So I have a lot less to say about this movie than I did about either of the previous two. To some extent, I think I’ve seen it fewer times than the others — Fellowship felt deeply familiar, whereas there were parts of this that I didn’t remember at all — so I don’t have any “huh, that’s different” reaction to any visual changes they did, and it just looks straight-up excellent.

As a movie, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that it’s much better than The Two Towers, but not quite as composed as Fellowship. There’s really only one area where it looks obtrusively non-Tolkienesque, which is everything having to do with the dead, from the skull avalanche to the way that the main dead guy seems to be borrowed from Pirates of the Caribbean. Okay, and maybe also the way that Sauron’s lighthouse-tower nature gets literalized further. The rest of the weirdness (Denethor is so fucking weird, as is the non-romance between Éowyn and Aragorn) is authentically Tolkien’s.

Anyway: Excellent movie, and this 4K Blu-ray version is as good as it’s ever looked or sounded.

(Well, I guess one last thing to say, which is that the sound mix is intense enough that I actually turned it down a bit during the elephant part of the big battle, because I was afraid of bothering the neighbors. Yes, we live in separate houses with a good amount of yard space between us. At some point, I’m going to have to go outside while a big action scene is happening and see how loud it actually is out there.)