Welverin said:
That makes may make it an impressive accomplishment and something to be proud of, it however doesn't make it a better movie.
Actually that is indeed one of the reasons ROTK is better than FOTR. "Best" doesn't mean having the fewest flaws, it just means its the best.
Let's say you have two football teams. One team plays the Green Bay Packers and beats them 27-3. The other team plays the football team at your local high school and beats them 7-0. Which winning team is better? The second, because it allowed no points scored against it? No way.
Obviously none of this is an exact science and there will be those who think FOTR was the more difficult film to make because it had less "spectacle" or an open ended resolution or what have you. Cinema history definitely supports the notion that closing out a successful trilogy is *much* more difficult than setting it up, however.
I know a number of people have been careful to differentiate their "favorite film" apart from the film they would call the "best", but I think the quality of each production was so high that it really comes down to which elements of the story itself do you prefer the most. Academy Award categories such as Best Editing, Sound, Costumes, Score, Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay, Direction, what have you are about dead even straight across the board.
I thought the acting and the score were a little better in ROTK, but I could see cases being made for those categories in FOTR as well.
As fabulous as FOTR was, it doesn't have Gollum, aside from two veiled cameos. Nor does it have Faramir, Theoden, Eowyn, Denethor, Shelob, Treebeard, the Rohirim, Fellbeasts, Wargs, or Oliphants. Those are all *big time* iconic Tolkien characters or elements. But Gollum is the biggest. It would be very hard for me to choose the one LOTR film he's basically absent from to be the best. "Best" for me isn't just pacing, acting, editing, and score, but also which film best presents the greatest elements of the story.
Now for people who think Boromir or Saruman bring as much to the story as Gollum (or more) then I could see why they chose FOTR. And for some it just doesn't get any better than Moria. I am curious as to why some people mentioned that they thought ROTK had most (or all) of the best parts of the trilogy but then chose FOTR.
Was it just disappointment in how those individual elements were executed or just a simple case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts? Obviously I found the whole of ROTK to be as good or greater than the sum of its parts but I'm curious about the opposite reaction.
