OK, as someone said, “prepare to be blown away …”

The movie lasted, it said here, 201 minutes. I did not look at my watch. I didn’t see anybody else look at their watches (all right, I’ll admit that I wasn’t paying that much attention to anything but the screen). When the last 15 minutes came, a period which according to other reviewers would bore viewers out of their mind, half a dozen people left — probably to grab their places in the rest-room lines. Nobody else made a sound. Other reviewers would have had it that there should be at least a few people snoring, but there weren’t …

You know the story. I hope you know the story. I will not repeat it here. Peter Jackson was relatively faithful to it, down to the very last line. * There were some additions to what I remember of the story (which I haven’t read in many, many years); I don’t remember the oliphaunts playing such an important role in the battle before Gondor — I don’t remember, for that matter, Legolas’s personal battle with an oliphaunt.

There were also some subtractions. At the end (or, rather, near the end), the hobbits return to a Shire untouched by war or the Isengard Mafia. What happened to Saruman? He and Grima don’t even appear in the film; odds on that we will be given some look at Saruman’s ultimate fate in the extended DVD version of the film, probably about four hours long, which we will be able to buy in about ten months or so. **

At least a few of the actors must have had to battle certain tempations in this film. In the confrontation between Eowyn and the Witch King of Angmar, when the Witch King says: “No living man may slay me” and then takes a stab in the back of the leg from Merry, the hobbit, and Eowyn doffs her helmet and shakes out her hair, had I been in her place I couldn’t have resisted saying something like: “No man, I, but a chick, you sucker!” as I lopped him. But Miranda Otto plays it straight. ***

The only (to me) sour note remains Gimli’s role as comic relief; I remember his part as being much more serious in the story. Though, give Jackson his due, once he decided to have Gimli played this way, he made it consistent (“That only counts as one!” he cries to Legolas after the latter wipes out an oliphaunt. ****)

Well, one other minor complaint: I think Jackson could have done the final immolation of the nazgul better. But we can’t have everything.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy it on DVD, many months down the road. But this is a big-screen epic. Catch it there. Catch it now.

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(*) There is no hint in the film of Sam Gamgee’s personal destiny, which, if I remember the Appendices correctly, was similar to Frodo’s; Sam, after all, was also a ring-bearer.

(**) Anybody remember my complaint from my review of “The Two Towers” last year: “This is the one loss I really regret in the film — the disappearance of the forest from the battle of Helm’s Deep, which I always found raised the hair on my arms when I read of it”? See the extended DVD, guys …

(***) I hope they add an hour or so of outtakes and bloopers to the extended DVD of this film …

(****) I remember Tolkien’s oliphaunts as being prehistoric elephants, perhaps mammoths. These things not only have too many tusks, they are infinitely larger; next to them, a mammoth would have seemed like a house cat, and even a brontosaur would have been put in their shade. I do remember that, seeing them stomping across the screen towards the Riders of Rohan, I muttered to myself, imagining myself as Theoden: “The mice! The mice! Didn’t anybody remember to bring the goddamned mice???”