[Arr, matey. There be slight spoil­ers ahead. Swipe to read.]

…I elated this amidst over three hun­dred tired, excited, sweaty geeks dur­ing last night's mid­nite screen­ing of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King after the con­clu­sion of the scene with the giant fuck­ing spi­der.

Slightly before this par­tic­u­lar sequence, Jake leaned over to me and said, "There's some­thing com­ing up, and you may have a prob­lem with it." I became slightly con­cerned, but con­sid­er­ing this was halfway through the movie, I decided not to fol­low up and just watch the film.

As Shelob appeared on the forty-foot screen, I clenched my hands into fists until my knuck­les were white and I could feel my fin­ger­nails embed­ding them­selves into my palms, and I think that I vocally winced once or twice. When Topher glanced at me, with a slight look of con­cern, I felt more than a bit embarassed, and fig­ured at that point that I should keep my ter­ror to a low hum rather than a whiny screech.

* * *

That said, Return of the King was a breath­tak­ing expe­ri­ence. After I calmed down from that unfor­tu­nate scene, I found myself com­pletely spell­bound dur­ing the remain­der of the film.

And what a remain­der it was.

The bat­tle scenes were absolutely jaw-dropping, espe­cially when Aragorn sailed in with the Dead. Granted, some of the CG looked like, well, like CG. But I didn't care. It was stunning.

* * *

I must con­fess. I have never read any of Tolkien's books. As I explained to Ames ear­lier tonite, the fan­tasy genre as a whole has never really held much inter­est for me. So, two years ago, when every­one but me was froth­ing at the mouth in antic­i­pa­tion of the release of Fel­low­ship of the Ring, I pon­dered how I was going to spend my time while every­one else was busy stand­ing in line. Jake was one of these fanat­ics and had to drag me to see the flick on New Year's Eve 2001.

I was… impressed. The fact that I was able to even stay inter­ested in the story was enough to make me a fan. And with the release of The Two Tow­ers last year, I was jazzed. And so, ear­lier this month, when Jake told me of the oppor­tu­nity to catch the mid­nite screen­ing of RotK, I real­ized that things had come full cir­cle. I was now froth­ing at the mouth to see how it would all end.

The plan was to meet Jake and Topher at the the­atre at 10:30pm. We had advance tick­ets days ahead of time, a require­ment being that the show had sold out almost a week ahead. On my way to Cin­e­mark, I real­ized that there was no way I was going to get through a film that was over three hours in length with my low energy level. So I stopped off and got burg­ers and litres of Code Red for Jake and I. I fig­ured that if that didn't keep me awake, noth­ing would.

When I got to the the­atre, it was pan­de­mo­nium. Lines up and down every hall­way, dou­bled and even tripled over in some places. When I found Jake, he told me that the peo­ple at the head of the line had been there since 4pm. Sweet Jesus. Now I didn't feel bad for being fif­teen min­utes late. A few min­utes later, Topher arrived and our own lit­tle jour­ney offi­cially began.

We ended up stand­ing in line for about another hour before our the­atre opened up. Appar­ently Honey, and its whop­ping six atten­dees, was tak­ing its time in fin­ish­ing up.

The doors opened and the cir­cus of geeks wran­gled them­selves into the the­atre like cat­tle. And the movie started.

I must say, that the charm of three plus hours of sit­ting in the the­atre with 300 of your clos­est friends (and I mean that spa­tially) and no air con­di­tion­ing was start­ing to wain after about two hours. But we toughed it out. And it was so worth it.

All in all, Return of the King is eas­ily the best of the tril­ogy, and while I felt the epi­logue of the film could have been tight­ened a bit, I have no com­plaints. I left the the­atre at 3:41am, my legs heavy and my eyes glazed. But happy. Oh yes, quite happy. Peter Jack­son truly has proved him­self a film­maker of enor­mous tal­ent and vision, and no mat­ter what he does in the future, I will con­tinue to hold high respect for him.

I'd say that I can't wait for the extended DVD edi­tion of this film to come out next year, but the truth is that I think I prob­a­bly should. Need time to recu­per­ate, after all.