The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Gollum biting off Frodo's finger and dancing at the edge of the Cracks of Doom is one of the strangest, bleakest climaxes in fantasy. Tolkien leaves the quest to fail at the last moment and lets the Ring be undone by the very creature Frodo spared. Reading it that way changes what the whole journey means, and the film softens that moment. The book also gives Tolkien's own voice, formal when it deals with kings and battles and plain when it follows two exhausted hobbits across Mordor. The screen can show the scale, but the prose carries the weight of old histories and lost ages. The Appendices hold material the films only borrow from, including Aragorn and Arwen's story. The film draws heavily on the end of The Two Towers, so viewers who loved Shelob's Lair and the Isengard scenes should start with that book and read on into this one.

The Mount Doom climax is where the film departs most from the book. In Tolkien, Gollum bites off Frodo's finger, dances with the Ring and slips into the fire. On screen, Frodo and Gollum struggle at the edge and go over together, Gollum falls into the lava and Sam pulls Frodo back, which gives Frodo a direct hand in the Ring's destruction. This change is reported by only one source, so treat the details as likely rather than certain. Shelob's Lair belongs to the end of The Two Towers in the book, but Jackson held it back for this film so that Frodo and Sam's story would line up in time with the others. Gollum leads Frodo to the spider, Frodo is stung and taken by orcs, and Sam rescues him. Moving it is widely credited with giving Sam a full arc, and one reviewer argues it makes him the hero of the story. The film also opens with the ride to Isengard, the reunion with Merry and Pippin and the confrontation with Saruman, which in the book close the Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli chapters of The Two Towers. Saruman's fate differs too, though only in the extended edition. There, Grima stabs him and he falls from the tower onto a spiked wheel. In the book, Gandalf breaks his staff and he is left imprisoned. The theatrical cut only hints at the scene. A scene on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol is added in which Gollum throws away the last lembas, frames Sam, and Frodo sends Sam home. One commentator calls this out of character, since the book never splits the two apart like this. Arwen's part is also expanded well beyond the novels, where she appears mostly in the Appendices.