"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Tuesday, June 22
At Pelleanor
I've been watching the hell out of The Return Of The King since it came out on DVD, and I gotta say, it's just a great movie. Noble deeds, sacrifice, bravery in the face of death - I'm a sucker for all that. It's full of great lines as well, such as Gandalf's, "Death is only another path, one that we all must take."
No one comes off as well in the trilogy as the Riders of Rohan. They broke the lines of Isengard at Helm's Deep, and broke the lines of Mordor at Pelleanor Fields. And my favorite character is Theoden, their king.
He's no born hero, like Aragorn. He's a brave man, but throughout The Two Towers he swings between bravado and despair. At the end of that film he faces the destruction of his people and his own death, and rages against it. "Now for wrath... now for ruin... and the red dawn!" And he wins an improbable victory.
And that seems to seal his resolve, to make him into a hero, because in Return he seems to drive forward with a certainty that doesn't allow for defeat. As he says to Eowyn, "You shall live to see these days renewed..."
Then, of course, his final battle, as he and his men charge with such wild abandon that even the Orcs flee in fear. And he gets the best line of the movie. "I go to my fathers, in whose mighty company I shall not now feel ashamed."
I can only recall actor Bernard Hill from one other role - he played the captain in Titanic - but I must have seen him in The Ghost And The Darkness, and he played Livingston opposite Patrick Bergen's Sir Richard Burton (no, not the actor) in Mountains Of The Moon.
