The return of epic cinemas: the final installment of Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is both a dramatic and technical tour de force.

Beyond the breathtaking spectacle of New Zealand landscapes and CGI battles, The Return of the King, Peter Jackson's latest and final installment of the glorious film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings, has a thematic heft and character depth worthy of the Oxford don's original novel.

Almost everyone not living in a hole in the ground in Iraq knows the trilogy's storyline by now: the Dark Lord Sauron wishes to regain the One Ring that he lost long ago, which will give him the power to conquer the entire earth. The ring has been found by a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, who then passes it on to his nephew Frodo for safekeeping. Frodo and his trusty servant Sam, along with a number of other supporters (the "fellowship of the ring") have been tasked with taking the ring to the land of Mordor--Sauron's dominion--and casting it into the volcanic fires of Mount Doom where it was originally forged, in order to destroy it forever. Sauron sends his most fearsome servants, the ringwraiths or Nazgul, to hunt down the ring-bearer; and, with the help of Saruman, a perfidious wizard, he simultaneously unleashes a war of conquest on the free peoples of Middle-Earth, Tolkien's fictional setting.

The ring, meanwhile, has powers of its own; it constantly tempts its owner to take advantage of the ring's ability to make its wearer invisible, and it never ceases trying to get back to its master, Sauron. Over time, a bearer of the ring becomes utterly addicted to its power, unable to get rid of it and enslaved to its will. In the story, Frodo must resist the ring's addictive powers, while protecting himself from the treachery of Gollum, the ring's former owner, who wants the "precious" ring back.

Epic Cinema

Viewers of The Return of the King will be overwhelmed by the Wagnerian scope of Jackson's film panorama: vast armies of orcs and trolls, equipped with terrifying siege engines, attacking the pinnacled fortress-city of Minas Tirith; the horrifying Nazgul, stooping Valkyrie-like to pluck soldiers from horseback and battlement; an army of phantoms, the shades of "oath-breakers" who have been cursed as a consequence of having reneged on a promise to fight the Dark Lord Sauron in an earlier age; an attack by a nightmarish spider realistic enough to make even the most jaded audience cringe; and a CGI Gollum even more tragic, more conflicted, and more dastardly than in the previous film, The Two Towers. (Gollum's initial encounter with the One Ring and its corrupting power are vividly and disturbingly depicted in the new movie's opening scene.)

But beyond images like these, which are far beyond anything ever seen anywhere before on the silver screen, Jackson's film pays homage to much of the original spirit of Tolkien. This is more the case in this final installment than in its two prequels. Admirers of Tolkien with an intimate knowledge of his work sometimes find cause to quibble with the cinematic interpretations of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, because they sometimes seem to sacrifice the lofty spirit of Tolkien for the tawdry pay-off of high-tech virtuosity. This time around, however, when Jackson and company take liberties with the original material, they usually enhance the story by stressing themes that Tolkien himself surely would have condoned.

Take, for example, a fine little dialog between Gandalf the white wizard and Pippin, a terrified hobbit who finds himself in the middle of an apparently hopeless battle for a city about to fall to Sauron's forces. With hideous trolls and orcs rampaging their way up the various levels of the city and catapulted boulders relentlessly battering down the walls, Pippin confesses to Gandalf his fear of death. The wizard, who has walked the earth for "300 lives of men" and has himself been "sent back" to finish his work after a life-sapping battle with a demonic balrog, replies that there is nothing to fear in death, that it is not the end but merely another journey. Reassured, Pippin then asks Gandalf what the next me will be like. Gandalf replies that it resembles "a far green country under a swift sunrise." The phrase is Tolkien's, found in a somewhat different context in the novel, but this vignette is pure Jackson.

Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, always insisted that The Lord of the Rings was a profoundly Christian work. Those familiar with the more overtly allegorical style of Tolkien's contemporary and friend, C.S. Lewis, might wonder how a work brimming over with diabolical monsters and other imagery lifted from the mythology of pre-Christian Europe could possibly do service to Christian themes. Yet the Rings trilogy, almost from its opening page, is bound together by Christian thematic sinews: the corrupting premise of absolute power to right all wrongs; the virtue of humility; the triumph of small things over great; the power of good to anticipate, outflank, and even exploit evil for its own ends; the sanctifying struggle for freedom; the imagery of resurrection; and much more. Anyone tempted to assume these as "universal themes" would do well to consult some of the ancient Roman and Greek writers to appreciate how scantily some of these axioms were valued in the pre-Christian world.

The Return of the King is, of course, the segment where the entire story is resolved, where many plot elements, such as the clinging, mendacious Gollum, and secondary characters like hobbits Merry and Pippin, are validated. Gollum, the hopelessly corrupted, Cain like outcast whose schemes to regain the ring for himself put Sam and Frodo in mortal danger, becomes, in spite of his worst intentions, the key to Frodo and Sam's success at every stage in the last part of their journey. Without Gollum's leadership, the heroes could never have found a way to sneak into Mordor; without Gollum's attempt to murder them by proxy by leading them into the lair of the monstrous Shelob, the hobbit duo would never have been able to slip past the ever-vigilant orcs in the tower of Cirith Ungol. Inside Mordor en route to Mount Doom, Gollum throws ore trackers off their trail (in an episode not depicted in the movie). Finally, as every Tolkien aficionado knows, it is Gollum who unintentionally helps Frodo at the climactic moment of the story.

Merry and Pippin, two rather frivolous hobbits who seem peripheral to the plot in the early part of the story, become the catalyst for the defeat of the wizard Saruman at the close of the second film, and make pivotal contributions in the third. Another hobbit, Frodo's devoted servant Samwise Gamgee, saves the day at the darkest point in the quest.

Tolkien's more obvious heroes also shine their brightest in the story's climactic segment. Gandalf the white wizard is transformed into a battlefield commander, rallying the harried residents of besieged Minas Tirith to make a desperate last stand against overwhelming odds. And the enigmatic Aragorn accepts the mantle of responsibility associated with his lineage as the rightful heir to the throne of Gondor.

Just as Tolkien's masterpiece is often deemed the finest book of the 20th century, and certainly the most original, no one has ever seen a movie trilogy like this. Some will find similarity with its candy coated, frothy predecessor, Star Wars. Yet the Star Wars trilogy itself is little more than a space-opera adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's originality casts a very long shadow over the sci-fi and fantasy genres: Who can doubt, for example, that the lavish cultures, epic scale, and made up book citations and languages of Frank Helbert's acclaimed Dune series owe a chunk of their inspiration to Tolkien?

Key to Popularity

But what, ultimately, is the reason for The Lord of the Rings" immense popular appeal, both on the screen and the printed page? One is Tolkien's (and Jackson's) unique ability to meld fine ,art with entertainment, to create a work with the complexity and depth of high literature and epic cinema, combined with the rollicking plot and imaginative sweep of popular storytelling.

But a far more important reason is that Tolkien's style and themes resonate strongly with the best of Western civilization, and not only in a world at war. His utter lack of irony and indifference to human sexuality, in a day where wisecracking antiheroes and sexual innuendo are de rigueur even in many children's books and movies, are attractive to the unsullied idealist in all of us. The chivalric virtues of his heroes, echoing Tolkien's own preference for Arthurian and Anglo-Saxon myth, remind us that, at its best, art should display the world as it ought to be, rather than wallowing in the ambiguities and vices of fallen man.

Most important of all, though, is Tolkien's central theme, that God, in the words of the Apostle Paul, chooses "the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.... The weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world ... and things which are nought, to bring to nought things that are." Frodo and the hobbits are the ultimate underdogs, nicknamed "halflings" because they are, quite literally, only half the stature of men and elves. They possess few of the traits of conventional epic heroes. They care little for the world outside their own bucolic Shire, have none of the gravitas of men on a mission, and no interest in achieving memorable heroic deeds. These are precisely the qualities that allow hobbits to succeed where men, elves and wizards have failed. Unlike a string of tragic heroes corrupted by the ring's allure--Isildur, Saruman, Boromir, and Denethor--the Shire hobbits want neither power nor renown.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Jackson's trilogy is that, in more than nine hours of cinema, there is nary a four-letter vulgarity or sexual innuendo. Even the violence of the battles is restrained by recent standards. And yet these films are among the most popular ever made. The Return of the King will almost certainly eclipse the $340 million domestic take of The Two Towers, and will likely become the second film (Titanic was the first) to surpass $1 billion in worldwide take. All of which suggests that the market for decent content and ennobling themes is very much alive, both in the United States and abroad, a comfort to anyone tempted to believe that the age of decency, innocence and old-fashioned values is forever behind us.