The final chapter of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Return of the King wraps up the story in splendid form. Why else would it be #2 on the IMDb Top 250 Films list? It couldn’t be the obsessive fans, could it? Of course not! Just ask the Academy: It also won all 11 Academy Awards that it was nominated for, including Best Director and Best Picture. (Oh, and it also won for Best Visual Effects, which makes it the seventh film in a row to win that award after using Apple’s Shake compositing software.)
So in any case, whatever you liked about The Return of the King, this special extended edition has more of it. Did the original 3-hour and 21-minute version feel too abrupt, with not enough endings? You’ll have plenty of room to breathe with the extended 4-hour and 11-minute cut. And if you add in the extended versions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, you can have a massive 11-hour, 22-minute Lord of the Rings marathon. (By contrast, you could watch the entire Godfather Trilogy in that time, and still almost have enough time to watch The Godfather again. Or you could watch all five Star Wars films, then start watching the Clone Wars cartoons in the remaining time.) However you slice it, you’ll have more Lord of the Rings movie goodness than you could ever want.
But of course, once you’re done watching all 682 minutes, you’ll just have to start over again and listen to each of the four commentaries, which will put you at over seven eight-hour days of watching time. The actor commentary on Return of the King also features Andy Serkis, as well as Gollum and Smeagol, so that should be interesting. You also get a DTS-ES 6.1 Discrete soundtrack, and two more disks of extra behind-the-scenes features that I won’t even bother to go into here. So if you loved The Lord of the Rings before, you can work your way through all of the DVD sets, and you will love it even more. Or maybe you’ll hate it. I can’t make that decision for you. All I can tell you is that it’s $22.99 at Best Buy, or $72.99 if you would like to pick up all 12 discs for the three movies. Much like Frodo, the decision is in your hands.
