Flashback Friday: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Jackson, 2003)

Three things the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences tend to avoid when choosing their Oscar winners: fantasies, sequels, and multiple wins for a single movie. But in 2003, all expectations and prior records were shattered when a threequel managed to win Best Picture, Best Director, and nine other awards at the 76th Academy Awards. With almost $3 billion in the worldwide box office, $1.1 billion of which belongs to the Best Picture winner, this is a film that virtually everyone saw and critics universally adored. There's a reason it ties for winning the most Oscars in the Academy's history. Today on Flashback Friday, we're looking at Peter Jackson's final installment in the film trilogy to define a decade: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King took home 11 Academy Awards on February 29, 2004. Only Ben-Hur and Titanic have matched Return of the King for the amount of Oscars won. This huge achievement is accredited to director Peter Jackson's tireless efforts to create of the most visually stunning, hugely expansive epics of modern film history.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which began in 2001 with The Fellowship of the Ring and continued with The Two Towers in 2002, is based on the best-selling novels by J.R.R. Tolkien of the same name. A highly influential fantasy masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings is the adventures of the Fellowship of the Ring, set out to protect the Hobbit named Frodo in his quest to destroy the highly powerful One Ring. The prophecy goes that the One Ring will rule all forces of Middle Earth. If its evil creator, Sauron, gets a hold of it, he will use it to conquer Middle Earth.

Frodo and Sam go alone to destroy the One Ring

Frodo is tasked with destroying this Ring, with the help of his best friend, the loyal and courageous Samwise "Sam" Gamgee; the wise wizard Gandalf; the Ranger with royal blood, Aragorn; the bow-and-arrow-wielding Elf, Legolas; the Dwarf warrior Gimli; the Captain of Gondor, Boromir; and the troublesome but brave and loyal Hobbits Merry and Pippin. Together, they are known as the Fellowship of the Ring.

After the events of the previous two films separates the Fellowship, two parallel stories tells of Man's conquest over the armies of the corrupt wizard Saruman's Isengard and Sauron's Mordor, and Frodo's journey to destroy the Ring in the fires of Mordor. Aragorn must reclaim his royal title by assuming the Kingdom of Gondor, a role he has forsaken since his ancient heir's weakness during the first war with Sauron. Gandalf, meanwhile, tries to defend Gondor's capital, the White City of Minas Tirith, with the aid of Pippin and Boromir's troubled brother, Faramir. A huge Orc army lies in wait out side the capital, and Gondor is left alone and virtually defenseless after the city's steward, Denethor, goes mad. With the Ringwraith Nazgul (Sauron's demon-like servants whose sole purpose is to find the Ring) and their death-defying leader, the Witch King, launching an all-out assault on the last defense of Gondor, the future of Man and Middle Earth is in grave danger.

Andy Serkis' performance as Gollum has been
recognized for it's innovations in motion picture capture

Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam enter a Faustian bargain with Gollum, a twisted former owner of the One Ring who's obsessed and mad with the Ring's allure. Gollum leads them on a treacherous path to Mordor, while secretly plotting the Hobbit's death. With the armies of Middle Earth losing more and more each day, Frodo only has a short time to destroy the Ring, and end Sauron's dominion over the world.

Sadly, that's only the surface-level plot of the film franchise. All three films have run times of almost three hours each, with The Return of the King surpassing them all with a whopping 200 minutes of footage (and that's not even counting the Expanded Editions of the films; that Return lasts approximately 268 minutes). But don't judge the movies solely on their duration; every minute of this fantasy is worth seeing.

At the time of its release, The Lord of the Rings trilogy was the only franchise in history to be filmed at the same time. All three movies were written together, shot together, and produced together. It was divided up into three installments, with final scenes different than the original endings of each of the novels. Each went through a lucrative design process by Weta Workshop, and were each shot in the beautiful landscapes of New Zealand.

Minas Tirith, designed by the Oscar-winning
 Weta Workshop 

The visual effect shots were seamlessly added to the final cuts, and the series has been noted for this innovation. However, unlike most modern day productions, nearly everything in Middle Earth was built and constructed on the set. The Hobbit homes, city miniatures, and characters are all real. Howard Shore orchestrated the score, a beautiful soundtrack that won him an Oscar.

The characters of the film were played by an ensemble cast, including Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, John Rhys-Davies, Sean Astin, Orlando Bloom, Cate Blanchett, Andy Serkis, Liv Tyler, Hugo Weaving, Karl Urban, John Noble, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Sean Bean, Brad Dourif, David Wenham, Lawrence Makoare, Ian Holm, and Christopher Lee. And that's just the principal characters. An unbelievable feat in all-star casting that really paid off; the characters and the chemistry between them is both memorable and Oscar-worthy. Ironically, despite the numerous accolades for the film, The Return of the King received no acting nominations (the only acting nomination in the whole series was for Best Supporting Actor for Ian McKellen in The Fellowship of the Ring).

The stunning visual effects of the film were
significant in the Battle of Pelennor

By the time Oscar night came around, as host Billy Crystal said, "There (was) no one left to thank in New Zealand." The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won 11 Academy Awards out of 11 nominations, tying for the most-winning single film and setting the record for the highest sweep by winning every category for which it was nominated. In the end, the movie won every technical award (minus Best Cinematography, for which it was not nominated): Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song ("Into the West"), Best Visual Effects, Best Makeup, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Editing.

Unlike several other Best Picture winners, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was easily recognized as the greatest movie of 2003. Also, the film's victory commemorated the whole trilogy, as opposed to just the final movie (even though both of the previous film's were also nominated for Best Picture in their respective years). Return of the King's closest competition were the Sofia Coppola movie Lost in Translation and the Clint Eastwood picture Mystic River, neither of which have retained any sort of legacy (Translation has become an art-house favorite, but it polarizes critics and audiences to this day). With The Lord of the Rings, the Academy finally recognized a big-budget movie as their Best Picture winner. 

No other fantasy film in cinematic history has reached the critical and commercial appeal of The Lord of the Rings, and this fact remains evident in the startling number of wins for the series' final installment. Among the best movies of the past twenty years, the magic of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King cannot possibly be replicated.

Thank you, Academy, for getting this one right.