The Return of the King – A Plot Précis
from the author of the Worst Case Scenarios
(Warning: in honour of its source material, this precis is really bloody long)
The film opens to the story of how innocent model Kate Moss descended into anorexia through the Catfish Diet; this decline was precipitated by the refusal of her boyfriend Deagol to propose to her on her birthday. He refuses to give her the ring he is holding, and she quite understandably strangles him to death. I’m sure many country girls would have done the same.
Frodo, corrupted by the continued presence of a top supermodel, is beginning to experiment with heroin chic, and is looking distinctly shadowy around the eyes. Sam, on the other hand, despite allegedly giving Frodo the lion’s share of the food, looks just as fat as he did in the Shire (and a lot fatter than he did in Rivendell). One can almost hear the words of the Witch King – "Diet now and curse in vain".
Meanwhile, the victorious Rohirrim ride whichever visible horses they have available to Isengard, where Merry and Pippin are holding a gurning contest. Sadly, the poor little tykes have been psychologically damaged by their ordeal with the Orcs, and have descended into total imbecility; everyone thinks this is terribly cute though, so that’s all right.
Saruman refuses to make an appearance. This is because of the embarrassment he feels when he realises that Gandalf has turned up to his tower wearing the same outfit as him, which he had been assured by the people at the boutique was a unique Givenchy original. He remains sulking in his tower, throwing his palantir out of the window so that no one can watch him cry and have an evil mascara disaster.
Back in Edoras a number of events take place. Theoden congratulates Eowyn on her ability to hand goblets to bearded men. "I am happy for you", he approves, after Aragorn accepts a sip. Merry and Pippin advance from gurning to table dancing, and if you look carefully you can see Gamling slip a fiver into Merry’s trousers. Aragorn and Gandalf carefully address the fact that none of their subsequent actions will make any sense if Frodo is dead: "What does the script tell you?" asks Strider. "That Frodo's alive," admits Gandalf, after a quick glance at it. "Yes, he’s alive."
Pippin, jealous of the money that Merry now has in his pants, practises a new "dancing manically with a ball of fire" routine, but slips and bashes his head, further damaging his brain. Gandalf, realising that without specialist treatment Pippin will turn completely into a gibbering moron, snatches him away to take him to the nearest clinic, in Minas Tirith.
Shadowfax shows us the meaning of haste, which is nice because I’ve lost my dictionary. He bears Pippin and Gandalf to a giant Wedding Cake, otherwise known as Minas Tirith. Taking Pippin to see the Steward before delivering the hobbit to the Houses of Brain Healing, he finds that Denethor has also gone completely loopy. Realising now that Pippin is beyond help, he walks off in disappointment, and spends the rest of the film putting Pippin in a variety of incredibly dangerous situations in the hope that he’ll get killed before his brain degenerates any further.
Poor Pippin displays his slipping grasp of logic when he explains that it is worse to be caught on the edge of a battle that you can’t escape than be in one; this despite the fact that if you can’t escape the battle then you are eventually going to be in one, so that in the long run the two problems are identical, or perhaps cumulative. Gandalf thinks about pushing Pippin off the balcony, but is distracted by The Lord of the Nazgul testing out his new anti-aircraft laser cannon. This prompts Gandalf to explain how afraid he is of the Witch King of Angmar, telling Pippin he’s met him before. Pippin’s brain condition renders him unable to explain to Gandalf that the Witch-King can be easily defeated by hurling burning sticks at him, a failure that costs our heroes dear as the film goes on.
At this moment, Kate Moss, Frodo and Sam are passing by Minas Morgul. Frodo, a student of medieval satantic sculpture, can’t help but investigate the gates of the city, possibly with the intent of getting a brass rubbing. Sam and Kate understandably think this is a bad idea, and drag him away just as the laser cannon gets tested. They climb the straight stair to Cirith Uncle, where Kate Moss asks what she has ever done to gain Sam’s enmity, forgetting the whole trying to strangle him, bite his neck and constantly calling him fat. Coming from the bitchy world of fashion, Kate doesn’t even realise that this is extreme behaviour.
She hatches an ingenious plot to get rid of Sam, which involves provoking him into becoming upset, and losing his accent. When Frodo realises that Sam’s accent is fake he immediately distrusts him. Sam cannot understand this. "It’s her!" he cried, pointing at Kate. "She’s the one with the silly voice!". "No," disagrees Frodo. "It’s you," he says and sends Sam away to cry. Frodo and Kate strike on without him.
Gandalf, increasingly concerned about how to get rid of Pippin, ingeniously sends him up a sheer cliff to light a beacon, reasoning that if the fire doesn’t kill him, the fall will. Amazingly, Pippin survives. Even more amazingly, all the beacons get lit, even though most of them seem to be above cloud level, and completely invisible to the world around.
Faramir, freed from possession by evil spirits by the Elixir of the Special Edition, is defending Osgiliath. Much is made in the film of the comparison between Faramir and Boromir’s military prowess: here Faramir displays his military genius by tackling hordes of Orcs in rickety wooden boats by letting them land first. Top hole old chap. Field Marshall Haig would be proud of you.
The Orcs, led by Miss Piggy from the Muppets, soon overrun the City, leading Faramir to bolt for the Wedding Cake of safety. However, he is trailed by winged Nazgul, who have found an amusing way of tormenting their foes by getting the seven children with trumpets to blow really high pitched squeals. Gandalf, spying another opportunity to bump off Pippin, rides out to the meet the flying bad guys with the hobbit perched precariously in front of him. Unfortunately, Pippin fails to fall off the horse, and Gandalf thinks he is stuck with him for a few more scenes. Reasoning that maybe Mad Denethor might just kill him, he brings him to him to swear into his service. However, the plan backfires when Denethor sends Faramir, the Last Normal Man in the City, to his death instead. Denethor sends Faramir, in charge of the Gondorian cavalry, to charge the Orcs at Osgiliath. Faramir goes believing that he has been provided with a back-up brigade of invisible horses. He is tragically mistaken.
Back in Rohan, Theoden the not very Old surveys his troops. Only six thousand have come he says ("less than half of what I’d hoped for"). "That will not be enough to break the lines of Mordor", says Aragorn, even though he has not seen the lines of Mordor, and in fact only has other people’s word for the fact that the lines of Mordor even exist. The audience is left to wonder why Theoden, if there really are 12,000+ horse-riding warriors in Rohan, decided to fight Saruman’s meagre 10,000 foot soldiers by hiding. And why would you not risk open war with overwhelming numerical and logistical superiority? Pillock.
Behind them, the horses are restless and the men are quiet. "The horses are restless and the men are quiet", Legolas informs us, helpfully. Eomer, taking some time off from melodramatic glaring, in forms them that the mountain is evil. Since mountains are not known for sneaking up on you in the dark and killing you, the company do not pay much heed to this warning.
Elrond arrives at camp to deliver the sword that his Mincing Elves have remade for him. He also warns that through an implausible plot device, Arwen will die if the ring is not destroyed. Aragorn, who already knows that he will die if the ring is not destroyed, shows very little emotion over this. In a desperate attempt to get a reaction, Elrond waves the sword theatrically. Aragorn regards it as one might examine a funky new corkscrew from Heals, but accepts the gift, and some advice about some dead blokes.
Eowyn catches him leaving, and Aragorn informs her that "it’s not you, it’s me" and rides off. She understandably assumes that his story about harnessing the power of the Dead to bring victory to the beleaguered races of man is just a cheap excuse to dump her. Eowyn resolves to ride to war and kill as many men as she can, just to feel better.
Theoden orders Merry to remain behind, telling him that no rider can bear him before them (much to Gamling’s disappointment). Eowyn brings him along for someone to talk to who isn’t a Man.
There is then a slight lull and script writers run out of new words. While Peter Jackson nips down the newsagents for some new words, all the characters keep repeating "The Way is shut. It was made by those that are dead, and the dead keep it. The Way is shut", several times. Peter gets back with the bag of new words just in time, and the story continues.
The Orc army approaches the walls of the Wedding Cake, prompting it’s soldiery to cry out "open the gates!" This at least lets the bloodied body of Faramir back in. He has been pierced by many arrows, and dragged across the Pelennor fields fast enough to outpace the armies of Mordor. Understandably, they think he is dead. Pippin, though, invokes some delusional medical training that he imagines himself to have and declares Faramir alive. Denethor reacts to this good news by going even madder. Gandalf, following his usual tactic for dealing with the mentally ill, tries to beat him to death with his staff.
So launches the Battle of the the Pelennor Fields. Gandalf musters the troops around him, facing off against the evil hordes of Miss Piggy. Pippin wanders into the battle. Gandalf tells him to go away, hoping that without the wizard to protect him, the hobbit will be cut down by a passing Orc. However, Pippin saves Gandalf’s life, and the old man decides to stop trying to get him killed. For at least five minutes.
Frodo, meanwhile, has been led into the Lair of the Softest Giant Spider in Movie History. Not seemingly over bothered by the Phial of Galadriel, "She" is nonetheless completely unable to beat Frodo in a fight. Eventually, she just sneaks up on him and stings him. The poison reacts terribly with the chewing gum that Frodo was eating, and he pulls a few faces and tries to spit it out before the poison knocks him cold.
Sam, fulfilling the movie’s quota for main characters falling down something, finds the precious, life saving lembas bread at the stair’s foot. In response to this godsend of vital nutrition, he…. crushes it and throws in the ground again. Pillock. He does rush back to save Mister Frodo, though, an act of heroism only slightly dampened by the softness of his foe.
Back in Gondor, Pippin spies Denethor carrying Faramir’s body on a bier. Pippin, still delusionally convinced that Faramir is alive, tries to stop the Steward burning his son. Denethor kicks him out, so Pippin fetches Gandalf. Gandalf sees a scenario of burning oil and wood as a perfect opportunity to get rid of his Pippin problem, and rushes them to the scene on horseback. Spotting his opportunity, Gandalf pretends to be busy with Denethor so that Pippin will foolishly climb onto the burning Pyre to try and lift a Man four times his weight. Amazingly he succeeds! Gandalf, now completely pissed off, knocks Denethor back into the fire. The tone of his voice as he moodily intones "thus passes Denethor", as said Steward runs off in flames, can only be explained by the unspoken addendum of "the wrong person dead; again! Still, at least he was bonkers too."
It is then that Gandalf learns that Faramir is really alive! Guiltily, he finally realises that Pippin is not mad after all, just slightly Scottish. He resolves to put an end to his attempts at Hobbitcide. For at least quarter of an hour.
Sam wins his fight with the soft spider, but finds that Frodo has turned yellow. Understanding that such an unphotogenically coloured hobbit can no longer be hero of the film, he resolves to take over. Only too late does he realise that not only will Frodo not be yellow for long, that soon he will appear half-naked! Realising that he will not be the hero after all, Sam resolves to chase the Orcs that have stolen his jaundiced pal.
Just when things seem darkest, and Miss Piggy is celebrating, Theodeon’s riders appear over the horizon. He gives them a quick, rousing speech "look lads, all you have to do is charge them while sounding a horn blast and letting the sun rise behind you, even though we’re coming from the south. You’ve all done it before, and take that invisible horse stocking off you ‘orrible little bleeder!" He then checks that they’ve all got their spearheads properly attached by running his sword over them (in the background, one rider’s spearhead falls off and he has to ride home to get a new one) before sounding the charge. Miss Piggy and her Muppets are soundly obliterated.
It seems victory is assured; the appearance of a herd of Dinotherium from the BBC’s Walking with Beasts interrupts celebrations, however. Amongst the Elephantine carnage, Theoden is thrown from his horse, and then, indeed, under it. The Witch King of Angmar, confident that there are no men with burning sticks around, drops in to kill him. Eowyn, who despite earlier statements that she fears only a cage has been looking pretty petrified for the last three scenes, bravely stands up to him. In a stroke of luck, we find that the Witch King appears to be suffering from "delayed killing syndrome", a virus spread around the evil folk of Middle Earth by Lurtz (so far affecting the Moria Orcs, Lurtz himself, the Dead in the Dead Marshes, Saruman’s Uruk Hai army [this is a guess, but since Aragorn plummeted into a crowd of several hundred of them, and then appeared up on the battlements a few minutes later with no wounds, we assume something went wrong somewhere] and the Orcs in Cirith Uncle), and completely fails to kill Eowyn, and then Merry stabs him in the arse. Eowyn acknowledges this when she announces before striking that she is "no man" – since time waits for "no man" we now know how she managed to avoid death.
While this is going on, Gandalf decides to redress his attempts on Pippin’s life by completely lying to him about what will happen to him after death. What a nice old man.
Aragorn arrives with army of radioactive pea soup. The radio active soup spreads over the battle field and kills all the bad guys. When the battle is over, Gimli warns of the danger of dumping the radioactive soup, but Aragorn has abandoned his environmentally sound past and flushes it away. The city is saved. Pippin, sent out on the battlefield alone in a last ditch attempt by Gandalf to get rid of him, stumbles across Merry, adding to the gaggle of mad hobbits that Gandalf has to deal with. The old man looks unimpressed.
In Cirith Uncle, Sam saves Mister Frodo, before disappointing the entire female audience by announcing that Frodo cannot go walking about Mordor in naught but his skin. They head off dressed as Orcs, and look surprisingly cute. Without Kate Moss around the make him feel fat, Sam is obviously feeling more heroic, and starts to take charge.
Back in Gondor, Gandalf realises that without another battle, there’s no way he can get rid of Merry and Pippin. So when Aragorn suggests attacking Mordor as a way of drawing Sauron’s eye away from Frodo ("a diversion", says Legolas, which is very helpful since, as stated earlier, I’ve lost my dictionary) he seizes upon it. Realising that the end of the film will be a bit dull if they all stay in Minas Tirith, the others agree to this plan.
Their way now clear, Frodo and Sam trudge to Mount Doom. At one point Frodo is so weak that Sam has to carry him. After Kate Moss reappears and attacks them though, Frodo is quite happy to run up the mountain all by himself; showing off for the girl again, it would seem. Thinking that this might mean that Frodo will marry her, the desperate Kate Moss bites the ring from his hand so that she can put it on her own. Frodo is so horrified at the thought of marrying her that he pushes her into the volcano – surely many country boys would do the same.
This is good news for armies of the West. Sauron is destroyed, everyone does a Mexican wave, and all the land around them crumbles into chasms, except the bit they were standing on. Whichever of them conducted the geological survey before they took up their positions is to be congratulated.
Eagles come and rescue to the Hobbits. The film ends.
(Pyjama looks round in horror: he realises that this time he has run out of both words and pictures, and quickly nips down the shops. Unfortunately, they only have a few words and pictures left, so he has to run around Wellington buying small "bitesize" packets of Words & Pictures to keep the film running)
The film starts again. Frodo recites the names of his companions in slow motion.
Gandalf, finally accepting that he’s stuck with all these lunatic hobbits, breaks into hysterical laughter.
The film ends.
The film starts again. Lots of digital people clap unfeasibly quickly.
The film ends.
The film starts again, and shows a map of Middle Earth with the word "Weathertop" on it. We have never been told where Weathertop is.
The film ends.
The film starts again, and we’re in the Shire. The mad Hobbits grin weirdly at everyone, and Odo Proudfoot rightly gives them a glare.
The film ends.
The film starts again and we travel to the Grey Havens with the Hobbits and Gandalf. Two hobbits leave, and with the passing of Gandalf, Pippin is finally safe. Hurrah.
The film ends.
The film starts again, and shows Sam returning to the yellow-doored hole that he has lived in since Frodo scrubbed him out of his will for laughing when Strider made an inappropriate joke about Frodo’s missing finger.
The film ends.
The films starts again, and shows a powerpoint presentation of pencil sketches.
The films ends.
(Cue Annie Lennox explaining in song where Frodo has gone, all too late as the entire audience is now queuing for the lavatory.)
THE END