever end their riders command -- those are not feigned. The camera running on tracks beside them caught the glory of those moments beautifully.

I loved the fact that so much of the Tolkien's speech was used as Théoden urged his troops to battle -- all that "Oaths ye have taken -- now fulfil them!" and "Arise now, riders of Théoden!" and so on. The horns of Rohan too -- a rough, wild sound. (If ever there's one prop I'd want to have from the movies, it'd be one of the horns!) Then the riders chanting "Death, Death!" That is in the books too, though at a later point, when Eomer finds Eowyn unconscious on the battlefield. "Ride to ruin, and the world's ending!" he cries, and "The Rohirrim sang no more. Death they cried with one voice loud and terrible…"

I'd have loved to have seen more of Eomer -- Karl Urban is such a fine actor -- but I could see the storylines would have got further complicated with the crowning of ANOTHER king on the battlefield and the further deeds of Eomer as he fought his way towards Aragorn.

At Théoden's death, he speaks his final words to Merry, not Eowyn, in the book. The films have made more of the father/daughter relationship than the book did, and so it has more impact to give Eowyn and Théoden that scene together. That worked well, for me. All through the film there's examples like that where speeches from the books are re-assigned from one character to another -- so the story gets told, but the net of relationships is cast slightly differently.

The emphasis for Merry has been his relationship with Pippin. The film dwells on his anguish at parting from Pippin, and so instead of moving the focus to a scene between him and Théoden, the film leaves him alone to be found by Pippin on the battlefield. I like the way the camera draws back from them as Pippin says "I'm going to look after you." The way he's solicitously tucking Merry's cloak around him is a wonderful gesture - both futile and pathetic, yet staunchly optimistic given the piles of dead and dying lying around on all sides. It sums up their relationship and hobbit nature so well.

I thought the film paid tribute to Tolkien's sources in a subtle way when Théoden caught sight of the Mûmakil. What Gimli expresses a lot more crudely later on ("Impossible odds, certain chance of death, what are we waiting for?") Théoden expresses with one look. Yes, he's never seen anything so terrifying before, but they are worthy foes for a hero. Tolkien's translation of the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon has the hero, faced with impossible odds, say,

Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose,
More proud the spirit as our power lessens.

I loved the moments when the film told the story in the way that only film can. For instance the very beginning, when we witness Sméagol's transformation into Gollum. Yes, it's a chance for the SFX department to show off, but it's more than that. The images of Sméagol's dissolution and enslavement to the Ring are potent and drive home the point as well as any amount of dialogue could. Another one is the lighting of the beacons -- this is startlingly moving. It's just a moment in the book -- Pippin sees them lit and Gandalf names them, all on their desperate ride to Gondor on Shadowfax. In the film that moment is transposed to a later point in the story. How the camera luxuriates in the power of it all! Hope and light are kindled and passed on, over the tops of the tall mountains in the gorgeous dawn and luminous star-studded night of the beautiful Middle-earth that they hope to save.

I've mentioned it before, but the moment when Pippin sings as Denethor eats, grim and wasted, in the deathly formality of his hall, and Faramir rides into the host of orcs in front of Osgiliath -- how unexpected it is to hear Bilbo's walking song in this context, recast as a lament. I thought that was a stroke of genius (and what a good voice Billy Boyd had for it too.) I had never seen that yearning in it before. I cannot now remember if they removed the line 'We'll wander back to home and bed,' but in any case the harmless looking lines 'Through shadows to the edge of night' and 'Away shall fade, away shall fade' became loaded with tragedy in the context of what was going on visually, with the doomed assault.

That reminds me of two things -- one a false note that happens as Faramir is leaving. It's a beautifully played scene between David Wenham and John Noble as Faramir asks him, "Do you wish that I had died instead of Boromir?" and Denethor replies, "Yes. I do wish that." And Faramir volunteers for a suicide mission. As he's riding out of Minas Tirith in front of the assembled crowd, Gandalf asks him to change his mind, for his father loves him "and will remember it before the end." This irks me -- the absolutely stupidest time to get somebody to change their mind by announcing their personal situation is when they're actively leading a group that is sworn to follow them, and are in front of a large crowd that also has come to see them carry out their duty. Faramir's not likely to stop, say "Oh, you're right!" and order everyone home. Maybe sometimes Gandalf is more like an unwelcome prophet who won't shut up than a subtle counsellor that can bend others to his will. But moments like those the film teeters uncomfortably between arthouse and action-movie.